“They’ve been pretty good friends to us, Chug—­those curtain frames.”

“Um.”  He glanced at her parboiled fingers.  “Just the same, it’ll be nix with the lace curtains for you.”

Glancing back on what has been told of Chug he sounds, somehow, so much like a modern Rollo, with a dash of Alger, that unless something is told of his social side he may be misunderstood.

Chug was a natural born dancer.  There are young men who, after the music has struck up, can start out incredibly enough by saying:  “What is this, anyway—­waltz or fox trot?” This was inconceivable to Chug.  He had never had a dancing lesson in his life, but he had a sense of rhythm that was infallible.  He could no more have danced out of time than he could have started a car on high, or confused a flivver with a Twelve.  He didn’t look particularly swanlike as he danced, having large, sensible feet, but they were expert at not being where someone else’s feet happened to be, and he could time a beat to the fraction of a second.

When you have practically spent your entire day sprawled under a balky car, with a piece of dirty mat between you and the cement floor, your view limited to crank-case, transmission, universal, fly-wheel, differential, pan, and brake-rods you can do with a bit of colour in the evening.  And just here was where Chippewa failed Chug.

He had a grave problem confronting him in his search for an evening’s amusement.  Chippewa, Wisconsin, was proud of its paved streets, its thirty thousand population, its lighting system, and the Greek temple that was the new First National Bank.  It boasted of its interurban lines, its neat houses set well back among old elms, its paper mills, its plough works, and its prosperity.  If you had told Chippewa that it was criminally ignoring Chug’s crying need it would have put you down as mad.

Boiled down, Chug Scaritt’s crying need was girls.  At twenty-two or three you must have girls in your life if you’re normal.  Chug was, but Chippewa wasn’t.  It had too many millionaires at one end and too many labourers at the other for a town of thirty thousand.  Its millionaires had their golf club, their high-powered cars, their smart social functions.  They were always running down to Chicago to hear Galli-Curci; and when it came to costume—­diamond bracelet, daring decolletage, large feather fans, and brilliant-buckled slippers—­you couldn’t tell their women from the city dwellers.  There is much money in paper mills and plough works.

The mill hands and their families were well-paid, thrifty, clannish Swedes, most of them, with a liberal sprinkling of Belgians and Slavs.  They belonged to all sorts of societies and lodges to which they paid infinitesimal dues and swore lifelong allegiance.