The word must have had some gratifying quality, because he repeated it.  Then he stood up and repeated it again.  “The fool I have been!” he cried; and now speech was coming to him.  He tried this sentence with expletives.  “Ass!” he went on, still warming.  “Muck-headed moral ass!  I ought to have done anything.

“I ought to have done anything!

“What’s a man for?

“Friendship!”

He doubled up his fist, and seemed to contemplate thrusting it through the window.  He turned his back on that temptation.  Then suddenly he seized a new preparation bottle that stood upon his table and contained the better part of a week’s work—­a displayed dissection of a snail, beautifully done—­and hurled it across the room, to smash resoundingly upon the cemented floor under the bookcase; then, without either haste or pause, he swept his arm along a shelf of re-agents and sent them to mingle with the debris on the floor.  They fell in a diapason of smashes.  “H’m!” he said, regarding the wreckage with a calmer visage.  “Silly!” he remarked after a pause.  “One hardly knows—­all the time.”

He put his hands in his pockets, his mouth puckered to a whistle, and he went to the door of the outer preparation-room and stood there, looking, save for the faintest intensification of his natural ruddiness, the embodiment of blond serenity.

“Gellett,” he called, “just come and clear up a mess, will you?  I’ve smashed some things.”

Part 3

There was one serious flaw in Ann Veronica’s arrangements for self-rehabilitation, and that was Ramage.  He hung over her—­he and his loan to her and his connection with her and that terrible evening—­a vague, disconcerting possibility of annoyance and exposure.  She could not see any relief from this anxiety except repayment, and repayment seemed impossible.  The raising of twenty-five pounds was a task altogether beyond her powers.  Her birthday was four months away, and that, at its extremist point, might give her another five pounds.

The thing rankled in her mind night and day.  She would wake in the night to repeat her bitter cry:  “Oh, why did I burn those notes?”

It added greatly to the annoyance of the situation that she had twice seen Ramage in the Avenue since her return to the shelter of her father’s roof.  He had saluted her with elaborate civility, his eyes distended with indecipherable meanings.

She felt she was bound in honor to tell the whole affair to Manning sooner or later.  Indeed, it seemed inevitable that she must clear it up with his assistance, or not at all.  And when Manning was not about the thing seemed simple enough.  She would compose extremely lucid and honorable explanations.  But when it came to broaching them, it proved to be much more difficult than she had supposed.

They went down the great staircase of the building, and, while she sought in her mind for a beginning, he broke into appreciation of her simple dress and self-congratulations upon their engagement.