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.
