"Almost home, dear," he said, and then for a long time neither of them spoke. Many big forces flowed freely into the silence of that moment.
She looked up at him at last with a smile which broke from her seriousness as a ripple breaks from a wave.
"Suppose we had to say everything in words!"
"Suppose we had to walk on one leg!"
"Oh, but that—you know, Karl, it's a little like the rivers and the ocean. The words are the rivers flowing into the ocean of silence. Rivers flow into oceans—but do they make them? And then the ocean gives back to the rivers in the things which it breathes out. There are so many reasons why it seems like that."
"Ernestine, where did you get all this? I sometimes think I'm not square with you at all. Why, I've been in all those places before! I saw the Bay of Naples long before I ever saw you—and yet I didn't really see it before at all. Don't you see? Eyes and appreciation and every decent thing I take from you. Where did you get it all, Ernestine?"
She pushed back a little curl which was always coming loose,—he loved that little curl for always coming loose.
"Perhaps I 'got it' from that way you have of looking at me—the way you're looking at me now; or maybe I got it from the way you say 'Ernestine'—the way you said it just now. But does it matter much what comes from which?"—with which bit of lucidity she wrinkled up her nose at him in a way which always vanquished argument and returned to the silence which seemed waiting to claim her.
He watched her then; he loved so to do that—just see how far he could follow. Ernestine seemed to draw things to her in a way very wonderful to him.
"You know, liebchen,"—as he saw that steady light of resolution shine through the veil of her tenderness—"it seems so queer to me that you really do anything."