Page:Ann Veronica, a modern love story.djvu/206

 "I like the mystical way better," said Ann Veronica, and thought. "A number of beautiful things are not intense."

"But delicacy, for example, may be intensely perceived."

"But why is one face beautiful and another not?" objected Ann Veronica; "on your theory any two faces side by side in the sunlight ought to be equally beautiful. One must get them with exactly the same intensity."

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