“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.
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.”