H. Wells - Ann Veronica

her friend's attitude. "He sees through it all. The Higher Life

and the Lower. He sees men all defiled by coarse thoughts,

coarse ways of living cruelties. Simply because they are

hardened by--by bestiality, and poisoned by the juices of meat

slain in anger and fermented drinks--fancy! drinks that have been

swarmed in by thousands and thousands of horrible little

bacteria!"

"It's yeast," said Ann Veronica--"a vegetable."

"It's all the same," said Miss Miniver. "And then they are

swollen up and inflamed and drunken with matter. They are

blinded to all fine and subtle things--they look at life with

bloodshot eyes and dilated nostrils. They are arbitrary and

unjust and dogmatic and brutish and lustful."

"But do you really think men's minds are altered by the food they

eat?"

"I know it," said Miss Miniver. "Experte credo. When I am

leading a true life, a pure and simple life free of all

stimulants and excitements, I think--I think --oh! with pellucid

clearness; but if I so much as take a mouthful of meat--or

anything--the mirror is all blurred."

Part 6

Then, arising she knew not how, like a new-born appetite, came a

craving in Ann Veronica for the sight and sound of beauty.

It was as if her aesthetic sense had become inflamed. Her mind

turned and accused itself of having been cold and hard. She

began to look for beauty and discover it in unexpected aspects

and places. Hitherto she had seen it chiefly in pictures and

other works of art, incidentally, and as a thing taken out of

life. Now the sense of beauty was spreading to a multitude of

hitherto unsuspected aspects of the world about her.

The thought of beauty became an obsession. It interwove with her

biological work. She found herself asking more and more

curiously, "Why, on the principle of the survival of the fittest,

have I any sense of beauty at all?" That enabled her to go on

thinking about beauty when it seemed to her right that she should

be thinking about biology.

She was very greatly exercised by the two systems of values--the

two series of explanations that her comparative anatomy on the

one hand and her sense of beauty on the other, set going in her

thoughts. She could not make up her mind which was the finer,

more elemental thing, which gave its values to the other. Was it

that the struggle of things to survive produced as a sort of

necessary by-product these intense preferences and appreciations,

or was it that some mystical outer thing, some great force, drove

life beautyward, even in spite of expediency, regardless of

survival value and all the manifest discretions of life? She

went to Capes with that riddle and put it to him very carefully

and clearly, and he talked well--he always talked at some length

when she took a difficulty to him--and sent her to a various

literature upon the markings of butterflies, the incomprehensible

elaboration and splendor of birds of Paradise and humming-birds'

plumes, the patterning of tigers, and a leopard's spots. He was

interesting and inconclusive, and the original papers to which he

referred her discursive were at best only suggestive. Afterward,

one afternoon, he hovered about her, and came and sat beside her

and talked of beauty and the riddle of beauty for some time. He

displayed a quite unprofessional vein of mysticism in the matter.

He contrasted with Russell, whose intellectual methods were, so

to speak, sceptically dogmatic. Their talk drifted to the beauty

of music, and they took that up again at tea-time.

But as the students sat about Miss Garvice's tea-pot and drank

tea or smoked cigarettes, the talk got away from Capes. The

Scotchman informed Ann Veronica that your view of beauty

necessarily depended on your metaphysical premises, and the young

man with the Russell-like hair became anxious to distinguish

himself by telling the Japanese student that Western art was

symmetrical and Eastern art asymmetrical, and that among the

higher organisms the tendency was toward an external symmetry

veiling an internal want of balance. Ann Veronica decided she

would have to go on with Capes another day, and, looking up,

discovered him sitting on a stool with his hands in his pockets

and his head a little on one side, regarding her with a

thoughtful expression. She met his eye for a moment in curious

surprise.

He turned his eyes and stared at Miss Garvice like one who wakes

from a reverie, and then got up and strolled down the laboratory

toward his refuge, the preparation-room.

Part 7

Then one day a little thing happened that clothed itself in

significance.

She had been working upon a ribbon of microtome sections of the

developing salamander, and he came to see what she had made of

them. She stood up and he sat down at the microscope, and for a

time he was busy scrutinizing one section after another. She

looked down at him and saw that the sunlight was gleaming from

his cheeks, and that all over his cheeks was a fine golden down

of delicate hairs. And at the sight something leaped within her.

Something changed for her.

She became aware of his presence as she had never been aware of

any human being in her life before. She became aware of the

modelling of his ear, of the muscles of his neck and the textures

of the hair that came off his brow, the soft minute curve of

eyelid that she could just see beyond his brow; she perceived all

these familiar objects as though they were acutely beautiful

things. They WERE, she realized, acutely beautiful things. Her

sense followed the shoulders under his coat, down to where his

flexible, sensitive-looking hand rested lightly upon the table.

She felt him as something solid and strong and trustworthy beyond

measure. The perception of him flooded her being.

He got up. "Here's something rather good," he said, and with a

start and an effort she took his place at the microscope, while

he stood beside her and almost leaning over her.

She found she was trembling at his nearness and full of a

thrilling dread that he might touch her. She pulled herself

together and put her eye to the eye-piece.

"You see the pointer?" he asked.

"I see the pointer," she said.

"It's like this," he said, and dragged a stool beside her and sat

down with his elbow four inches from hers and made a sketch.

Then he got up and left her.

She had a feeling at his departure as of an immense cavity, of

something enormously gone; she could not tell whether it was

infinite regret or infinite relief. . . .

But now Ann Veronica knew what was the matter with her.

Part 8

And as she sat on her bed that night, musing and half-undressed,

she began to run one hand down her arm and scrutinize the soft

flow of muscle under her skin. She thought of the marvellous

beauty of skin, and all the delightfulness of living texture. Oh

the back of her arm she found the faintest down of hair in the

world. "Etherialized monkey," she said. She held out her arm

straight before her, and turned her hand this way and that.

"Why should one pretend?" she whispered. "Why should one

pretend?

"Think of all the beauty in the world that is covered up and

overlaid."

She glanced shyly at the mirror above her dressing-table, and

then about her at the furniture, as though it might penetrate to

the thoughts that peeped in her mind.

"I wonder," said Ann Veronica at last, "if I am beautiful? I