She was still smiling about Karl's remoteness as she came into the building. He had come down to meet her. "You see I thought you might get lost," he explained. "I might have," she responded, and then laughed, for when people are very happy it is not at all difficult to laugh. "Do you know what you look like?" he said. "You look like a kind of spiritualised rainbow--or like the flowers after the rain." "I dressed in five minutes," said Ernestine, smoothing down her gown with the complacency of a woman who knows she has nothing to fear from scrutiny. "As if that had anything to do with it! You dress as the birds and flowers dress--by just being yourself." She let that bit of masculine ignorance pass with a wise little smile. They were in the laboratory now. "I came," said Ernestine severely, "to listen to an elucidation of the mysteries of science." "Then you had no business to come looking like this," he responded promptly. She was looking around the room. "And this is where all those great things are done?" "Um--well this is where we make attempts at things." He was not quite through, and Ernestine sat down by the window to wait for him. It seemed surprising, somehow, that it should be such a simple looking room. Karl was doing something with some tubes, writing something on a chart-like thing. Something in the expression of his face as he bent over the work carried her back to other days. "Karl," she said abruptly, "why don't you and I have any quarrels about which is greater--science or art?" He looked up at her in such absolute astonishment that she laughed. "Liebchen," he said, "don't you think that would be going a long way out of our road to hunt a quarrel? Now I can think up much better subjects for a quarrel than that. For instance: Do I love you more than you love me, or do you love me more than I love you? Your subject makes me think of our old debating society. We used to get up and argue in thunderous tones something about which was worse--fire or water!" "But Karl--it isn't logical that you and I should love each other this way!" He pushed back his work and turned squarely around to her. He was smiling in his tenderly humorous way. "Well, sweetheart," he said, "would you rather be logical, or would you rather be happy?" "Oh, I'm not insisting upon the logic. I'm just wondering about it." "Isn't love greater than either a test tube or a paint brush?" Karl asked softly. She nodded, smiling at him lovingly. He sat there looking a long way ahead. She knew he was thinking something out. "Ernestine," he began, "do you ever think much about the _oneness_ of the world?" "Why, yes--I do, but I didn't suppose you did."