school. In the later years of her college life he forced her into the
scientific courses which she hated. She sighed even now at the memory of
those weary hours in the laboratory, though while hating the detail of
it, she responded, as her father had never done, to the glimpses she
caught of the thing as a whole. It was ironical enough that the only
thing she seemed to get from her scientific studies was an enthusiasm for
the poetry of science. In those days many thoughts beat hard against the
door of Ernestine's loyalty. Why did not her mother see all this--and
make her father see it? Was there not a point at which they could have
met--and did they not fail in meeting because neither of them went far
enough?

It was when she was in her senior year that her father died. She finished
out her laboratory work with lavish conscientiousness, feeling a new
tenderness of him in the consciousness that his ideas for her had failed.
That hour before his funeral, when she sat beside him alone, stood out as
among the very vivid moments of her life. The tragedy of his life seemed
that he had failed in impressing himself. His keenness of mind had not
made for bigness. Life had left an aggressiveness, a certain sullenness
in the lines of his face. His mind and his soul had never found one
another--was it because his heart had closed the channel between the two?

And then they went to New York and Ernestine began her study of art.

A great light seemed turned back over it all tonight. She understood much
now which she had lived through wonderingly. She seemed now really to
know that girl who went to New York with all the dreams of all her years
calling upon her for fulfillment. She knew what that girl had dreamed
when she dreamed she knew not what; knew what she thought when she thought
the undefined. She smiled understandingly, tenderly, at thought of it