H. Wells - Ann Veronica

wonder if I shall ever shine like a light, like a translucent

goddess?--

"I wonder--

"I suppose girls and women have prayed for this, have come to

this-- In Babylon, in Nineveh.

"Why shouldn't one face the facts of one's self?"

She stood up. She posed herself before her mirror and surveyed

herself with gravely thoughtful, gravely critical, and yet

admiring eyes. "And, after all, I am just one common person!"

She watched the throb of the arteries in the stem of her neck,

and put her hand at last gently and almost timidly to where her

heart beat beneath her breast.

Part 9

The realization that she was in love flooded Ann Veronica's mind,

and altered the quality of all its topics.

She began to think persistently of Capes, and it seemed to her

now that for some weeks at least she must have been thinking

persistently of him unawares. She was surprised to find how

stored her mind was with impressions and memories of him, how

vividly she remembered his gestures and little things that he had

said. It occurred to her that it was absurd and wrong to be so

continuously thinking of one engrossing topic, and she made a

strenuous effort to force her mind to other questions.

But it was extraordinary what seemingly irrelevant things could

restore her to the thought of Capes again. And when she went to

sleep, then always Capes became the novel and wonderful guest of

her dreams.

For a time it really seemed all-sufficient to her that she should

love. That Capes should love her seemed beyond the compass of

her imagination. Indeed, she did not want to think of him as

loving her. She wanted to think of him as her beloved person, to

be near him and watch him, to have him going about, doing this

and that, saying this and that, unconscious of her, while she too

remained unconscious of herself. To think of him as loving her

would make all that different. Then he would turn his face to

her, and she would have to think of herself in his eyes. She

would become defensive--what she did would be the thing that

mattered. He would require things of her, and she would be

passionately concerned to meet his requirements. Loving was

better than that. Loving was self-forgetfulness, pure delighting

in another human being. She felt that with Capes near to her she

would be content always to go on loving.

She went next day to the schools, and her world seemed all made

of happiness just worked up roughly into shapes and occasions and

duties. She found she could do her microscope work all the

better for being in love. She winced when first she heard the

preparation-room door open and Capes came down the laboratory;

but when at last he reached her she was self-possessed. She put

a stool for him at a little distance from her own, and after he

had seen the day's work he hesitated, and then plunged into a

resumption of their discussion about beauty.

"I think," he said, "I was a little too mystical about beauty the

other day."

"I like the mystical way," she said.

"Our business here is the right way. I've been thinking, you

know-- I'm not sure that primarily the perception of beauty isn't

just intensity of feeling free from pain; intensity of perception

without any tissue destruction."

"I like the mystical way better," said Ann Veronica, and thought.

"A number of beautiful things are not intense."

"But delicacy, for example, may be intensely perceived."

"But why is one face beautiful and another not?" objected Ann

Veronica; "on your theory any two faces side by side in the

sunlight ought to be equally beautiful. One must get them with

exactly the same intensity."

He did not agree with that. "I don't mean simply intensity of

sensation. I said intensity of perception. You may perceive

harmony, proportion, rhythm, intensely. They are things faint

and slight in themselves, as physical facts, but they are like

the detonator of a bomb: they let loose the explosive. There's

the internal factor as well as the external. . . . I don't know

if I express myself clearly. I mean that the point is that

vividness of perception is the essential factor of beauty; but,

of course, vividness may be created by a whisper."

"That brings us back," said Ann Veronica, "to the mystery. Why

should some things and not others open the deeps?"

"Well, that might, after all, be an outcome of selection --like

the preference for blue flowers, which are not nearly so bright

as yellow, of some insects."

"That doesn't explain sunsets."

"Not quite so easily as it explains an insect alighting on

colored paper. But perhaps if people didn't like clear, bright,

healthy eyes--which is biologically understandable--they couldn't

like precious stones. One thing may be a necessary collateral of

the others. And, after all, a fine clear sky of bright colors is

the signal to come out of hiding and rejoice and go on with

life."

"H'm!" said Ann Veronica, and shook her head.

Capes smiled cheerfully with his eyes meeting hers. "I throw it

out in passing," he said. "What I am after is that beauty isn't

a special inserted sort of thing; that's my idea. It's just

life, pure life, life nascent, running clear and strong."

He stood up to go on to the next student.

"There's morbid beauty," said Ann Veronica.

"I wonder if there is!" said Capes, and paused, and then bent

down over the boy who wore his hair like Russell.

Ann Veronica surveyed his sloping back for a moment, and then

drew her microscope toward her. Then for a time she sat very

still. She felt that she had passed a difficult corner, and that

now she could go on talking with him again, just as she had been

used to do before she understood what was the matter with her. .

. .

She had one idea, she found, very clear in her mind--that she

would get a Research Scholarship, and so contrive another year in

the laboratory.

"Now I see what everything means," said Ann Veronica to herself;

and it really felt for some days as though the secret of the

universe, that had been wrapped and hidden from her so

obstinately, was at last altogether displayed.

CHAPTER THE NINTH

DISCORDS

Part 1

One afternoon, soon after Ann Veronica's great discovery, a

telegram came into the laboratory for her. It ran:

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| Bored | and | nothing | to | do |

|----------|-----------|----------|--------|--------|

| will | you | dine | with | me |

|----------|-----------|----------|--------|--------|

| to-night | somewhere | and | talk | I |

|----------|-----------|----------|--------|--------|

| shall | be | grateful | Ramage | |

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Ann Veronica was rather pleased by this. She had not seen Ramage

for ten or eleven days, and she was quite ready for a gossip with

him. And now her mind was so full of the thought that she was in

love--in love!--that marvellous state! that I really believe she

had some dim idea of talking to him about it. At any rate, it

would be good to hear him saying the sort of things he

did--perhaps now she would grasp them better--with this

world--shaking secret brandishing itself about inside her head

within a yard of him.

She was sorry to find Ramage a little disposed to be melancholy.

"I have made over seven hundred pounds in the last week," he