"But don't you see The keynote of it is that stubborn grip on the broken sword. I should think every fighter would love it for that. And it is more than the glory of the good fight. It is the glory of the unconquerable will. Look at the woman's face! The world calls him beaten. She knows that he has won. I see behind it the world's battlefields—'way back from the first I see them all, and I see that the thing which has shaped the world is not the success or failure of individual battles one-half so much as it is this wresting of victory from defeat by simply breathing victory even after the sword has been broken in the hand. What we call victory and defeat are incidents—things individual and temporal. The thing universal and eternal is this immortality of the spirit of victory. Why, every time I look at that grip on the broken sword,"—laughing now, but eyes shining—"I can feel the world take a bound ahead!"
CHAPTER VII
ERNESTINE IN HER STUDIO
The next morning she went to work. She had never wanted anything with quite the eagerness that she wanted to work that morning.
"What I want to know is," Georgia had demanded the night before, "did either of you do any work? I hear a great deal about quaint little villages and festive cafes, but what did you actually do?"
Now if Georgia were only here to repeat the question, she could answer jubilantly: "What did I do? Why, I got ready for this morning! Wasn't that a fine year's work?"
It had seemed queer at first. "Why don't I work," she would ask Karl, "now that I am here where I always wanted to be?" But Karl would only laugh, and say that was too obvious to explain. Once he had talked a little about it. "I wouldn't worry, liebchen. Isn't it possible that the creative instinct is being all used up? It's your dream time, sweetheart. It's your time to do nothing but love. After a while you'll turn to the work, and you'll do things easily then that were hard to do before."
How had he known? For nothing had ever been more true than that. She knew this morning that she could do things easily now which had been hard to do before.
One of the very best things about this curious, old-fashioned house was that it had an attic which had all the possibilities of a studio. Just a little remodeling—and Paris itself could do no better.
To that attic she turned just as soon as Karl had gone over to the university. Her things had been carried up; now for a fine morning of sorting them out! But instead of attacking the unpacking and sorting and arranging she got no farther than a book of her sketches. Sitting down on the floor she spread them all around her.
Despite the fact that she had not at once settled down to serious work, she made sketches everywhere, just rough, hasty little things—"bubbles of joy" she called them to Karl. It seemed now that these were counting for more than she had thought. Everything was counting for more than she had thought!
Something of the joy of it carried her back to the days when she was a little girl and had had such happy times with her blackboard. The thought came that now, out of her great happiness, she must pay back to the blackboard all that it had given her in those less happy days. Work was but the overflow of love!
During the last five months, when Karl had been working in Paris, she had studied with Laplace. He had taken her in at once, rejoiced in her and scolded her. One day in an unguarded moment he said she knew something about colour. No one remembered his ever having said a thing like that before. And Ernestine had seen a teardrop on his face when he stood before her picture of rain in the autumn woods. That teardrop was very precious to her. It seemed she could work years on just the memory of it.
So there were many reasons why she felt like working this morning. All the loving and the living and the dreaming and the thinking and the working of a lifetime! Karl had understood. Her dream time! She loved that way of putting it. Beautiful days to be cherished forever! How rich she was in the things she had known! How unstinted love had been with her! She wanted now to give with that same largeness, that same overwhelming richness, with which she had received. Enthusiasm and desire and joy settled to fixed purpose. She began upon actual work.
She kept at it until late in the afternoon. She had never had such a day, and the great thing about it was that it seemed a mere beginning, just an opening up. A new day had dawned; a day which meant, not the death of the dream days, but their reincarnation into life. Those hours when she sat idly beneath blue skies, looking dreamily out upon beautiful vistas it seemed she should have been painting—how well, after all, they had done their work! Dreams which she had not understood were making themselves plain to her now. The love days were translating themselves in terms of life and work. She wanted to glorify the world until it should be to all eyes as the eyes of love had made it to her.
Laplace had said once it was too bad she had married. She thought of that now, and smiled. She was sorry for any one who thought it too bad she had married!
And then Karl telephoned. Would she come over to the university? He had been wanting to show her around, and this would be a good time. She dressed hurriedly, humming a little song they had heard often in Paris.
CHAPTER VIII
SCIENCE, ART, AND LOVE
From his window in the laboratory he saw her as she was coming across the campus, and waved. She waved back, and then wondered if it were proper to wave at learned professors who were looking from their windows. In one sense it was hard to comprehend that it was her Karl who was such an important man about this great university. Karl was so completely just her Karl, so human and dear, and a great scientist seemed a remote abstraction. She must tell that to Karl. He would enjoy himself as a remote abstraction.
She was still smiling about Karl's remoteness as she came into the building. He had come down to meet her. "You see I thought you might get lost," he explained.
"I might have," she responded, and then laughed, for when people are very happy it is not at all difficult to laugh.
"Do you know what you look like?" he said. "You look like a kind of spiritualised rainbow—or like the flowers after the rain."
"I dressed in five minutes," said Ernestine, smoothing down her gown with the complacency of a woman who knows she has nothing to fear from scrutiny.
"As if that had anything to do with it! You dress as the birds and flowers dress—by just being yourself."
She let that bit of masculine ignorance pass with a wise little smile.
They were in the laboratory now. "I came," said Ernestine severely, "to listen to an elucidation of the mysteries of science."
"Then you had no business to come looking like this," he responded promptly.
She was looking around the room. "And this is where all those great things are done?"
"Um—well this is where we make attempts at things."
He was not quite through, and Ernestine sat down by the window to wait for him. It seemed surprising, somehow, that it should be such a simple looking room. Karl was doing something with some tubes, writing something on a chart-like thing. Something in the expression of his face as he bent over the work carried her back to other days.
"Karl," she said abruptly, "why don't you and I have any quarrels about which is greater—science or art?"
He looked up at her in such absolute astonishment that she laughed.
"Liebchen," he said, "don't you think that would be going a long way out of our road to hunt a quarrel? Now I can think up much better subjects for a quarrel than that. For instance: Do I love you more than you love me, or do you love me more than I love you? Your subject makes me think of our old debating society. We used to get up and argue in thunderous tones something about which was worse—fire or water!"
"But Karl—it isn't logical that you and I should love each other this way!"
He pushed back his work and turned squarely around to her. He was smiling in his tenderly humorous way. "Well, sweetheart," he said, "would you rather be logical, or would you rather be happy?"
"Oh, I'm not insisting upon the logic. I'm just wondering about it."
"Isn't love greater than either a test tube or a paint brush?" Karl asked softly.
