The Bacillus of Beauty | Page 9

room; cooked over the gas jet, in tin pails. And if little Nelly is the equal of other women of her family--but that is practice versus principle, my young friend; practice versus principle."
He turned again to his letters, and I understood that the interview was closed.
Right after lunch I started for Barnard. Helen has written so much about the college that as soon as I struck the Boulevard I knew the solid brick building with its trimmings of stone fasces. I turned into the cloistered court on One Hundred and Nineteenth Street and paused a minute, looking up at its Ionic porticoes and high window lettered "Millbank Hall."
Then I entered, and a page, small, meek and blue-uniformed, trotted ahead of me through a beautiful hall, white with marble columns and mosaics, sumptuous with golden ceiling, dazzling with light and green with palms, to the curtained entrance of a dainty reception room.
"Stop a minute, Mercury," I said as he turned to leave; "where is Miss Winship?"
He reappeared from an office beyond, replying:--
"Biol'gy lab'r'tory. What name?"
Instead of waiting until Nelly could be summoned, I followed the mildly disapproving boy up a great, white stairway, past groups of girls, some in bright silk waists and some in college gowns. Even in the farthest corner remote from the hubbub, a musical echo blent of gay talk and laughter filled the air; a light body of sound that the walls held and gave out as a continuous murmur.
A second time piping, "What name, Sir?" Mercury opened the door of a large room with many windows. At the far corner my eyes sought out Helen in conversation with a keen-eyed, weazened little man, at sight of whom the boy took to his heels.
Three women besides Helen were in the room, bunched at a table that ran along two sides under the windows. They wore big checked aprons, and one of them squinted into her microscope under a fur cap. Wide-mouthed jars, empty or holding dirty water, stood on other tables ranged up and down the middle of the room, and there was a litter of porcelain-lined trays, test tubes, pipettes, glass stirring-rods and racks for microscope slides.
Against the wall to the left were cabinets with sliding doors, showing retorts, apparatus, bottles of drugs, jars of specimens and large, coloured models of flowers and of the lower marine forms. Against the right hand wall were sinks, an incubator and, beyond, a door leading into a drug closet. There was the usual laboratory smell, in which the penetrating fume of alcohol, the smokiness of creosote and carbolic acid, the pungency of oil of clove and the aroma of Canada balsam struggled for the mastery.
In her college gown Helen looked more like herself than the day before and less so, the familiar dress accentuating every difference. Against the flowing black her loveliness shone fair and delicate as a cameo, I thought of the Princess Ida,
Liker to the inhabitant Of some far planet close upon the sun Than our man's earth; such eyes were in her head, And so much grace and power-- Lived through her to the tips of her long hands And to her feet.
She had not noticed my entrance, but as I stepped forward, she turned, and I was again lost in wonder at her marvellous grace. Her beauty seemed a harmony so vitally perfect that the sight of it was a joy approaching pain.
I had not been mistaken! She was the rarest thing in human form on this earth. I was awed and frightened anew at her perfection.
"Why, how did you find your way out here?" she asked with girlish directness. "I'm not quite ready to go; I must finish my sections for Prof. Darmstetter."
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