Part 6
Capes lit things wonderfully for Ann Veronica all that afternoon,
he was so friendly, so palpably interested in her, and glad to
have her back with him. Tea in the laboratory was a sort of
suffragette reception. Miss Garvice assumed a quality of
neutrality, professed herself almost won over by Ann Veronica's
example, and the Scotchman decided that if women had a
distinctive sphere it was, at any rate, an enlarging sphere, and
no one who believed in the doctrine of evolution could logically
deny the vote to women "ultimately," however much they might be
disposed to doubt the advisability of its immediate concession.
It was a refusal of expediency, he said, and not an absolute
refusal. The youth with his hair like Russell cleared his throat
and said rather irrelevantly that he knew a man who knew Thomas
Bayard Simmons, who had rioted in the Strangers' Gallery, and
then Capes, finding them all distinctly pro-Ann Veronica, if not
pro-feminist, ventured to be perverse, and started a vein of
speculation upon the Scotchman's idea--that there were still
hopes of women evolving into something higher.
He was unusually absurd and ready, and all the time it seemed to
Ann Veronica as a delightful possibility, as a thing not indeed
to be entertained seriously, but to be half furtively felt, that
he was being so agreeable because she had come back again. She
returned home through a world that was as roseate as it had been
gray overnight.
But as she got out of the train at Morningside Park Station she
had a shock. She saw, twenty yards down the platform, the shiny
hat and broad back and inimitable swagger of Ramage. She dived
at once behind the cover of the lamp-room and affected serious
trouble with her shoe-lace until he was out of the station, and
then she followed slowly and with extreme discretion until the
bifurcation of the Avenue from the field way insured her escape.
Ramage went up the Avenue, and she hurried along the path with a
beating heart and a disagreeable sense of unsolved problems in
her mind.
"That thing's going on," she told herself. "Everything goes on,
confound it! One doesn't change anything one has set going by
making good resolutions."
And then ahead of her she saw the radiant and welcoming figure of
Manning. He came as an agreeable diversion from an insoluble
perplexity. She smiled at the sight of him, and thereat his
radiation increased.
"I missed the hour of your release," he said, "but I was at the
Vindicator Restaurant. You did not see me, I know. I was among
the common herd in the place below, but I took good care to see
you."
"Of course you're converted?" she said.
"To the view that all those Splendid Women in the movement ought
to have votes. Rather! Who could help it?"
He towered up over her and smiled down at her in his fatherly
way.
"To the view that all women ought to have votes whether they like
it or not."
He shook his head, and his eyes and the mouth under the black
mustache wrinkled with his smile. And as he walked by her side
they began a wrangle that was none the less pleasant to Ann
Veronica because it served to banish a disagreeable
preoccupation. It seemed to her in her restored geniality that
she liked Manning extremely. The brightness Capes had diffused
over the world glorified even his rival.
