One Wednesday afternoon in late September, Ann Veronica Stanley came
down from London in a state of solemn excitement and quite resolved to
have things out with her father that very evening. She had trembled on
the verge of such a resolution before, but this time quite definitely
she made it. A crisis had been reached, and she was almost glad it had
been reached. She made up her mind in the train home that it should be
a decisive crisis. It is for that reason that this novel begins with
her there, and neither earlier nor later, for it is the history of this
crisis and its consequences that this novel has to tell.

She had a compartment to herself in the train from London to Morningside
Park, and she sat with both her feet on the seat in an attitude that
would certainly have distressed her mother to see, and horrified her
grandmother beyond measure; she sat with her knees up to her chin and
her hands clasped before them, and she was so lost in thought that
she discovered with a start, from a lettered lamp, that she was at
Morningside Park, and thought she was moving out of the station, whereas
she was only moving in. "Lord!" she said. She jumped up at once,
caught up a leather clutch containing notebooks, a fat text-book, and
a chocolate-and-yellow-covered pamphlet, and leaped neatly from the
carriage, only to discover that the train was slowing down and that she
had to traverse the full length of the platform past it again as the
result of her precipitation. "Sold again," she remarked. "Idiot!" She
raged inwardly while she walked along with that air of self-contained
serenity that is proper to a young lady of nearly two-and-twenty under
the eye of the world.

She walked down the station approach, past the neat, obtrusive offices
of the coal merchant and the house agent, and so to the wicket-gate by
the butcher's shop that led to the field path to her home. Outside the
post-office stood a no-hatted, blond young man in gray flannels, who was
elaborately affixing a stamp to a letter. At the sight of her he became
rigid and a singularly bright shade of pink. She made herself serenely
unaware of his existence, though it may be it was his presence that sent
her by the field detour instead of by the direct path up the Avenue.

"Umph!" he said, and regarded his letter doubtfully before consigning it
to the pillar-box. "Here goes," he said. Then he hovered undecidedly for
some seconds with his hands in his pockets and his mouth puckered to a
whistle before he turned to go home by the Avenue.

Ann Veronica forgot him as soon as she was through the gate, and her
face resumed its expression of stern preoccupation. "It's either now or
never," she said to herself....