She nodded, smiling at him lovingly.
He sat there looking a long way ahead. She knew he was thinking something out. "Ernestine," he began, "do you ever think much about the oneness of the world?"
"Why, yes—I do, but I didn't suppose you did."
"But, liebchen—who would be more apt to think about it than I? Doesn't my work teach oneness more than it teaches anything else? All the quarrelling comes through a failure to recognise the oneness. I often think of the different ways Goethe and Darwin got at evolution. Goethe had the poetic conception of it all right; Darwin worked it out step by step. Who's ahead? And which has any business scoffing at the other?"
He went back to his notes, and her thoughts returned to the battles she had heard fought in the name of science. She looked about the room, out at the great buildings all around, and then back to Karl, who seemed soul of it all. How different all this was! What would her father think to hear a man like Karl Hubers giving to a poet place in the developing of the theory of evolution? What was the difference between Karl and her father? Was it that the school to which they belonged was itself changing, or was it just a difference in type? Or, perhaps, most of all, was it not a difference in degree? Her father had only seen a little way, and that down a narrow path bounded by high walls of bigotry. Karl had reached the heights from which he could see the oneness! And was it not love had helped him to those heights?
A little later, when Karl was seeking to explain what he evidently regarded as a very simple little thing, and just as a few glimmers of light were beginning to penetrate her darkness, she looked up and at the half open door saw a boy whose consternation at sight of her made it difficult for Ernestine to repress a smile.
"Come in, Beason," said Karl, who had just noticed him. "I want you to meet Mrs. Hubers." Ernestine looked at Karl suspiciously—something in his voice signified he was enjoying something.
But there was nothing about Mr. Beason which signified any kind of enjoyment. He advanced to meet her sturdily, as one determined to do his duty at any cost. The boy was rendered peculiar in appearance by an abnormally long, heavy jaw, which gave his face a heavy, stolid appearance which might or might not be characteristic. He had small, sharp eyes, and Ernestine was quite sure from one look at his face that he did not laugh often, or see many things to laugh about.
He was not impenetrable to graciousness, however, for within five minutes he had told her that he was born in southern Indiana, that he lived in Minneapolis now, and that he had come to Chicago to get some work with Dr. Hubers. Upon hearing that Ernestine immediately noticed what a remarkably intelligent face he had, and felt sure that that heavy jaw gave him a phlegmatic look which was most misleading.
Karl laughed as the boy went away. "Funny fellow—Beason. He'll have to cut away a lot of the trees before he gets a good look at the woods. Never in his life has one gleam of humour penetrated him. In fact if a few humour cells were to creep in by mistake, they'd be so alien as to make a tremendous disturbance."
"He seems to think a great deal of you," said Ernestine, a little reproachfully.
"Oh, yes; and I like him. I like the fellow first rate. He's a splendid worker—conscientious, absolutely to be depended upon. 'Way ahead of lots of these fellows around here who think they know it all. But he has those uncompromising ideas about science; ready to fight for it at the drop of the hat. Oh, Beason's all right. We need his sort. I'll tell you whom I do want you to meet, Ernestine, and that's Hastings. You'll like him. He's such a success as a human being. He's more like the old-time professor of the small college, has a fatherly, benevolent feeling toward all the students. You see we're so big here that we haven't many of the small college characteristics about us. It's each fellow doing his own work, and not that close comradeship that there is in the small school. But Hastings is a connecting link. Then, on the other hand, there's Lane. You must meet him too, for he's a rare specimen: pedantic, academic; I don't know just why they have him, he doesn't represent the spirit of the place at all. He's entirely too erudite to be of much use. But I'll let Parkman tell you about Lane. Oh, but he hates him! They met here in the laboratory one day and upon my soul I thought Parkman was going to pick him up and throw him out the window."
As they were looking through the general laboratory they met Professor Hastings, and she could see at once what Karl meant. He was apparently a man of about sixty, and kindness was written large upon him. Ernestine could fancy his looking after students who were ill, and trying to devise some way of helping the poverty-stricken boy through another year in college.
They left the building and sauntered slowly across the campus. Almost in the centre of the quadrangle Ernestine stopped and looked all around. She was beginning to feel what it was for which the University of Chicago stood. It was not "college life," all those things vital to the undergraduate heart, which this university suggested. She fancied there might be things the undergraduate would miss here; she was even a little glad her own college days had been spent at the smaller school. As she stood looking about at building upon building she had visions, not of boys and girls singing their college songs, but of men and women working their way toward truth. She looked from one red roof to another, and each building seemed to her a separate channel through which men were working ahead to the light. It was a place for research, for striving for new knowledge, for clearing the way. She turned her face for the moment to the north; there was great Chicago, where men fought for wealth and power, Chicago, with all the enthusiasm of youth, and the arrogance of youthful success, with all the strength of youthful muscle, all the power and possibility of young brain and heart. This seemed far away from the Board of Trade, from State Street and Michigan Avenue. But was not the spirit of it all one? This, too, was Chicago, the Chicago which had fought its way through criticism, indifference and jeers to a place in the world of scholarship. People who knew what they were talking about did not laugh at the University of Chicago any more. It had too much to its credit to be passed over lightly. Men were doing things here; she felt all about her the ideas here in embryo. How would they develop? Where would they strike? What things now slumbering here would step, robust and mighty, into the next generation?
And greatest of all these was Karl! She turned to him with flushed, glowing face. He had been watching her, following much of her thought. "I like this place," she said—her eyes telling all the rest. "I was not sure I was going to, but I do."
CHAPTER IX
AS THE SURGEON SAW IT
"But, Karl, you must!"
"I tell you, my dear, I can't!"
"Well, I think it's just—"
"Now, Ernestine,"—in tones maddeningly calm and conciliatory—"you go on down to Parkman's office and I'll come just as soon as I can. Now be sensible—there's a good girl."
"Well, I call it mean!"—this after hanging up the receiver. "I don't care,"—still talking into the telephone, as if there were satisfaction in having something understand—"it's not nice of Karl."
They had an engagement with Dr. Parkman for dinner at his club, to meet some people he wanted her to know, and now Karl had telephoned from the laboratory at the last minute that he was not ready to leave and for her to go on down alone.
"And he'll come late—and not dressed—and they'll think,"—she went over and sat down by the window to enjoy the mournful luxury of contemplating just what they would think.
Couldn't he go over to the laboratory a little earlier in the morning and finish up this terribly important thing? Was it nice of a man to have people being sorry for his wife? Was it considerate of Karl to ask her to put on this pearl-coloured dress and then let her go down in the train all alone?
