scientific pursuits? And when he took her face so tenderly in his two
hands--looked so far down into her eyes--and told her in a voice she
would follow to the ends of the earth that he _loved_ her--was there any
time then to think of paltry non-essentials like art and science?

But she thought of them a little now. How could she get away from them
when each year of her past marched slowly in front of her, paused for an
instant that she might get a full view, and then passed grinningly back
to the abyss of things gone, from over the shoulder tossing straight into
her consciousness a jeering, deep sinking "_You too?_"

Ernestine Stanley--that was the name she read in one of her books open
beside her. Why her very _name_ stood for that quarrel which had rent all
the years!

Until she was ten years old she had been nameless. She had been You--and
Baby--and Dear--and Mother's Girl--and Father's Girl, but her mother and
father had been unable to agree upon a name for her. Each discussion
served to send them a little farther apart. Finally they spoke of
Ernestine and reached the point of agreement through separate channels.
Her father approved it for what it meant in the dictionary;--her mother
for the music of its sound. That told the whole story; their attitudes
toward her name spoke for the things of themselves bestowed upon her.

Her father had been a disciple of exact science,--a professor of biology.
He believed only in that which could be reduced to a formula. The
knowable was to him the only real. He viewed life microscopically and
spent his portion of emotion in an aggressive hatred of all those things
which he consigned to the rubbish heap labeled non-scientific.