“Oh, yes,” said Grace, “his opinion would be of great value.  It wouldn’t be at all essential that I should agree with him:’ 

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Maynard.  “I reckon he thinks a good deal of your agreeing with him.  I’ve been talking with him about settling out our way.  We’ve got a magnificent country, and there’s bound to be plenty of sickness there, sooner or later.  Why, doctor, it would be a good opening for you!  It ’s just the place for you.  You ’re off here in a corner, in New England, and you have n’t got any sort of scope; but at Cheyenne you’d have the whole field to yourself; there is n’t another lady doctor in Cheyenne.  Now, you come out with us.  Bring your mother with you, and grow up with the country.  Your mother would like it.  There’s enough moral obliquity in Cheyenne to keep her conscience in a state of healthful activity all the time.  Yes, you’d get along out there.”

Grace laughed, and shook her head.  It was part of the joke which life seemed to be with Mr. Maynard that the inhabitants of New England were all eager to escape from their native section, and that they ought to be pitied and abetted in this desire.  As soon as his wife’s convalescence released him from constant attendance upon her, he began an inspection of the region from the compassionate point of view; the small, frugal husbandry appealed to his commiseration, and he professed to have found the use of canvas caps upon the haycocks intolerably pathetic.  “Why, I’m told,” he said, “that they have to blanket the apple-trees while the fruit is setting; and they kill off our Colorado bugs by turning them loose, one at a time, on the potato-patches:  the bug starves to death in forty-eight hours.  But you’ve got plenty of schoolhouses, doctor; it does beat all, about the schoolhouses.  And it’s an awful pity that there are no children to go to school in them.  Why, of course the people go West as fast as they can, but they ought to be helped; the Government ought to do something.  They’re good people; make first-rate citizens when you get them waked up, out there.  But they ought all to be got away, and let somebody run New England’ as a summer resort.  It’s pretty, and it’s cool and pleasant, and the fishing is excellent; milk, eggs, and all kinds of berries and historical associations on the premises; and it could be made very attractive three months of the year; but my goodness! you oughtn’t to ask anybody to live here.  You come out with us, doctor, and see that country, and you’ll know what I mean.”

His boasts were always uttered with a wan, lack-lustre irony, as if he were burlesquing the conventional Western brag and enjoying the mystifications of his listener, whose feeble sense of humor often failed to seize his intention, and to whom any depreciation of New England was naturally unintelligible.  She had not come to her final liking for him without a season of serious misgiving, but after that she rested in peace upon what every one knowing him felt to be his essential neighborliness.  Her wonder had then come to be how he could marry Louise, when they sat together on the seaward piazza, and he poured out his easy talk, unwearied and unwearying, while, with one long, lank leg crossed upon the other, he swung his unblacked, thin-soled boot to and fro.