She would telephone Dr. Parkman that they could not come. Then Karl would be sorry! But no—severely and with dignity—she would show that one member of the family had some sense of the conventions. Oh, yes—this in long-suffering vein—she would do her part, and would also do her best to make up for Karl. No doubt she might as well become accustomed to that first as last.
Going down in the train she had a very clear picture of herself as the poor, neglected wife of the man absorbed in his work. She saw so many reasons for being unhappy. Was it kind the way Karl had told her in that first letter about some other woman in his life, and then had never so much as revealed to her that other woman's name? Where did this woman live? When had Karl known her? How well had he known her? And all the while her sense of humour was striving to make attacks upon her and the consciousness in her inmost heart that all this was absurd and most unworthy only made her the more persistently forlorn.
She had never been to Dr. Parkman's office, and she was not very familiar with Chicago—had it never occurred to Karl she might get lost and have some unfortunate experience? But fate did not favour her mood, and she reached the office in safety. Dr. Parkman did not seem at all surprised at seeing her alone, which flamed the fire anew.
"He hasn't backed out?" he demanded, laughing a little.
She explained with considerable dignity that her husband had been detained at the laboratory, that he regretted it exceedingly, but would be with them just as soon as circumstances permitted.
He took her into his private office, and Ernestine was too sincere a lover of beautiful things to be wholly miserable in a room like that.
"Why, this doesn't look like an office," she exclaimed. "It's more like a pet room in a beautiful home."
He laughed, not mirthfully.
"I hardly think you could call it that, but this is where I spend a good deal of my time, so I tried to make it livable."
He was busy at his desk, and she watched his hands. She was thinking that she would like to paint a picture and call it "The Surgeon." She would leave the man's face and figure in shadow, concentrating the light upon those hands, letting them tell their own story.
The whole man stood for force. She was sure that he always had his way about things, that he simply took for granted having his own way. Yet there was something in which he had not had his way. Karl had told her a little about that; she must ask him more about it. It seemed suddenly that there was something pathetic about this beautiful room. Did it not reflect a man trying to make up to himself for the things he did not have? It was a room which suggested pleasant hours and fine, quiet enjoyment. The deep, leather chairs seemed made for long, intimate conversations. The dark red tapestry, the oak panelling, this richly toned rug, the few real pictures, the little odds and ends suggestive of remote corners of the world—it seemed a setting for some beautiful companionship, some close sympathy, a place where one would like to sit for hours and be just one's self. But was not Dr. Parkman's life lacking in the very things of which this bespoke an appreciation? There was a subtle pathos in a beautiful room which breathed loneliness. She thought of their own library at home, quick to sense the difference.
The doctor went into an adjoining room, and her thoughts were broken by the low murmur of voices. Then the inner door opened; he was showing a man through to the outer office. The man stumbled over the rug, and at his exclamation Ernestine looked up. Her own face paled; she half rose from her chair;—the native impulse to do something. She looked at Dr. Parkman. His face was entirely masked. The man passed into the outer room, leaving behind him something which caused Ernestine's heart to beat fast.
The doctor walked slowly over to his chair and sat down. He seemed unconscious of her for a moment, and then he looked at her and saw that she had seen and that she wanted to know.
"You'd think a man would get used to it," he said in his short, gruff way. "You'd think it would become a matter of course, but it doesn't. That man's wife is dying of cancer. It's not an operable case. I told him that to-day. He asked for the truth and I gave it. I even gave my estimate of the time." He swung his chair around and looked out at the roof of the building below, and then turned sharply back to her. "You said a while ago that this looked like a home. Well, it's not. It's like a good many other things—empty show. Where that man lives, it's not much for looks, but it is a home, and this means—breaking it up. In there a minute ago, I told him he had to lose the only thing in life he cares anything about. He—oh, well!" and with one of his abrupt changes, he turned away.
But Ernestine was leaning forward in her chair. Her lips were parted. Her eyes were very dark.
"Cancer—you say, doctor?"—her voice was so low he could barely catch it. "Cancer?"
He nodded, looking at her intently.
"But that's what Karl's working on! That's what Karl's doing this very minute!"
"Yes, and do you ever think of it like that? Do you ever think of the lives and homes he is going to save; the tragedies and heartbreaks he is going to avert; the children he is going to keep from being motherless or fatherless if he does do this thing?—and I believe with all my heart he will! I tell you, Mrs. Hubers, you want to help him! I'm not sorry you saw that little thing just now. It will show you the other side of it—the human side. And there wasn't anything unusual in it. All over the world, physicians are doing this same thing every day—telling people it's hopeless, admitting there's nothing to be done. Then think of the tremendousness of this work Karl Hubers is doing!—where it strikes—the hearts breaking for it—the thousands praying for it! Is it any wonder we're watching it? Interested? I tell you we know what it means."
She was unconscious of the tear on her cheek, of the quivering of her face.
"And Karl is doing that? That is what Karl's work means?"
"Karl's work simply means giving into our hands the power to save more lives. Now we're doing the best we can with what we have—but God knows we're short on power! We're groping around in the dark. Karl's work means letting in the light."
His voice had grown warm. Something had fallen from him—leaving him himself. In his eyes was a wealth of unspeakable feeling.
"Doctor, I want to thank you!"—but it was her face thanked him most eloquently.
She was glad when he left her for a minute before they finally went away. Her heart was very full. This was Karl! This the real meaning of Karl's work! To think she had looked at it in that small, paltry way—that even in her thoughts she had put the slightest stumbling block in his path. This very afternoon had come new inspiration and she had resented it, had said small, mean things in her heart because he stayed to work out his precious thoughts. Why, it would have been fairly criminal for Karl to run away from that call of his work!
She wanted to tell him all about it; she yearned to "make it up to him," make him more happy than he had ever been before. She dwelt upon it all until, when Dr. Parkman came in for her, he was startled at the light shining from her face.
CHAPTER X
KARL IN HIS LABORATORY
One of their favourite speculations, as the days went on, was as to whether any one had ever been so happy before. They argued it from all sides, in a purely unprejudiced and dispassionate manner, and always arrived at the conclusion that of course no one ever had. "Because," Ernestine would say, "no one ever had so many reasons for being happy." "And if they had," he would respond, "they would have said something about it."
Ernestine worked that winter as she had never worked before. That first day had not been a deceptive one. She had done some of the things which something within her heart assured her that day she could do. The best thing she had done she sent to Laplace, as he had asked her to. "It's considered rather superior to disdain the Salon," she said to Karl, the day they packed the canvas, "but Paris seems the only way of proving to Americans that good can come out of America."
