"Splendid it must be to be a composer. Glorious! The Pastoral.
Beethoven; he's the best of them. Don't you think? Tum, tay, tum, tay."

Ann Veronica did.

"What have you been doing since our last talk? Still cutting up
rabbits and probing into things? I've often thought of that talk of
ours--often."

He did not appear to require any answer to his question.

"Often," he repeated, a little heavily.

"Beautiful these autumn flowers are," said Ann Veronica, in a wide,
uncomfortable pause.

"Do come and see the Michaelmas daisies at the end of the garden," said
Mr. Manning, "they're a dream." And Ann Veronica found herself being
carried off to an isolation even remoter and more conspicuous than the
corner of the lawn, with the whole of the party aiding and abetting and
glancing at them. "Damn!" said Ann Veronica to herself, rousing herself
for a conflict.

Mr. Manning told her he loved beauty, and extorted a similar admission
from her; he then expatiated upon his own love of beauty. He said that
for him beauty justified life, that he could not imagine a good action
that was not a beautiful one nor any beautiful thing that could be
altogether bad. Ann Veronica hazarded an opinion that as a matter of
history some very beautiful people had, to a quite considerable extent,
been bad, but Mr. Manning questioned whether when they were bad they