Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be.
Nobody needs drug-store ice cream; pie is good enough
for anybody.
The farmers want too much for their wheat.
The owners of the elevator-company expect too much
for the salaries they pay.
There would be no more trouble or discontent in the
world if everybody worked as hard as Pa did when he
cleared our first farm.
Carol’s hero-worship dwindled to polite nodding,
and the nodding dwindled to a desire to escape, and
she went home with a headache.
Next day she saw Miles Bjornstam on the street.
“Just back from Montana. Great summer.
Pumped my lungs chuck-full of Rocky Mountain air.
Now for another whirl at sassing the bosses of Gopher
Prairie.” She smiled at him, and the Perrys
faded, the pioneers faded, till they were but daguerreotypes
in a black walnut cupboard.
She tried, more from loyalty than from desire,
to call upon the Perrys on a November evening when
Kennicott was away. They were not at home.
Like a child who has no one to play with she loitered
through the dark hall. She saw a light under
an office door. She knocked. To the person
who opened she murmured, “Do you happen to know
where the Perrys are?” She realized that it
was Guy Pollock.
“I’m awfully sorry, Mrs. Kennicott, but
I don’t know. Won’t you come in and
wait for them?”
“W-why——” she observed,
as she reflected that in Gopher Prairie it is not
decent to call on a man; as she decided that no, really,
she wouldn’t go in; and as she went in.
“I didn’t know your office was up here.”
“Yes, office, town-house, and chateau in Picardy.
But you can’t see the chateau and town-house
(next to the Duke of Sutherland’s). They’re
beyond that inner door. They are a cot and a wash-stand
and my other suit and the blue crepe tie you said
you liked.”
“You remember my saying that?”
“Of course. I always shall. Please
try this chair.”
She glanced about the rusty office—gaunt
stove, shelves of tan law-books, desk-chair filled
with newspapers so long sat upon that they were in
holes and smudged to grayness. There were only
two things which suggested Guy Pollock. On the
green felt of the table-desk, between legal blanks
and a clotted inkwell, was a cloissone vase. On
a swing shelf was a row of books unfamiliar to Gopher
Prairie: Mosher editions of the poets, black
and red German novels, a Charles Lamb in crushed levant.
Guy did not sit down. He quartered the office,
a grayhound on the scent; a grayhound with glasses
tilted forward on his thin nose, and a silky indecisive
brown mustache. He had a golf jacket of jersey,
worn through at the creases in the sleeves. She
noted that he did not apologize for it, as Kennicott
would have done.