She had heard from Laplace that the picture would be hung. His brief comment had been that America could not be so bad as was sometimes said. She was eager now to hear more about it. She would surely have a letter very soon. And she and Karl were so happy! It had been such a glorious, wholesome, splendidly worth while winter.
It was one afternoon in early spring that over in the laboratory John Beason and Professor Hastings were talking of Dr. Hubers. "But that isn't all of it," said Professor Hastings in the midst of a discussion. "This fanaticism for veracity Huxley talks about isn't all of it by any means. Any of us can get together a lot of facts. It takes the big man to know what the facts mean."
"Somebody said that truth was the soul of facts," said Beason, in the uncertain way he talked of anything outside tabulated knowledge. "But I suppose that's just one of those things people say."
"Yes—but is it? Isn't it true? Why is Hubers greater than the rest of us? It isn't that he works harder. We all work. It isn't that he's more exact. We're all exact. Isn't it that very thing of having a genius for getting the soul out of his facts? That man looks a long way ahead—smells truth away off, as it were. I tell you, Mr. Beason, scientific training kills many men for research work. They're afraid to move more than inch by inch. They won't take any jumps. Now Dr. Hubers jumps; I've seen him do it. Of course, after he's made his jump he goes back and sees that there aren't any ditches in between, but he's not afraid of a leap in the dark. That's his own peculiar gift. Most of us are not made for jumping."
"But that doesn't sound like the scientific method," said Beason, brows knitted.
"I'll admit it wouldn't do for general practice," replied the older man, a twinkle in his eye. "The spirit has to move you, or you wouldn't gain anything but a broken neck."
"Yes, but that thing of a spirit moving you," said Beason, more sure of himself here, "that does not belong in science at all; that is a part of religion."
"And to a man like Dr. Hubers"—very quietly and firmly—"science is religion."
Beason pondered that a minute. "They're entirely distinct," was his conclusion.
"So it seems to you; but I'm a year or two older than you are, Mr. Beason, and the longer I live the more firmly I believe that there is such a thing as an intuitive sense of truth. If there isn't, why is Dr. Hubers a greater man than I am?"—and with that he left him, smiling a little at how it had never occurred to Beason to say anything polite.
Beason was in truth much perturbed. It was not pleasing to have the greatness of his idol explained on unscientific principles. He did not like that idea of the jumps. Jumping sounded unscientific, and what could be worse than to say of a man that he was not scientific? Preposterous to say the greatest things of science were achieved by unscientific methods!
To-day Dr. Hubers had been all afternoon alone in his laboratory. Some one had brought him in some luncheon at noon, but since one o'clock the door had not opened, and now it was almost five. What was going on in there? Even Beason had the imagination to wonder.
Could he have seen he would not have been much enlightened. The man was sitting before a table, his arms reaching out in front of him—some tubes, his microscope, other things he had been working with within reach, but unheeded now. For he was not seeing now the detail, the immediate. This was not one of those moments of advancing step by step. The light in those eyes of wonderful sight was the light from a farther distance. A way had opened ahead; far out across dim places he could see it now. The afternoon had been a momentous one. He had taken a step leading to a greater height, and with the greater height came a wider vision. A few of those minutes such as he was living now fires a man for months—yes, years, of work. Ahead were days when the fires of inspiration would be in abeyance, when the work would be only a working of step by step—detail, some would call it drudgery. But it is in these moments of inspiration man qualifies for the fight. In the hours of working onward toward the light he may grow very weary, but he can never forget that one day, for just a moment, the light opened to him. Moments such as Karl Hubers was living now mark the great man from the small.
And his glowing moment was more than a promise; it was also a reward. It was spring now, and all through the winter he had worked hard. He had come back in the fall determining in the gratitude of his great happiness to do the best work of his life. He pulled his microscope over in front of him and looked over it after the manner of one dreaming. How many days he had come to it eager to note the slightest significance in its variations of colour, for the staining of the slides made colour count in his work almost as it did in Ernestine's, only to be met with the non-essential, more of the husk and no sight of the kernel. He smiled a little to think what a bulky and stupid volume it would make were he to write down all he had done. If each hope, each possibility, each experiment and verification were to be put down, he could quite rival in bulk a government report. And if added to that should be a report of the cases he had watched, the operations he had attended, the attempts at getting living matter and of working with dead, how large and how useless that volume would be were it to contain it all! He had done days and days of useless work to get the slightest thing that was significant.
Only the week before Ernestine had laughingly read him an article one of the popular magazines printed on cancer research. The whole thing is becoming a farce—so said the popular magazine. Every once in a while some man issues a report saying the germ is in sight. Then another man appears with a still more learned report saying it is not a germ at all. All doing different things, and all sure they are on the right track! Meanwhile the disease is on the increase, surgery cannot meet it satisfactorily, and while laboratories pursue the peaceful tenor of their way, men and women are dying hard deaths which no one seems able to stay. Truly, the man behind the microscope is a very slow man the article had concluded.
No doubt that seemed true. He could see the writer's point of view well enough. The things the man behind the microscope did accomplish sounded so very easy that the on-looker could give only indolence and stupidity as the reason for not accomplishing a great deal more.
And even from his own point of view, with his own knowledge of all the facts in the case, he had no doubt that once done it would sound so easy that he would stand amazed to think it had not been done before. Let the unknown become the known, and even the trained worker cannot look upon it as other than a matter of course. It was so easy now to meet diphtheria. Strange they had let so many children die of it! It was so very easy now to give a man an anesthetic. Fearful how they had let a man suffer through every stroke of the knife, or die for need of it! Should he blame the man outside for looking at it that way when even to him things accomplished took on that matter of course aspect?
He began putting away his things. It was Ernestine's birthday, and he had promised to be home early, for they were going to the theatre. "It will be like all the rest," he mused. "Once done, it will seem so easy that we will wonder why it was not done long before." Again the fire leaped high within him. To do it! Perhaps after all he did see it too complexly. He must not let the husk dull his eye to the kernel. A man building a beautiful tower must erect a scaffold. But the scaffolding should not make him forget the tower! Some way in this last hour his mind had seemed to clear. His immense amount of useless work was not hanging about his neck like a millstone. Something had cut that away. He was free from it all. He could feel within himself that his approach to his problem was better than it had been before. Perhaps he had made the mistake of the others of looking at it as something fearfully complex, something it would be the hardest thing in all the world for any man to do. It all looked more simple now. It was as if muscles strained to the point of tenseness had relaxed, and in an easy and natural way he foresaw victory as a logical part of his work.
