She looked up at him at last with a smile which broke from her
seriousness as a ripple breaks from a wave.

"Suppose we had to say everything in words!"

"Suppose we had to walk on one leg!"

"Oh, but that--you know, Karl, it's a little like the rivers and the
ocean. The words are the rivers flowing into the ocean of silence. Rivers
flow into oceans--but do they _make_ them? And then the ocean gives back
to the rivers in the things which it breathes out. There are so many
reasons why it seems like that."

"Ernestine, where did you get all this? I sometimes think I'm not square
with you at all. Why, I've been in all those places before! I saw the Bay
of Naples long before I ever saw you--and yet I didn't really see it
before at all. Don't you see? Eyes and appreciation and every decent
thing I take from you. Where did you get it all, Ernestine?"

She pushed back a little curl which was always coming loose,--he loved
that little curl for always coming loose.

"Perhaps I 'got it' from that way you have of looking at me--the way
you're looking at me now; or maybe I got it from the way you say
'Ernestine'--the way you said it just now. But does it matter much what
comes from which?"--with which bit of lucidity she wrinkled up her nose
at him in a way which always vanquished argument and returned to the
silence which seemed waiting to claim her.

He watched her then; he loved so to do that--just see how far he could