H. Wells - Ann Veronica

of Manning's.

That ring manifestly occupied her thoughts a great deal. She

kept pausing in her work and regarding it, and when Capes came

round to her, she first put her hand in her lap and then rather

awkwardly in front of him. But men are often blind to rings. He

seemed to be.

In the afternoon she had considered certain doubts very

carefully, and decided on a more emphatic course of action. "Are

these ordinary sapphires?" she said. He bent to her hand, and she

slipped off the ring and gave it to him to examine.

"Very good," he said. "Rather darker than most of them. But I'm

generously ignorant of gems. Is it an old ring?" he asked,

returning it.

"I believe it is. It's an engagement ring. . . ." She slipped

it on her finger, and added, in a voice she tried to make

matter-of-fact: "It was given to me last week."

"Oh!" he said, in a colorless tone, and with his eyes on her

face.

"Yes. Last week."

She glanced at him, and it was suddenly apparent for one instant

of illumination that this ring upon her finger was the crowning

blunder of her life. It was apparent, and then it faded into the

quality of an inevitable necessity.

"Odd!" he remarked, rather surprisingly, after a little interval.

There was a brief pause, a crowded pause, between them.

She sat very still, and his eyes rested on that ornament for a

moment, and then travelled slowly to her wrist and the soft lines

of her forearm.

"I suppose I ought to congratulate you," he said. Their eyes met,

and his expressed perplexity and curiosity. "The fact is--I

don't know why--this takes me by surprise. Somehow I haven't

connected the idea with you. You seemed complete--without that."

"Did I?" she said.

"I don't know why. But this is like--like walking round a house

that looks square and complete and finding an unexpected long

wing running out behind."

She looked up at him, and found he was watching her closely. For

some seconds of voluminous thinking they looked at the ring

between them, and neither spoke. Then Capes shifted his eyes to

her microscope and the little trays of unmounted sections beside

it. "How is that carmine working?" he asked, with a forced

interest.

"Better," said Ann Veronica, with an unreal alacrity. "But it

still misses the nucleolus."

CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH

THE SAPPHIRE RING

Part 1

For a time that ring set with sapphires seemed to be, after all,

the satisfactory solution of Ann Veronica's difficulties. It was

like pouring a strong acid over dulled metal. A tarnish of

constraint that had recently spread over her intercourse with

Capes vanished again. They embarked upon an open and declared

friendship. They even talked about friendship. They went to the

Zoological Gardens together one Saturday to see for themselves a

point of morphological interest about the toucan's bill--that

friendly and entertaining bird--and they spent the rest of the

afternoon walking about and elaborating in general terms this

theme and the superiority of intellectual fellowship to all

merely passionate relationships. Upon this topic Capes was heavy

and conscientious, but that seemed to her to be just exactly what

he ought to be. He was also, had she known it, more than a

little insincere. "We are only in the dawn of the Age of

Friendship," he said, "when interest, I suppose, will take the

place of passions. Either you have had to love people or hate

them--which is a sort of love, too, in its way--to get anything

out of them. Now, more and more, we're going to be interested in

them, to be curious about them and--quite mildly-experimental

with them." He seemed to be elaborating ideas as he talked.

They watched the chimpanzees in the new apes' house, and admired

the gentle humanity of their eyes--"so much more human than human

beings" --and they watched the Agile Gibbon in the next apartment

doing wonderful leaps and aerial somersaults.

"I wonder which of us enjoys that most," said Capes--"does he, or

do we?"

"He seems to get a zest--"

"He does it and forgets it. We remember it. These joyful bounds

just lace into the stuff of my memories and stay there forever.

Living's just material."

"It's very good to be alive."

"It's better to know life than be life."

"One may do both," said Ann Veronica.

She was in a very uncritical state that afternoon. When he said,

"Let's go and see the wart-hog," she thought no one ever had had

so quick a flow of good ideas as he; and when he explained that

sugar and not buns was the talisman of popularity among the

animals, she marvelled at his practical omniscience.

Finally, at the exit into Regent's Park, they ran against Miss

Klegg. It was the expression of Miss Klegg's face that put the

idea into Ann Veronica's head of showing Manning at the College

one day, an idea which she didn't for some reason or other carry

out for a fortnight.

Part 2

When at last she did so, the sapphire ring took on a new quality

in the imagination of Capes. It ceased to be the symbol of

liberty and a remote and quite abstracted person, and became

suddenly and very disagreeably the token of a large and

portentous body visible and tangible.

Manning appeared just at the end of the afternoon's work, and the

biologist was going through some perplexities the Scotchman had

created by a metaphysical treatment of the skulls of Hyrax and a

young African elephant. He was clearing up these difficulties by

tracing a partially obliterated suture the Scotchman had

overlooked when the door from the passage opened, and Manning

came into his universe.

Seen down the length of the laboratory, Manning looked a very

handsome and shapely gentleman indeed, and, at the sight of his

eager advance to his fiancee, Miss Klegg replaced one

long-cherished romance about Ann Veronica by one more normal and

simple. He carried a cane and a silk hat with a mourning-band in

one gray-gloved hand; his frock-coat and trousers were admirable;

his handsome face, his black mustache, his prominent brow

conveyed an eager solicitude.

"I want," he said, with a white hand outstretched, "to take you

out to tea."

"I've been clearing up," said Ann Veronica, brightly.

"All your dreadful scientific things?" he said, with a smile that

Miss Klegg thought extraordinarily kindly.

"All my dreadful scientific things," said Ann Veronica.

He stood back, smiling with an air of proprietorship, and looking

about him at the business-like equipment of the room. The low

ceiling made him seem abnormally tall. Ann Veronica wiped a

scalpel, put a card over a watch-glass containing thin shreds of

embryonic guinea-pig swimming in mauve stain, and dismantled her

microscope.

"I wish I understood more of biology," said Manning.

"I'm ready," said Ann Veronica, closing her microscope-box with a

click, and looking for one brief instant up the laboratory. "We

have no airs and graces here, and my hat hangs from a peg in the

passage."

She led the way to the door, and Manning passed behind her and

round her and opened the door for her. When Capes glanced up at

them for a moment, Manning seemed to be holding his arms all

about her, and there was nothing but quiet acquiescence in her

bearing.

After Capes had finished the Scotchman's troubles he went back

into the preparation-room. He sat down on the sill of the open