He was happy to-night, light-hearted. The windows of the laboratory were open to the soft air of that glorious day of early spring, and his spirit was open too, open to the soul of the world, taking unto itself the sweet and simple spirit of the men who have done the greatest things. From his window he could see one of the tennis courts. Some of the students were playing. "Good!" he exclaimed enthusiastically to himself, as he watched a return that had looked impossible. He was glad they were playing tennis. Why shouldn't they?
Professor Hastings heard him whistling softly to himself—a German love song—as he walked through the big laboratory, and catching a glimpse of the younger man's face, he nodded his head and smiled. It had been a good afternoon—that was plain. Now let there be more afternoons like this—and then—to think it should be done right here under his very eyes! Was not that joy enough for any man?
On the steps of the building Karl stopped suddenly, put his hand in his inner pocket and drew out a small box. Yes, it was there all right, and a girl passing up the steps just then was amazed and much fluttered to think Dr. Hubers should be smiling so beautifully at her. In fact, Dr. Hubers did not know that the girl was passing. She had simply been in the direction of his smile; and he was smiling because it was Ernestine's birthday, and because he had so beautiful a present for her. He walked along very fast. He could scarcely wait to see her face when he gave it to her. Too bad he had kept her waiting so long!
CHAPTER XI
PICTURES IN THE EMBERS
They were back home now.
"Why, Mary has intuitions," laughed Ernestine, when she saw that a fire had been lighted in the library, and was in just the proper state for seeing pictures. "A girl who knew we would want a fire has either been in love or ought to be. At any rate, she knows we are."
"This is the kind of a night when a fire serves artistic purposes only.
You don't need it, so you have to enjoy it all the more."
"Still, these spring evenings are damp," she insisted, defending the fire. "It doesn't feel at all uncomfortable."
"And looks immense," he added, turning down the gas and pulling up a seat just right for sitting before the fire.
She leaned over, holding her hand so close to the flame that he wondered at first what she was doing.
"See!" she cried, "see my ruby in the firelight, Karl! It's just a piece of it right up here on my hand!"
"And I suppose,"—seeming to be injured—"that during the remainder of my life, I may play second fiddle to that ring. Oh, Ernestine—you're a woman! I was mortified to death at the theatre. You didn't look at the play at all. You just sat and looked down at that ring. Oh, I saw through that thing of not being able to fasten your glove!"
She was twisting her hand about to show off the stone—any woman of any land who has ever owned a ring knows just how to do it.
"See, dear!" she laughed exultantly, "it is fire! You can see things in it just as you can in the coals."
But he was not looking at the ring. There were things to be seen in her face and he was looking at them. He loved this child in her. Was it in all women when they love, he wondered, as many other men have wondered of other women, or was it just Ernestine?
"It was a dreadful thing for you to get it," she scolded,—these affectionate scoldings were a great joy to him. "It's a ridiculous thing for a poor college professor—that's you—to buy a ruby ring. Why, rubies exist just to show millionaires how rich they are! And it's a scandalous thing for a poor man's wife—that's I—to be wearing a real ruby!" Then her other hand went over the ring, and clasping both to her breast she laughed gleefully: "But it's mine! They'll not get it now!"
"Who wants it, foolish child?" he asked, pressing her head to his shoulder and holding the ring hand in his.
She moved a little nearer to him.
"See some pictures for me in the fire," she commanded. "See something nice."
"I see a beautiful lady wearing a beautiful ring. See?—right under that top piece of coal. The ring is growing larger and larger and larger. Now it is so large you can't see the lady at all, just nothing but the ring."
She laughed. "Now see one that isn't silly. See a beautiful one."
"Liebchen, I see two people who are growing old. See?—right down here. One of them must be sixty now, and one about seventy, but they're smiling just as they did when they were young. And they're whispering that they love each other a great deal better now than they did in those days of long ago; that it has grown and grown until it is a bigger thing than the love of youth ever dreamed of."
"That is nice," she murmured happily. "That would be a nice picture to paint." They were silent for a time, perhaps both seeing pictures of their own. "It's growing late," said Ernestine, a little drowsily, "but then, I'll never have this birthday again."
"And it was happy?" he asked tenderly. "Just as happy as you wanted it to be?"
"So happy that I hate to see it go. It was—just right."
"Weren't any of the others happy, dear?"—he was stroking her hair, thinking that it too had caught little touches of the fire-light.
"None of the others were perfect. Of course, last year was our first one together, and"—a shudder ran through her.
"I know, dear," he hastened; "I know that wasn't a perfect day."
"Before that," she went on, after a minute of looking a long way into the fire, "something always happened. My birthday seemed ill-fated. That was why I wanted a happy one so much—to make up for all the others. This day began right by the work going so splendidly. Is there anything much more satisfying than the feeling which comes at the close of a good day's work? It puts you on such good terms with yourself, convinces you that you have a perfect right to be alive. Then this afternoon I read some things which I had read long ago and didn't understand then as I do now. You see, there was a great deal I didn't know before I loved you, Karl; and books are just human enough to want to be met half way."
"Like men," he commented, meeting her then a trifle more than half way.
"Yes, they have to be petted and fussed over, just like men. Now, Karl, are you listening or are you not?"
He assured her that he was listening.
"Then, this afternoon, Georgia came out and we went for a row on the lagoon in Jackson Park. Did you happen to look out and see how beautiful it was this afternoon, Karl? I wish you would do that once in a while. Germs and cells and things aren't so very aesthetic, you know, and I don't like to have you miss things. I was thinking about you as we passed the university. It seemed such a big, wonderful place, and I love to think of what it is your work really means. I am so proud of you, Karl!"
"And was it nice down there?" he asked, just to bring her back to her story of the day.
"So beautiful! You and I must go often now that the spring evenings have come. There is one place where you come out from a bridge, and can see the German building, left from the World's Fair, across a great sweep of lights and shadows. People who want to go to Europe and can't, should go down there and look at that. It's so old-worldish.
