But it was extraordinary what seemingly irrelevant things could restore her to the thought of Capes again.  And when she went to sleep, then always Capes became the novel and wonderful guest of her dreams.

For a time it really seemed all-sufficient to her that she should love.  That Capes should love her seemed beyond the compass of her imagination.  Indeed, she did not want to think of him as loving her.  She wanted to think of him as her beloved person, to be near him and watch him, to have him going about, doing this and that, saying this and that, unconscious of her, while she too remained unconscious of herself.  To think of him as loving her would make all that different.  Then he would turn his face to her, and she would have to think of herself in his eyes.  She would become defensive—­what she did would be the thing that mattered.  He would require things of her, and she would be passionately concerned to meet his requirements.  Loving was better than that.  Loving was self-forgetfulness, pure delighting in another human being.  She felt that with Capes near to her she would be content always to go on loving.

She went next day to the schools, and her world seemed all made of happiness just worked up roughly into shapes and occasions and duties.  She found she could do her microscope work all the better for being in love.  She winced when first she heard the preparation-room door open and Capes came down the laboratory; but when at last he reached her she was self-possessed.  She put a stool for him at a little distance from her own, and after he had seen the day’s work he hesitated, and then plunged into a resumption of their discussion about beauty.

“I think,” he said, “I was a little too mystical about beauty the other day.”

“I like the mystical way,” she said.

“Our business here is the right way.  I’ve been thinking, you know—­I’m not sure that primarily the perception of beauty isn’t just intensity of feeling free from pain; intensity of perception without any tissue destruction.”

“I like the mystical way better,” said Ann Veronica, and thought.

“A number of beautiful things are not intense.”

“But delicacy, for example, may be intensely perceived.”

“But why is one face beautiful and another not?” objected Ann Veronica; “on your theory any two faces side by side in the sunlight ought to be equally beautiful.  One must get them with exactly the same intensity.”

He did not agree with that.  “I don’t mean simply intensity of sensation.  I said intensity of perception.  You may perceive harmony, proportion, rhythm, intensely.  They are things faint and slight in themselves, as physical facts, but they are like the detonator of a bomb:  they let loose the explosive.  There’s the internal factor as well as the external....  I don’t know if I express myself clearly.  I mean that the point is that vividness of perception is the essential factor of beauty; but, of course, vividness may be created by a whisper.”