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The very facts that Miss Miniver never stated an argument
clearly, that she was never embarrassed by a sense of
self-contradiction, and had little more respect for consistency
of statement than a washerwoman has for wisps of vapor, which
made Ann Veronica critical and hostile at their first encounter
in Morningside Park, became at last with constant association the
secret of Miss Miniver's growing influence. The brain tires of
resistance, and when it meets again and again, incoherently
active, the same phrases, the same ideas that it has already
slain, exposed and dissected and buried, it becomes less and less
energetic to repeat the operation. There must be something, one
feels, in ideas that achieve persistently a successful
resurrection. What Miss Miniver would have called the Higher
Truth supervenes.
Yet through these talks, these meetings and conferences, these
movements and efforts, Ann Veronica, for all that she went with
her friend, and at times applauded with her enthusiastically, yet
went nevertheless with eyes that grew more and more puzzled, and
fine eyebrows more and more disposed to knit. She was with these
movements--akin to them, she felt it at times intensely--and yet
something eluded her. Morningside Park had been passive and
defective; all this rushed about and was active, but it was still
defective. It still failed in something. It did seem germane to
the matter that so many of the people "in the van" were plain
people, or faded people, or tired-looking people. It did affect
the business that they all argued badly and were egotistical in
their manners and inconsistent in their phrases. There were
moments when she doubted whether the whole mass of movements and
societies and gatherings and talks was not simply one coherent
spectacle of failure protecting itself from abjection by the
glamour of its own assertions. It happened that at the extremest
point of Ann Veronica's social circle from the Widgetts was the
family of the Morningside Park horse-dealer, a company of
extremely dressy and hilarious young women, with one equestrian
brother addicted to fancy waistcoats, cigars, and facial spots.
These girls wore hats at remarkable angles and bows to startle
and kill; they liked to be right on the spot every time and up to
everything that was it from the very beginning and they rendered
their conception of Socialists and all reformers by the words
"positively frightening" and "weird." Well, it was beyond
dispute that these words did convey a certain quality of the
Movements in general amid which Miss Miniver disported herself.
They WERE weird. And yet for all that--
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