Excerpt
CHAPTER I ERNESTINE
She had promised to marry a scientist! It was too overwhelming a thought to entertain standing there by the window. She sought the room's most comfortable chair and braced herself to the situation.
If, one month before, a gossiping daughter of Fate had come to her with—"Shall I tell you something?—You are going to marry a man of science!"—she would have smiled serenely at Fate's amusing mistake and responded—"My good friend, it is quite true that great uncertainty attends this subject. So much to be expected is the unexpected, that I am quite willing to admit I may marry the hurdy-gurdy man who plays beneath my window. I know life well enough to appreciate that I may marry a pawnbroker or the Sultan of Turkey. I assert but one thing. I shall not marry a 'man of science.'"
And now, not only had she promised to marry a man of science, but she had quite overlooked the fact of his being one! And the thing which stripped her of the last shred of consistency was that she was to marry, not the every-day, average "man of science," but one of the foremost scientists of all the world! The powers in charge of things matrimonial must be smiling a quiet little smile to-night.
But ah—here was the vindication! He had not asked her to marry him. He had simply come and told her she was to marry him. And he was a great, strong man—far more powerful than she. She had had positively nothing to do with it! Was it her fault that he chanced to be engaged in 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....