"Karl's queer," she said. "He's roasted a good deal by the academic folks--pooh-hoos a lot of their stuff, you know. He seems to have a strange notion that science, learning, the whole business is for humanity. Unique conception, isn't it?" After she went away, Beason said he had no doubt that when one came to know Miss McCormick, he would see, in spite of her lightness of manner, that she had many fine qualities. "Qualities!" burst forth the enthusiastic Wyman. "Say--you just ought to hear the newspaper fellows talk about Georgia McCormick! I tell you she's a peach, and more than that, she's a brick. She's the divide-her-last-penny kind--Georgia McCormick is. And I want you to know that if ever any one had the joy of living stunt down pat, she's it. It's an honest fact that if she was put in the penitentiary and you went to see her after she'd been there awhile, she'd tell you so many funny and interesting things about the pen. that you'd feel sore to think you weren't in yourself. And _smart?_ And a hustler? Well, her paper's done some fool things, but it's had sense to hold on to _her_ all right-all right." And Beason replied that of course Dr. Hubers' cousin was bound to be smart. CHAPTER V THE HOME-COMING "Yes, suh, Chicago only two hours, suh," and the porter smiled broadly. There was both memory and anticipation in that smile. The car was almost empty. Across the aisle a man slept peacefully; a little farther ahead a young lady read of the joys and sorrows of a knight and his lady who had lived some several hundred years before, and still farther on a lady all in black was looking from the window, evidently lost to sorrows of more recent date. As no one was paying any attention to the man and woman back there in the rear of the car it was perfectly safe, when the porter passed on, for her hand to slip over into his. He responded with that quiet, protecting smile which always made it seem no bad thing could ever come to her. "Almost home, dear," he said, and then for a long time neither of them spoke. Many big forces flowed freely into the silence of that moment. She looked up at him at last with a smile which broke from her seriousness as a ripple breaks from a wave. "Suppose we had to say everything in words!" "Suppose we had to walk on one leg!" "Oh, but that--you know, Karl, it's a little like the rivers and the ocean. The words are the rivers flowing into the ocean of silence. Rivers flow into oceans--but do they _make_ them? And then the ocean gives back to the rivers in the things which it breathes out. There are so many reasons why it seems like that." "Ernestine, where did you get all this? I sometimes think I'm not square with you at all. Why, I've been in all those places before! I saw the Bay of Naples long before I ever saw you--and yet I didn't really see it before at all. Don't you see? Eyes and appreciation and every decent thing I take from you. Where did you get it all, Ernestine?"