Else stroked her chin with a twinkle in her eyes.
Ah, the beard. Henrik smiled and patted his beard. “Ja.”
“Is he a Viking? I think you look like a Viking.”
Laila laughed and plopped on the sofa that faced Henrik. “You do, Hemming. You need one of those helmets with horns.”
Else clucked her tongue. “You know real Vikings didn’t have horns on their helmets.”
“True, but how would we recognize a Viking without horns?”
Else gave Henrik an amused look and joined her friend on the sofa. “Laila, did I tell you I had a breakthrough today while mimeographing?”
“Mortensen made you do that again?”
Henrik’s hand stiffened on the knife. From all he’d heard, Mortensen was a cad.
Else arranged her skirt over her knees. “I’m embracing it as growth in humility. And I do excellent thinking at the mimeograph machine. That’s my reward.”
“What was your breakthrough?”
Henrik kept his ears on their conversation and tried to keep his eyes on his carving.
Else circled one hand in a cranking motion. “With each turn of the mimeo, the stencil wears down a bit more. Entropy in action.”
“Entropy.” Laila narrowed one eye. “Second Law of Thermodynamics?”
“Yes. ‘Everything tends to disorder.’ Entropy is a measure of disorder or randomness.”
Henrik had read about that in the physics textbook from Lyd-af-Lys.
Else tapped the notebook on her lap. “I was wondering how entropy applies to light. Max von Laue and Max Planck did some work on it in the early days of quantum theory. I think it goes deeper.”
“Do you have calculations?” Laila eyed the notebook.
“I was hoping you’d ask.” With a sly smile, Else opened her notebook. “It might involve matrices, and those are a weakness of mine.”
“Oh! I love matrix mathematics.”
The two ladies bent their heads over the notebook, both faces bright with intellectual stimulation.
Their conversation exceeded the basic physics in Henrik’s textbook. But he was beginning to understand a concept Else kept talking about, the nature of light, how it was both a wave and a particle.
For hundreds of years, physicists had argued about it. Light could only be a particle. Or a wave. Not both. Then Niels Bohr solved the problem with his complementarity principle, explaining how two concepts could be mutually exclusive—and still both be true.
Henrik carved a valley separating the Havmand’s arm from his chest, and he smiled. The theory illuminated the smallness of the human mind, how little the brain could understand, even the most brilliant of brains.
Else laughed and wrote in her notebook.
Everything about her seemed soft. Her laughter. The way the lamplight gleamed on her light blond hair. How that hair curled under her round face. The glow in her eyes, the curve of her cheeks, the bend to her pink lips. Those looked soft too.
Henrik jerked his gaze down to the figurine. He wanted to fashion the same pose as the Little Mermaid statue, the same wistful longing for what couldn’t be had.
And Henrik could not have a woman in his life. He’d had more than his share of women in his dissolute years, and now he could have none.
He glanced under his eyebrows at Else writing and chatting. Brilliance and sweetness in equal measure. Those qualities had shone in Mor, and they shone in Else.
The sort of woman he’d consider if he ever had the chance.
