"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.