"A young man comes into life asking how best he may place himself," Ramage had said; "a woman comes into life thinking instinctively how best she may give herself."
She noted that as a good saying, and it germinated and spread tentacles of explanation through her brain. The biological laboratory, perpetually viewing life as pairing and breeding and selection, and again pairing and breeding, seemed only a translated generalization of that assertion. And all the talk of the Miniver people and the Widgett people seemed always to be like a ship in adverse weather on the lee shore of love. "For seven years," said Ann Veronica, "I have been trying to keep myself from thinking about love… .
"I have been training myself to look askance at beautiful things."
She gave herself permission now to look at this squarely. She made herself a private declaration of liberty. "This is mere nonsense, mere tongue-tied fear!" she said. "This is the slavery of the veiled life. I might as well be at Morningside Park. This business of love is the supreme affair in life, it is the woman's one event and crisis that makes up for all her other restrictions, and I cower—as we all cower—with a blushing and paralyzed mind until it overtakes me!…
"I'll be hanged if I do."
But she could not talk freely about love, she found, for all that manumission.
Ramage seemed always fencing about the forbidden topic, probing for openings, and she wondered why she did not give him them. But something instinctive prevented that, and with the finest resolve not to be "silly" and prudish she found that whenever he became at all bold in this matter she became severely scientific and impersonal, almost entomological indeed, in her method; she killed every remark as he made it and pinned it out for examination. In the biological laboratory that was their invincible tone. But she disapproved more and more of her own mental austerity. Here was an experienced man of the world, her friend, who evidently took a great interest in this supreme topic and was willing to give her the benefit of his experiences! Why should not she be at her ease with him? Why should not she know things? It is hard enough anyhow for a human being to learn, she decided, but it is a dozen times more difficult than it need be because of all this locking of the lips and thoughts.
She contrived to break down the barriers of shyness at last in one direction, and talked one night of love and the facts of love with Miss Miniver.
But Miss Miniver was highly unsatisfactory. She repeated phrases of Mrs. Goopes's: "Advanced people," she said, with an air of great elucidation, "tend to GENERALIZE love. 'He prayeth best who loveth best—all things both great and small.' For my own part I go about loving."
"Yes, but men;" said Ann Veronica, plunging; "don't you want the love of men?"
For some seconds they remained silent, both shocked by this question.
Miss Miniver looked over her glasses at her friend almost balefully. "NO!" she said, at last, with something in her voice that reminded Ann Veronica of a sprung tennis-racket.
"I've been through all that," she went on, after a pause.
She spoke slowly. "I have never yet met a man whose intellect I could respect."
Ann Veronica looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, and decided to persist on principle.
"But if you had?" she said.
"I can't imagine it," said Miss Miniver. "And think, think"—her voice sank—"of the horrible coarseness!"
"What coarseness?" said Ann Veronica.
"My dear Vee!" Her voice became very low. "Don't you know?"
"Oh! I know—"
"Well—" Her face was an unaccustomed pink.
Ann Veronica ignored her friend's confusion.
"Don't we all rather humbug about the coarseness? All we women, I mean," said she. She decided to go on, after a momentary halt. "We pretend bodies are ugly. Really they are the most beautiful things in the world. We pretend we never think of everything that makes us what we are."
"No," cried Miss Miniver, almost vehemently. "You are wrong! I did not think you thought such things. Bodies! Bodies! Horrible things! We are souls. Love lives on a higher plane. We are not animals. If ever I did meet a man I could love, I should love him"—her voice dropped again—"platonically."
She made her glasses glint. "Absolutely platonically," she said.
"Soul to soul."
She turned her face to the fire, gripped her hands upon her elbows, and drew her thin shoulders together in a shrug. "Ugh!" she said.
Ann Veronica watched her and wondered about her.
"We do not want the men," said Miss Miniver; "we do not want them, with their sneers and loud laughter. Empty, silly, coarse brutes. Brutes! They are the brute still with us! Science some day may teach us a way to do without them. It is only the women matter. It is not every sort of creature needs—these males. Some have no males."
"There's green-fly," admitted Ann Veronica. "And even then—"
The conversation hung for a thoughtful moment.
Ann Veronica readjusted her chin on her hand. "I wonder which of us is right," she said. "I haven't a scrap—of this sort of aversion."
"Tolstoy is so good about this," said Miss Miniver, regardless of her friend's attitude. "He sees through it all. The Higher Life and the Lower. He sees men all defiled by coarse thoughts, coarse ways of living cruelties. Simply because they are hardened by—by bestiality, and poisoned by the juices of meat slain in anger and fermented drinks—fancy! drinks that have been swarmed in by thousands and thousands of horrible little bacteria!"
"It's yeast," said Ann Veronica—"a vegetable."
"It's all the same," said Miss Miniver. "And then they are swollen up and inflamed and drunken with matter. They are blinded to all fine and subtle things—they look at life with bloodshot eyes and dilated nostrils. They are arbitrary and unjust and dogmatic and brutish and lustful."
"But do you really think men's minds are altered by the food they eat?"
"I know it," said Miss Miniver. "Experte credo. When I am leading a true life, a pure and simple life free of all stimulants and excitements, I think—I think—oh! with pellucid clearness; but if I so much as take a mouthful of meat—or anything—the mirror is all blurred."
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