"Then Georgia and I had a fine talk,"—after another warm, happy silence. "Georgia never was so nice. She was telling me all about a man. I shouldn't wonder; but I mustn't tell even you—not yet. Then I came home and here were the beautiful flowers from Dr. Parkman. Karl—you did tell him! Honest now—you did—and it was awful. Why didn't you put it in the university paper so that all the students could send me things? That nice boy, Harry Wyman, wrote a poem about me—'To the Lovely Lady'—now you needn't laugh! And oh, I don't know, but it all seemed so beautiful and right when I came home this afternoon. I love our house more and more. I love those funny knobs on the doors, and this library seems just us! I was so happy I couldn't keep from singing, and you know I can't sing at all. Then you came home! You had the box out in your hand—I saw it clear across the street. You were smiling just like a boy. I shall never forget how you looked as you gave me the ring. I think, after all, that look was my real birthday gift.—Now, Karl, don't you know you shouldn't have bought such a ring? But, oh!—I, am so happy, sweetheart."
He kissed her. His heart was very full. There was nothing he could say, so he kissed her again and laid his cheek upon her hair.
He knew she was growing sleepy. Sleep was coming to her as it does to the child who has had its long, happy day. But like the child, she would not give up until the last. It was true, he was sure, that she was loath to let the day go.
"The play to-night was very nice," she said, rousing a little, "but so short-sighted."
"Short-sighted, liebchen? How?"
"So many things in literature stop short when the people are married. I think that's such an immature point of view—just as if that were the end of the story. And when they write stories about married people they usually have them terribly unhappy about having to live together, and wishing they could live with some one else. It seems to me they leave out the best part."
"The best part, I suppose, meaning us?"
"Yes!"
"But, dear, if you and I were written up, just as we are, we'd be called two idiots."
"Would we?"—her head was caressing his coat.
"Have you ever thought how a stenographic or phonographic report of some of our conversations would sound?"
"Beautiful," she murmured.
"Crazy!" he insisted.
"Perhaps the world didn't mean people to be so happy as we are,"—her words stumbled drowsily.
"The world isn't as good to many people as it is to us. Oh, sweetheart—why,"—he held her closely but very tenderly, for he knew she was going to sleep—"why are we so happy?"
"Because I'm the—lovely—lady,"—it came from just outside the land of dreams.
It was sweet to have her go to sleep in his arms like this. He trembled with the joy of holding her, looking at her face with eyes of tenderest love, rejoicing in her, worshipping her. He went over the things she had said, his whole being mellowed, divinely exultant, at thought of her going to sleep just because she was tired from her day of happiness. Long ago his mother had taught him to pray, and he prayed now that he might keep her always as she was to-day, that he might guard her ever as she had that sense now of being guarded, that her only weariness might come as this had come, because she was so happy. How beautiful she was as she slept! The Lovely Lady—that boy had said it right, after all. And she was his!—his treasure—his joy—his sweetest thing in life! He had heard a discussion over at the university a few days before about the equality of man and woman. How foolish that seemed in this divine moment! God in His great far-sightedness had given to the world a masculine and a feminine soul. How insane to talk of their being alike, when the highest happiness in life came through their being so entirely different! And she was his! Other men could send her flowers—write poems about her loveliness—but she was his, all his. His to love and cherish and protect—to work for—live for!
He kissed her, and her eyes opened. "Poor little girl's so tired; but she'll have to wake up enough to go to bed."
She smiled, murmured something that sounded like "Happy day," and went to sleep again.
The fire had died low. He sat there a minute longer dreaming before it, thanking God for a home, for work and love and happiness. Then he picked Ernestine up in his arms as one would pick up the little child too tired to walk to bed. "Oh, liebchen," he breathed in tender passion, as she nestled close to him,—"ich liebe dich!"
CHAPTER XII
A WARNING AND A PREMONITION
It put him very much out of patience to have his eyes bothering him just when he was so anxious to work. What in the world was the matter with them, he wondered, as he directed a couple of students on some work they were helping him with. It seemed that yesterday afternoon he had taken a new start; now he was eager to work things out while he felt like this. This was a very inopportune time for a cold, or whatever it was, to settle in his eyes. Perhaps the lights at the theatre last night, and then the wind coming home—but he smiled an intimate little smile with himself at thought of last night and forgot all about that sandy feeling in his eyes.
During the morning it almost passed away. When he thought of it at all, it was only to be thankful it was not amounting to anything, for he was anxious to do a good day's work. He would hate it if anything were to happen to his eyes and he had to wear glasses! He had never had the slightest trouble with them; in fact they had served him so well that he never gave them any thought. The idea came now of how impossible it would be to do anything without them. His work depended entirely on seeing things right; it was the appearance of things in their different stages which told the story.
Dr. Hubers had a queer little trick with his eyes; the students who worked with him had often noticed it. He had a way of resting his finger in the corner of his eye when thinking. Sometimes it would rest in one eye for awhile, and then if he became a little restless, moved under a new thought, he would slip his finger meditatively over his nose to the corner of the other eye. It did not signify anything in particular, merely an unconscious mannerism. Some men pull their hair, others gnaw their under lip, and with him it was a queer little way of rubbing his finger in his eye.
It was Saturday, and that was always a good day for him as he could give all of his time to the laboratory. He was especially anxious to have things go well this morning, as he wanted to stop at two o'clock and go down to one of Dr. Parkman's operations. That end of it was very important and this was to be an especially good operation.
He was thinking about Dr. Parkman on the way down;—of the man's splendid surgery. It was a real joy to see him work. He did big things so very easily and quietly; not at all as though they were overwhelming him. Poor Parkman—things should have gone differently with him. If it had been almost any other man, it would have mattered less, but it seemed a matter of a lifetime with Parkman. He could understand that better now than he once had. To have found Ernestine and then—then to have found she was not Ernestine! But of course in the case of Ernestine that could not be. Now if Parkman had only found an Ernestine—but then he couldn't very well, for there was only one! Since the first of time, there had been only one—and she was his! He fell to dreaming of how she had looked last night in the fire-light, and almost forgot the station at which he was to get off.
He was in very jubilant mood when they went down to Dr. Parkman's office after the operation. It had verified some of his own conclusions; seemed fairly to stand as an endorsement of what he held. He had never felt more sure of himself, had never seen his way more clearly. It was a great thing to have facts bear one out, to see made real what one had believed to be true. He went over it all with Parkman, putting his case clearly, convincingly, his points standing out true and unassailable; throwing away all the irrelevant, picking out unerringly, the little kernel of truth;—a big mind this, a mind qualified to cope with big problems. Dr. Parkman had never seen so clearly as he did to-day how absolutely his friend possessed those peculiar qualities the work demanded. He had never felt more sure of Karl's power; and power did not cover it—not quite.
"Something in your eye?" he asked when, just as Karl was about to leave, he seemed to be bothered with his eye, and was rubbing it a little.
