The Professor--I had guessed his identity--joined us, glancing at me inquisitively. His spare figure seemed restless as a squirrel's, but around the pupils of his eyes appeared the faint, white rim of age. "You are friendt of Mees Veensheep?" he asked. "Looks she not vell? New York has agreed vit' her; not so?" At my awkward, guarded assent, I thought that something of the same surprise Judge Baker had voiced at my moderation flitted over the old man's face. "I find you kvite right; kvite right," he said, "New York has done Mees Veensheep goot; she looks fery vell." He whisked into the drug closet, and Helen seated herself before a microscope next that of the fur-capped woman. "Do you care for slides?" she said. "I'll get another microscope and while I draw you may look at any on my rack. But be careful; most of the things are only temporarily mounted--just in glycerine. Here is the sweetest longitudinal section of the tentacle of an _Actinia_, and here--look at these lovely transverse sections of the plumule of a pea; you can see the primary groups of spiral vessels. They've taken the carmine stain wonderfully! But my work is not advanced; I wish you could see that of the other girls." "I mustn't interfere with your task; I'll look about until you are ready." Her shining head was already bent over the microscope; her pencil was moving, glad to respond to the touch of that lovely hand. I picked up a book, the same little volume I had noticed the day before, on "Imbedding, Sectioning and Staining." Near it lay a treatise on histology. I opened to the first chapter, on "Protoplasm and the Cell," but I couldn't fix my thoughts on _Bathybius_ or the _Protomoeba_. I walked toward an aquarium, flanking which stood a jar half-filled with water in which floated what seemed a big cup-shaped flower of bright brown jelly with waving petals of white and rose colour. While I looked, thinking only of the curve of Helen's lips and the dancing light in her eyes, and the glowing colour of her soft flesh, Prof. Darmstetter's thin, high-pitched voice grated almost at my ear. "T'at is _Actinia_--sea anemone." "I come from the West; I have never seen the sea forms living," I answered with an effort, fearing that he meant to show me about the laboratory. "It is fery goot sea anemone; fery strong, fery perfect; a goot organism." He bent over the jar, rubbing his hands. His parchment face crackled with an almost tender complacency. For a full minute he seemed to gloat over the flower-like animal. "Very pretty," I said, carelessly. "Fery pretty, you call it? T'e prettiness is t'e sign of t'e gootness, t'e strengt', t'e perfection. You know t'at?" To his challenging question, in which I saw the manner of a teacher with his pupils, I replied: "In your estimation goodness and beauty go together?" "T'ey are t'e same; how not? See t'is way."