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 vessels. They've taken the carmine stain wonderfully! But my work is not advanced; I wish you could see that of the other girls."
"I mustn't interfere with your task; I'll look about until you are ready."
Her shining head was already bent over the microscope; her pencil was moving, glad to respond to the touch of that lovely hand.
I picked up a book, the same little volume I had noticed the day before, on "Imbedding, Sectioning and Staining." Near it lay a treatise on histology. I opened to the first chapter, on "Protoplasm and the Cell," but I couldn't fix my thoughts on Bathybius or the Protomoeba. I walked toward an aquarium, flanking which stood a jar half-filled with water in which floated what seemed a big cup-shaped flower of bright brown jelly with waving petals of white and rose colour.
While I looked, thinking only of the curve of Helen's lips and the dancing light in her eyes, and the glowing colour of her soft flesh, Prof. Darmstetter's thin, high-pitched voice grated almost at my ear.
"T'at is Actinia—sea anemone."
"I come from the West; I have never seen the sea forms living," I answered with an effort, fearing that he meant to show me about the laboratory.