"I don't know. It's felt off and on all day as though something was the matter with them both."
"Want me to take a look at them?"
"Oh no—no, it's nothing."
"By the way, you have a bad trick with your eyes. I've noticed it several times lately and intended to tell you about it. You have a way of rubbing them;—not rubbing them exactly, but pressing your finger in them. I'd quit that if I were you. If you must put your finger somewhere, put it on your nose. A man dealing with the stuff you do can't be too careful."
"Why, what do you mean?"
"Simply what I say. One drop of some of those things you have out there would be—a drop too much."
"Now, look here, you don't think I'm any such a bungler as that, do you?"
"Hum! You ought to know your medical history well enough to know that all the victims haven't been bunglers, by a long sight."
Karl's hand was on the knob. "Well, don't worry about me; I'm not built for a victim. I may be run over by an automobile—anybody is liable to be run over by yours, the way you run that thing—but I'm not liable to be killed by my own sword. That's not the way I work."
"Just the same, you'd better keep your hands out of your eyes!"
"All right," he agreed laughingly. "It does sound like a fool's trick.
It's new to me;—didn't know that I did it."
When he was making some calls late that evening, Dr. Parkman passed the university and for some reason recalled what Karl had said that afternoon about his eyes bothering him. Why hadn't he examined them; or better still, one of the best oculists in the city was right there in the building—why hadn't he made Karl go in to see him? It was criminal for a man like that to neglect his eyes! He was near the Hubers now; he had an impulse to run over and make sure that everything was all right. He slowed up the machine and looked at his watch. No, it was almost eleven; he would not go now. After all he was silly to be attaching any weight to such a thing as a man's rubbing his eyes. He smiled a little as he thought of it that way. Karl wasn't bothering about it; so why should he?
But he had it on his mind, thinking of it frequently until he went to bed. And the thing which worried him most was that he was worrying a great deal more than the facts in the case warranted. He was not given to taking notions, and that was just what this seemed. One would suppose that a man like Hubers would be able to look out for himself,—"but for a fool, give me a great man!" was the thought with which the doctor went to sleep.
CHAPTER XIII
AN UNCROSSED BRIDGE
Karl awoke next morning with the sense of something wrong. Something was making him uncomfortable, but he was not wide enough awake at first to locate the trouble. He lay there dozing for a few minutes and when he roused again he knew that his eyes were hurting badly. He awakened instantly then. His eyes? Why, they had bothered him a little all day yesterday. Was there something the matter with them?
He got up, raised the shade and looked in the glass. They looked badly irritated, both of them. They felt wretchedly; he could scarcely keep looking into the glass. Then leaning over the dressing table, he looked more closely. He thought he saw something he did not like. He took a hand mirror and went to the window. He could see better now, and the better light verified the other one. It was true that in the corner of one eye there was a drop of pus. In the other there was a suggestion of the same thing.
He began to dress, proceeding slowly, his brows knitted, evidently thinking about something, and worried. Then he opened a drawer, took out a handkerchief, got the drop of pus from his eye and arranged the handkerchief for preserving it.
He would find out about that, and the sooner the better! He did not like it. He would see an oculist, too, this morning. It was plain he was going to have some trouble with his eyes.
Ernestine noticed them at once. What made them so red?—she wanted to know. Did they hurt? And wasn't there something he could put in them? He told her he was going to look after them at once. He could not afford to lose any time, and of course he could do nothing without his eyes.
Immediately after breakfast he started over to the laboratory.
It was Sunday morning and there would be no one there, which was so much the better. He wanted to get this straightened out.
He had his head down all the way over to the university, partly because his eyes bothered him and partly because he was thinking hard. The trouble had evidently been coming on yesterday. He stopped short. That trick Parkman told him about! But of course—moving on a little—that could not have anything to do with this. He had no recollection—he was very sure—then he walked faster, and the lines of his mouth told that he was troubled.
When he reached the laboratory he began immediately upon the microscopic examination. He hoped he could get at it through that, for the culture process meant a long wait. But after fifteen minutes of careful work the "smear" proved negative. There remained then only the longer route of the culture.
He did not begin upon that immediately. He sat there trying to think back to just what it was he had been doing Friday afternoon. The latter part of the afternoon he had been sitting here by this table. That was the time he was so buoyed up—getting so fine a light on the thing. It was the cancer problem then—but in the nature of things nothing could have happened with that. But there were always other things—all those things known to the pathological laboratory.
He turned around toward the culture oven, opened the outer door and through the inner door of glass looked in at the row of tubes. He was trying to recall what it was he had been working with the earlier part of Friday afternoon.
He knew now; one of the tubes had brought it to him. Yes, he knew now, and within him there was a pause, and a stillness. Right over there was where he sat preparing some cultures. There were two things with which he had been working;—again a pause, and a stillness. One of them could not make any serious difference; he went that far firmly, and then his heart seemed to stand quite still, waiting for his thought to go on. But he did not go on; there was a little convulsive clutching of his consciousness, and a return, with acclaim, to the fact that that could not make any serious difference. He clung there; he would not leave that; doggedly, defiantly, insistently, all-embracingly he affirmed that that could not make any serious difference. It was without opening his thought to anything further that he got out his things and began preparing the culture.
He was so accustomed to this that it went very mechanically and quickly. He took one of the test tubes arranged for the process in the culture oven and with the small wire instrument he had there, lifted the drop of pus on the handkerchief into the bullion of the tube. He did it all very carefully, very exactly, just as he always did. Then he put the tuft of cotton over the top and placed the tube in that strange-looking box commonly called a culture oven. In twenty-four hours he would know the truth. He adjusted the gas with a firm hand, arranging with his usual precision this thing which outwardly was like any of his experiments and which in reality—but he would not go into that.
Now for an oculist. His eyes were hurting badly; it was time to do whatever there was to be done. After all he was rather jumping at conclusions. There was a big chance that this was just something characteristic to eyes and had no relation to the things of his work. He seized upon that, ridiculing himself for having looked right over the most simple and natural explanation of all. Did not a great many people have trouble with their eyes?
That nerved him up all the way down town. He was almost ready to think it a great joke, the way he had hurried over to the laboratory and had gone at it in that life-and-death fashion.
He knew that the oculist in Dr. Parkman's building was a good one, and so he went there. It was a little disconcerting when he stepped into the elevator to meet Dr. Parkman himself. He had not thought of trying especially to avoid the doctor, but he had wanted to see the oculist first and get the thing straightened out. He was counting a great deal now on the oculist.
