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
window, folded his arms, and stared straight before him for a
long time over the wilderness of tiles and chimney-pots into a
sky that was blue and empty. He was not addicted to monologue,
and the only audible comment he permitted himself at first upon a
universe that was evidently anything but satisfactory to him that
afternoon, was one compact and entirely unassigned "Damn!"
The word must have had some gratifying quality, because he
repeated it. Then he stood up and repeated it again. "The fool
I have been!" he cried; and now speech was coming to him. He
tried this sentence with expletives. "Ass!" he went on, still
warming. "Muck-headed moral ass! I ought to have done anything.
I ought to have done anything!
"What's a man for?
"Friendship!"
He doubled up his fist, and seemed to contemplate thrusting it
through the window. He turned his back on that temptation. Then
suddenly he seized a new preparation bottle that stood upon his
table and contained the better part of a week's work--a displayed
dissection of a snail, beautifully done--and hurled it across the
room, to smash resoundingly upon the cemented floor under the
bookcase; then, without either haste or pause, he swept his arm
along a shelf of re-agents and sent them to mingle with the
debris on the floor. They fell in a diapason of smashes. "H'm!"
he said, regarding the wreckage with a calmer visage. "Silly!" he
remarked after a pause. "One hardly knows--all the time."
He put his hands in his pockets, his mouth puckered to a whistle,
and he went to the door of the outer preparation-room and stood
there, looking, save for the faintest intensification of his
natural ruddiness, the embodiment of blond serenity.
"Gellett," he called, "just come and clear up a mess, will you?
I've smashed some things."
