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."
"That brings us back," said Ann Veronica, "to the mystery. Why should some things and not others open the deeps?"
"Well, that might, after all, be an outcome of selection--like the preference for blue flowers, which are not nearly so bright as yellow, of some insects."
"That doesn't explain sunsets."
"Not quite so easily as it explains an insect alighting on colored paper. But perhaps if people didn't like clear, bright, healthy eyes--which is biologically understandable--they couldn't like precious stones. One thing may be a necessary collateral of the others. And, after all, a fine clear sky of bright colors is the signal to come out of hiding and rejoice and go on with life."
"H'm!" said Ann Veronica, and shook her head.
Capes smiled cheerfully with his eyes meeting hers. "I throw it out in passing," he said. "What I am after is that beauty isn't a special inserted sort of thing; that's my idea. It's just life, pure life, life nascent, running clear and strong."
He stood up to go on to the next student.
"There's morbid beauty," said Ann Veronica.
"I wonder if there is!" said Capes, and paused, and then bent down over the boy who wore his hair like Russell.
Ann Veronica surveyed his sloping back for a moment, and then drew her microscope toward her. Then for a time she sat very still. She felt that she had passed a difficult corner, and that now she could go on talking with him again, just as she had been used to do before she understood what was the matter with her....
She had one idea, she found, very clear in her mind--that she would get a Research Scholarship, and so contrive another year in the laboratory.
"Now I see what everything means," said Ann Veronica to herself; and it really felt for some days as though the secret of the universe, that had been wrapped and hidden from her so obstinately, was at last altogether displayed.