And her mother--she never thought of her mother without that sad little
shake of her head--was a dreamer, a lover of things beautiful, a hater of
all she felt to be at war with her gods. Ernestine's loyalty did not
permit the analysis to go further, except to deplore her mother's
unhappiness as unnecessary. Even when a very little girl she wondered
why her father could not have his bottles and things, and her mother have
her poems and the things she liked, and just let each other alone about
it. She wondered that long before she appreciated its significance.

As she grew a little older she used to wonder if something inside her
would not some day be pulled in two. It seemed the desire of each of her
parents to guide her from what they saw as the rocks surrounding her.
Elementary science was all mixed up with Keats and Heine and Byron.
Another one of her early speculations was as to whether or not poetry and
science really meant to make so much trouble.

Of course from the very first there had been the blackboard--the
blackboard and all its logical successors. As perversity would have it,
it was her father bought her that blackboard. It was to help turn her in
the way she should go, for upon this blackboard she was to do her sums.
But the sums executed thereon were all performed when some one was
standing at her shoulder, while many were the hours spent in the drawing
of cats and dogs and fish and birds, of lakes and trees and other little
girls and boys. She never had that being-pulled-in-two feeling when she
and the blackboard were alone together. The blackboard seemed the only
thing which made her all one, and she often wished her father and mother
loved their things as she did hers, for if they were only _sure_, as she
was, then what some one else said would not matter at all.

They lived in a university town, her father being a professor in the