The Glory of the Conquered | Page 2

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.
Of course from the very first there had been the blackboard--the
blackboard and all its logical successors. As perversity would have it, it
was her father bought her that blackboard. It was to help turn her in the
way she should go, for upon this blackboard she was to do her sums.
But the sums executed thereon were all performed when some one was
standing at her shoulder, while many were the hours spent in the
drawing of cats and dogs and fish and birds, of lakes and trees and
other little girls and boys. She never had that being-pulled-in-two
feeling when she and the blackboard were alone together. The
blackboard seemed the only thing which made her all one, and she
often wished her father and mother loved their things as she did hers,
for if they were only sure, as she was, then what some one else said
would not matter at all.
They lived in a university town, her father being a professor in the
school. In the later years of her college life he forced her into the
scientific courses which she hated. She sighed even now at the memory
of those weary hours in the laboratory, though while hating the detail of
it, she responded, as her father had never done, to the glimpses she
caught of the thing as a whole. It was ironical enough that the only
thing she seemed to get from her scientific studies was an enthusiasm

for the poetry of science. In those days many thoughts beat hard against
the door of Ernestine's loyalty. Why did not her mother see all this--and
make her father see it? Was there not a point at which they could have
met--and did they not fail in meeting because neither of them went far
enough?
It was when she was in her senior year that her father died. She finished
out her laboratory work with lavish conscientiousness, feeling a new
tenderness of him in the consciousness that his ideas for her had failed.
That hour before his funeral, when she sat beside him alone, stood out
as among the very vivid moments of her life. The tragedy of his life
seemed that he had failed in impressing himself. His keenness of mind
had not made for bigness. Life had left an aggressiveness, a certain
sullenness in the lines of his face. His mind and his soul had never
found one another--was it because his