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. He viewed life microscopically and spent his portion of emotion in an aggressive hatred of all those things which he consigned to the rubbish heap labeled non-scientific. 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.