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.
