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.
