rked upon an open and declared friendship. They even talked about
friendship. They went to the Zoological Gardens together one Saturday to
see for themselves a point of morphological interest about the toucan's
bill--that friendly and entertaining bird--and they spent the rest of
the afternoon walking about and elaborating in general terms this theme
and the superiority of intellectual fellowship to all merely passionate
relationships. Upon this topic Capes was heavy and conscientious, but
that seemed to her to be just exactly what he ought to be. He was also,
had she known it, more than a little insincere. "We are only in the dawn
of the Age of Friendship," he said, "when interest, I suppose, will
take the place of passions. Either you have had to love people or hate
them--which is a sort of love, too, in its way--to get anything out of
them. Now, more and more, we're going to be interested in them, to be
curious about them and--quite mildly-experimental with them." He seemed
to be elaborating ideas as he talked. They watched the chimpanzees in
the new apes' house, and admired the gentle humanity of their eyes--"so
much more human than human beings"--and they watched the Agile Gibbon in
the next apartment doing wonderful leaps and aerial somersaults.

"I wonder which of us enjoys that most," said Capes--"does he, or do
we?"

"He seems to get a zest--"

"He does it and forgets it. We remember it. These joyful bounds just
lace into the stuff of my memories and stay there forever. Living's just
material."

"It's very good to be alive."

"It's better to know life than be life."

"One may do both," said Ann Veronica.

She was in a very uncritical state that afternoon. When he said, "Let's
go and see the wart-hog," she thought no one ever had had so quick a
flow of good ideas as he; and when he explained that sugar and not buns
was the talisman of popularity among the animals, she marvelled at his
practical omniscience.

Finally, at the exit into Regent's Park, they ran against Miss Klegg.
It was the expression of Miss Klegg's face that put the idea into Ann
Veronica's head of showing Manning at the College one day, an idea which
she didn't for some reason or other carry out for a fortnight.

Part 2

When at last she did so, the sapphire ring took on a new quality in the
imagination of Capes. It ceased to be the symbol of liberty and a remote
and quite abstracted person, and became suddenly and very disagre