seemed always stretching out
further and further into a world of interests that lay altogether
outside their legitimate bounds.

It came to Ann Veronica one night after a long talk with Miss Miniver,
as a sudden remarkable thing, as a grotesque, novel aspect, that this
slowly elaborating biological scheme had something more than an academic
interest for herself. And not only so, but that it was after all, a more
systematic and particular method of examining just the same questions
that underlay the discussions of the Fabian Society, the talk of the
West Central Arts Club, the chatter of the studios and the deep, the
bottomless discussions of the simple-life homes. It was the same Bios
whose nature and drift and ways and methods and aspects engaged
them all. And she, she in her own person too, was this eternal Bios,
beginning again its recurrent journey to selection and multiplication
and failure or survival.

But this was but a momentary gleam of personal application, and at this
time she followed it up no further.

And now Ann Veronica's evenings were also becoming very busy. She
pursued her interest in the Socialist movement and in the Suffragist
agitation in the company of Miss Miniver. They went to various central
and local Fabian gatherings, and to a number of suffrage meetings. Teddy
Widgett hovered on the fringe of all these gatherings, blinking at Ann
Veronica and occasionally making a wildly friendly dash at her, and
carrying her and Miss Miniver off to drink cocoa with a choice diversity
of other youthful and congenial Fabians after the meetings. Then Mr.
Manning loomed up ever and again into her world, full of a futile
solicitude, and almost always declaring she was splendid, splendid, and
wishing he could talk things out with her. Teas he contributed to the
commissariat of Ann Veronica's campaign--quite a number of teas. He
would get her to come to tea with him, usually in a pleasant tea-room
over a fruit-shop in Tottenham Court Road, and he would discuss his own
point of view and hint at a thousand devotions were she but to command
him. And he would express various artistic sensibilities and aesthetic
appreciations in carefully punctuated sentences and a large, clear
voice. At Christmas he gave her a set of a small edition of Meredith's
novels, very prettily bound in flexible leather, being guided in the
choice of an author, as he intimated, rather by her preferences than his
own.

There was something