"Hello!" said the doctor, seeming startled at first, and then after one sharp glance: "Going up to see me?"
"Well, yes, after a little. Fact of the matter is I thought I'd run in and let this eye fellow take a look at me."
"Eyes bothering you?"
"Somewhat." He said it shortly, almost curtly.
When they reached the fifth floor, Dr. Parkman stepped out with him, although he himself belonged farther up.
"I know him pretty well," he explained, "I'll go with you."
He could not very well say: "I would rather you would not," although for some reason he felt that way.
It was soon clear to their initiated minds that the oculist did not know the exact nature of the trouble. He admitted that the case perplexed him. He, too, must make an examination of the pus. He treated Karl's eyes, and advised that they begin upon an immediate and aggressive course of treatment. Dr. Parkman, observing Karl's growing irritability, said that he would look after all that, see that the right thing was done.
As he walked out of that office Karl was a little dizzy. His avenue of hope had grown narrower. It was not, then, some affection characteristic of eyes. It was, after all, something from without. It was, in all probability, one of two things,—it was either—but again he did not go beyond the first, telling himself with nervous buoyancy that that would not make any serious difference.
They stepped into an elevator and went up. He knew Parkman would ask him questions now, but it seemed he could not get away from the doctor if he tried. He felt just at present as though he had not strength to resist any one. That oculist, he admitted to himself, had taken a good deal of starch out of him.
When they reached the office, Dr. Parkman offered him a drink; that irritated him considerably.
"Why no," he said, fretfully, "No—I don't want a drink. Why should I take a drink? Did you think I was all shot to pieces about something?"
The doctor was looking over his mail, fingering it a great deal, but not seeming to accomplish much of anything with it. At last he wheeled around toward him.
"What's the matter with your eyes?" he asked with disconcerting directness.
"How should I know?" retorted Karl, heatedly, almost angrily. "What do I know about it? If an oculist can't tell—you say he is a good one—why should you expect me to?" And then he added with a touch of eagerness, as if seizing upon a possibility: "I don't believe that fellow amounts to much. I think I'll go out now and hunt up somebody who knows something."
"The man's all right," said Dr. Parkman shortly. His own foot was tapping the floor nervously. "You ought to have some idea," he added, with what he felt to be brutal insistence, "as to whether or not you got anything in your eyes."
"Well, I haven't! I don't know anything about it."
But he was breathing hard. His whole manner told of fears and possibilities he was not willing to state. He would tell what he thought now in just a minute; the doctor knew that.
He began with insisting, elaborately, that he never got things on his hands—that was not his way; and even if he did get something on his hands, he wouldn't get it in his eyes; even if he did rub his eyes sometimes—he didn't admit it—but even if he did, would he be such a fool as to rub them when he had something on his hands? But if, in spite of all those impossibilities, just admitting for the sake of argument, and because Parkman insisted on being ominous, that it was something like that, there were two things it might be. It might be—he named the first with emphasis, and Dr. Parkman, after a minute's thought, heaved a big sigh of unmistakable relief.
"Now you see that couldn't make any vital difference," Karl added, with a debonair manner, a thin veneer of aggressiveness.
The doctor was leaning forward in his chair. He was beginning to grow fearful of the emphasis put upon this thing which could make no vital difference.
Karl stopped as though he had reached the end of his story. But the silence was wearing on him. His eyes had a hunted look.
"Why, you can see for yourself," he said—and this was the note of appeal—"that that could not make any vital difference."
Dr. Parkman was looking at him narrowly. His own breath was coming hard.
He saw at last that he would have to ask.
"The—other?" he said, succeeding fairly well in gaining a tone of indifference.
"Heavens—how you fellows nag for details! How you drag at a man! Well, the other—if you're so anxious to know"—the doctor's heart sank before the defiance of that—"the other is"—he looked all about him as one hunted, desperate, and then snapped it out and turned away, and instantly the room grew frightfully still.
It struck Dr. Parkman like a blow from which one must have time to recover. Steeled though he was to the hearing of tragic facts, he was helpless for the minute before this. And then, refusing to let it close in upon him, it was he who turned recklessly assertive, defiantly insistent.
"Any fool would know it's not that," he said, his gruff voice touched with bravado.
There was one of those strange changes then. Karl turned and faced him.
"How do you know?" he asked, with a calm not to be thrust aside. "How do you know it's not that? You can't be sure," he pursued, and there was fairly cunning in forcing his friend upon it, cutting off all escape, "but there are just fifty chances out of a hundred that it is that. And if it is," with a cold, impersonal sort of smile—"would you give very much for my chances of sight?"
"You're talking like a fool!"—but beads of perspiration were on the doctor's forehead. And then, the professional man getting himself in hand: "You're overworked, Karl. You're nervous. Why I can fix this up for you. I'll just—" but before that steady, understanding gaze he could not go on.
"Not on me, Parkman—," slowly and very quietly—"not on me. I know the ropes. Don't try those little tricks on me. I don't need professional coddling, and I don't need professional lies. You see I happen to know just a little about the action of germs. We'll do the usual things, of course—that's mere scientific decency, but if this thing has really gotten in its work—oh I've studied these things a little too long, old man, I've watched them too many times, to be able to fool myself now."
"Well you will at least admit," said Parkman—brusque because he was afraid to let himself be anything else—"that there are fifty chances out of a hundred in your favour?"
Karl nodded; he had leaned back in his chair; he seemed terribly tired.
"Come now, old chap—it isn't like you to surrender before the battle. We'll prepare to meet the foe—though I give you my word of honour I don't expect the enemy to show up. This isn't in the cards. I know it."
Karl roused a little. There was a bracing note in that vehemence. "Well, don't ask me to do any crossing of a bridge before I come to it. I think our friend down stairs is thinking of hospitals and nurses and all kinds of quirks that would drive me crazy. Tell him I know what I'm about. Tell him to let me alone!"
"All right," laughed the doctor, knowing Karl too well to press the matter further just then, "though, of course, common-sense demands quiet and a dark room."
"Ernestine will darken our rooms at home," said Karl stubbornly.
It was strange how quickly they could turn to the refuge of everyday phrases, could hide their innermost selves within their average selves as the only shelter which opened to them. There was something Dr. Parkman wanted to do for him, and they went into the treatment room. In there they spoke about meeting for dinner,—Ernestine had asked the doctor to come out. Georgia and her mother were coming too, Karl told him, and the interview closed with some light word about not being late for dinner.