Part 1

More Books

More by this Author

One afternoon, soon after Ann Veronica's great discovery, a telegram came into the laboratory for her. It ran:

 ---------------------------------------------------
|   Bored  |  and      | nothing  |   to   |   do   |
|----------|-----------|----------|--------|--------| 
|   will   |    you    |   dine   |  with  |   me   |
|----------|-----------|----------|--------|--------| 
| to-night | somewhere |   and    |  talk  |   I    |
|----------|-----------|----------|--------|--------| 
|  shall   |     be    | grateful | Ramage |        | 
---------------------------------------------------

Ann Veronica was rather pleased by this. She had not seen Ramage for ten or eleven days, and she was quite ready for a gossip with him. And now her mind was so full of the thought that she was in love--in love!--that marvellous state! that I really believe she had some dim idea of talking to him about it. At any rate, it would be good to hear him saying the sort of things he did--perhaps now she would grasp them better--with this world--shaking secret brandishing itself about inside her head within a yard of him.

She was sorry to find Ramage a little disposed to be melancholy.

"I have made over seven hundred pounds in the last week," he said.

"That's exhilarating," said Ann Veronica.

"Not a bit of it," he said; "it's only a score in a game."

"It's a score you can buy all sorts of things with."

"Nothing that one wants."

He turned to the waiter, who held a wine-card. "Nothing can cheer me," he said, "except champagne." He meditated. "This," he said, and then: "No! Is this sweeter? Very well."

"Everything goes well with me," he said, folding his arms under him and regarding Ann Veronica with the slightly projecting eyes wide open. "And I'm not happy. I believe I'm in love."

He leaned back for his soup.

Presently he resumed: "I believe I must be in love."

"You can't be that," said Ann Veronica, wisely.

"How do you know?"

"Well, it isn't exactly a depressing state, is it?"

"YOU don't know."

"One has theories," said Ann Veronica, radiantly.

"Oh, theories! Being in love is a fact."

"It ought to make one happy."

"It's an unrest--a longing-- What's that?" The waiter had intervened. "Parmesan--take it away!"

He glanced at Ann Veronica's face, and it seemed to him that she really was exceptionally radiant. He wondered why she thought love made people happy, and began to talk of the smilax and pinks that adorned the table. He filled her glass with champagne. "You MUST," he said, "because of my depression."

They were eating quails when they returned to the topic of love. "What made you think" he said, abruptly, with the gleam of avidity in his face, "that love makes people happy?"

"I know it must."

"But how?"

He was, she thought, a little too insistent. "Women know these things by instinct," she answered.