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“You’re a good salesman,” she said.

“I’m not a salesman at all! I just like elegant things. All this is so inartistic.” He indicated with a forlornly waving hand the shelves of shoe-boxes, the seat of thin wood perforated in rosettes, the display of shoe-trees and tin boxes of blacking, the lithograph of a smirking young woman with cherry cheeks who proclaimed in the exalted poetry of advertising, “My tootsies never got hep to what pedal perfection was till I got a pair of clever classy Cleopatra Shoes.”

“But sometimes,” Raymie sighed, “there is a pair of dainty little shoes like these, and I set them aside for some one who will appreciate. When I saw these I said right away, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if they fitted Mrs. Kennicott,’ and I meant to speak to you first chance I had. I haven’t forgotten our jolly talks at Mrs. Gurrey’s!”

That evening Guy Pollock came in and, though Kennicott instantly impressed him into a cribbage game, Carol was happy again.

V

She did not, in recovering something of her buoyancy, forget her determination to begin the liberalizing of Gopher Prairie by the easy and agreeable propaganda of teaching Kennicott to enjoy reading poetry in the lamplight. The campaign was delayed. Twice he suggested that they call on neighbors; once he was in the country. The fourth evening he yawned pleasantly, stretched, and inquired, “Well, what’ll we do tonight? Shall we go to the movies?”

“I know exactly what we’re going to do. Now don’t ask questions! Come and sit down by the table. There, are you comfy? Lean back and forget you’re a practical man, and listen to me.”

It may be that she had been influenced by the managerial Vida Sherwin; certainly she sounded as though she was selling culture. But she dropped it when she sat on the couch, her chin in her hands, a volume of Yeats on her knees, and read aloud.

Instantly she was released from the homely comfort of a prairie town. She was in the world of lonely things—the flutter of twilight linnets, the aching call of gulls along a shore to which the netted foam crept out of darkness, the island of Aengusax and the elder gods and the eternal glories that never were, tall kings and women girdled with crusted gold, the woful incessant chanting and the—

“Heh-cha-cha!” coughed Dr. Kennicott. She stopped. She remembered that he was the sort of person who chewed tobacco. She glared, while he uneasily petitioned, “That’s great stuff. Study it in college? I like poetry fine—James Whitcomb Riley and some of Longfellow—this ‘Hiawatha.’ Gosh, I wish I could appreciate that highbrow art stuff. But I guess I’m too old a dog to learn new tricks.”

With pity for his bewilderment, and a certain desire to giggle, she consoled him, “Then let’s try some Tennyson. You’ve read him?”

“Tennyson? You bet. Read him in school. There’s that:

And let there be no (what is it?) of farewell

When I put out to sea,

But let the—

Well, I don’t remember all of it but—Oh, sure! And there’s that ‘I met a little country boy who—’ I don’t remember exactly how it goes, but the chorus ends up, ‘We are seven.’”ay

“Yes. Well—Shall we try ‘The Idylls of the King?’† They’re so full of color.”

“Go to it. Shoot.” But he hastened to shelter himself behind a cigar.

She was not transported to Camelot. She read with an eye cocked on him, and when she saw how much he was suffering she ran to him, kissed his forehead, cried, “You poor forced tube-rose that wants to be a decent turnip!”

“Look here now, that ain’t—”

“Anyway, I sha’n’t torture you any longer.”

She could not quite give up. She read Kipling, with a great deal of emphasis:

There’s a REGIMENT a-COMING down the

GRAND Trunk ROAD.‡

He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal and reassured. But when he complimented her, “That was fine. I don’t know but what you can elocute just as good as Ella Stowbody,” she banged the book and suggested that they were not too late for the nine o’clock show at the movies.

That was her last effort to harvest the April wind, to teach divine unhappiness by a correspondence