was disposed to be lukewarm. But a man's
opposition always inclined her to the suffrage side; she had a curious
feeling of loyalty in seeing the more aggressive women through. Capes
was irritatingly judicial in the matter, neither absurdly against, in
which case one might have smashed him, or hopelessly undecided, but
tepidly sceptical. Miss Klegg and the youngest girl made a vigorous
attack on Miss Garvice, who had said she thought women lost something
infinitely precious by mingling in the conflicts of life. The discussion
wandered, and was punctuated with bread and butter. Capes was inclined
to support Miss Klegg until Miss Garvice cornered him by quoting him
against himself, and citing a recent paper in the Nineteenth Century, in
which, following Atkinson, he had made a vigorous and damaging attack
on Lester Ward's case for the primitive matriarchate and the predominant
importance of the female throughout the animal kingdom.

Ann Veronica was not aware of this literary side of her teacher; she had
a little tinge of annoyance at Miss Garvice's advantage. Afterwards
she hunted up the article in question, and it seemed to her quite
delightfully written and argued. Capes had the gift of easy, unaffected
writing, coupled with very clear and logical thinking, and to follow
his written thought gave her the sensation of cutting things with a
perfectly new, perfectly sharp knife. She found herself anxious to read
more of him, and the next Wednesday she went to the British Museum and
hunted first among the half-crown magazines for his essays and then
through various scientific quarterlies for his research papers. The
ordinary research paper, when it is not extravagant theorizing, is apt
to be rather sawdusty in texture, and Ann Veronica was delighted to find
the same easy and confident luminosity that distinguished his work for
the general reader. She returned to these latter, and at the back of
her mind, as she looked them over again, was a very distinct resolve
to quote them after the manner of Miss Garvice at the very first
opportunity.

When she got home to her lodgings that evening she reflected with
something like surprise upon her half-day's employment, and decided
that it showed nothing more nor less than that Capes was a really very
interesting person indeed.

And then she fell into a musing about Capes. She wondered why he was so
distinctive, so unlike other men, and it never occurred to her for some
time that th