. Now the sense of beauty was spreading
to a multitude of hitherto unsuspected aspects of the world about her.

The thought of beauty became an obsession. It interwove with her
biological work. She found herself asking more and more curiously, "Why,
on the principle of the survival of the fittest, have I any sense of
beauty at all?" That enabled her to go on thinking about beauty when it
seemed to her right that she should be thinking about biology.

She was very greatly exercised by the two systems of values--the two
series of explanations that her comparative anatomy on the one hand and
her sense of beauty on the other, set going in her thoughts. She could
not make up her mind which was the finer, more elemental thing, which
gave its values to the other. Was it that the struggle of things
to survive produced as a sort of necessary by-product these intense
preferences and appreciations, or was it that some mystical outer thing,
some great force, drove life beautyward, even in spite of expediency,
regardless of survival value and all the manifest discretions of life?
She went to Capes with that riddle and put it to him very carefully and
clearly, and he talked well--he always talked at some length when she
took a difficulty to him--and sent her to a various literature upon the
markings of butterflies, the incomprehensible elaboration and splendor
of birds of Paradise and humming-birds' plumes, the patterning of
tigers, and a leopard's spots. He was interesting and inconclusive, and
the original papers to which he referred her discursive were at best
only suggestive. Afterward, one afternoon, he hovered about her, and
came and sat beside her and talked of beauty and the riddle of beauty
for some time. He displayed a quite unprofessional vein of mysticism in
the matter. He contrasted with Russell, whose intellectual methods were,
so to speak, sceptically dogmatic. Their talk drifted to the beauty of
music, and they took that up again at tea-time.

But as the students sat about Miss Garvice's tea-pot and drank tea or
smoked cigarettes, the talk got away from Capes. The Scotchman informed
Ann Veronica that your view of beauty necessarily depended on your
metaphysical premises, and the young man with the Russell-like hair
became anxious to distinguish himself by telling the Japanese student
that Western art was symmetrical and Eastern art asymmetrical, and that
among the higher organisms the tendency was toward an external