“Don’t we all rather humbug about the coarseness? All we women, I mean,” said she. She decided to go on, after a momentary halt. “We pretend bodies are ugly. Really they are the most beautiful things in the world. We pretend we never think of everything that makes us what we are.” “No,” cried Miss Miniver, almost vehemently. “You are wrong! I did not think you thought such things. Bodies! Bodies! Horrible things! We are souls. Love lives on a higher plane. We are not animals. If ever I did meet a man I could love, I should love him”--her voice dropped again--“platonically.” She made her glasses glint. “Absolutely platonically,” she said. “Soul to soul.” She turned her face to the fire, gripped her hands upon her elbows, and drew her thin shoulders together in a shrug. “Ugh!” she said. Ann Veronica watched her and wondered about her. “We do not want the men,” said Miss Miniver; “we do not want them, with their sneers and loud laughter. Empty, silly, coarse brutes. Brutes! They are the brute still with us! Science some day may teach us a way to do without them. It is only the women matter. It is not every sort of creature needs--these males. Some have no males.” “There’s green-fly,” admitted Ann Veronica. “And even then--” The conversation hung for a thoughtful moment. Ann Veronica readjusted her chin on her hand. “I wonder which of us is right,” she said. “I haven’t a scrap--of this sort of aversion.” “Tolstoy is so good about this,” said Miss Miniver, regardless of her friend’s attitude. “He sees through it all. The Higher Life and the Lower. He sees men all defiled by coarse thoughts, coarse ways of living cruelties. Simply because they are hardened by--by bestiality, and poisoned by the juices of meat slain in anger and fermented drinks--fancy! drinks that have been swarmed in by thousands and thousands of horrible little bacteria!” “It’s yeast,” said Ann Veronica--“a vegetable.” “It’s all the same,” said Miss Miniver. “And then they are swollen up and inflamed and drunken with matter. They are blinded to all fine and subtle things--they look at life with bloodshot eyes and dilated nostrils. They are arbitrary and unjust and dogmatic and brutish and lustful.” “But do you really think men’s minds are altered by the food they eat?” “I know it,” said Miss Miniver. “Experte credo. When I am leading a true life, a pure and simple life free of all stimulants and excitements, I think--I think--oh! with pellucid clearness; but if I so much as take a mouthful of meat--or anything--the mirror is all blurred.” Part 6 Then, arising she knew not how, like a new-born appetite, came a craving in Ann Veronica for the sight and sound of beauty.