urse in Comparative Anatomy, wonderfully
relieved to have her mind engaged upon one methodically developing theme
in the place of the discursive uncertainties of the previous two months,
and doing her utmost to keep right in the back of her mind and out
of sight the facts, firstly, that she had achieved this haven of
satisfactory activity by incurring a debt to Ramage of forty pounds,
and, secondly, that her present position was necessarily temporary and
her outlook quite uncertain.

The biological laboratory had an atmosphere that was all its own.

It was at the top of the building, and looked clear over a clustering
mass of inferior buildings toward Regent's Park. It was long and narrow,
a well-lit, well-ventilated, quiet gallery of small tables and sinks,
pervaded by a thin smell of methylated spirit and of a mitigated
and sterilized organic decay. Along the inner side was a wonderfully
arranged series of displayed specimens that Russell himself had
prepared. The supreme effect for Ann Veronica was its surpassing
relevance; it made every other atmosphere she knew seem discursive and
confused. The whole place and everything in it aimed at one thing--to
illustrate, to elaborate, to criticise and illuminate, and make ever
plainer and plainer the significance of animal and vegetable structure.
It dealt from floor to ceiling and end to end with the Theory of the
Forms of Life; the very duster by the blackboard was there to do its
share in that work, the very washers in the taps; the room was more
simply concentrated in aim even than a church. To that, perhaps, a
large part of its satisfyingness was due. Contrasted with the confused
movement and presences of a Fabian meeting, or the inexplicable
enthusiasm behind the suffrage demand, with the speeches that were
partly egotistical displays, partly artful manoeuvres, and partly
incoherent cries for unsoundly formulated ends, compared with the
comings and goings of audiences and supporters that were like the
eddy-driven drift of paper in the street, this long, quiet, methodical
chamber shone like a star seen through clouds.

Day after day for a measured hour in the lecture-theatre, with elaborate
power and patience, Russell pieced together difficulty and suggestion,
instance and counter-instance, in the elaborate construction of the
family tree of life. And then the students went into the long laboratory
and followed out these facts in almost living tissue with microscope a