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.