“Oh, I’m dreadfully old.  I expect to take to a lip-stick, and to find a gray hair any morning now.”

“Huh!  You must be frightfully old—­prob’ly too old to be my granddaughter, I guess!”

Thus in the Vale of Arcady nymph and satyr beguiled the hours; precisely thus, and not in honeyed pentameters, discoursed Elaine and the worn Sir Launcelot in the pleached alley.

“How do you like your work?” asked the doctor.

“It’s pleasant, but sometimes I feel shut off from things—­the steel stacks, and the everlasting cards smeared all over with red rubber stamps.”

“Don’t you get sick of the city?”

“St. Paul?  Why, don’t you like it?  I don’t know of any lovelier view than when you stand on Summit Avenue and look across Lower Town to the Mississippi cliffs and the upland farms beyond.”

“I know but——­Of course I’ve spent nine years around the Twin Cities—­took my B.A. and M.D. over at the U., and had my internship in a hospital in Minneapolis, but still, oh well, you don’t get to know folks here, way you do up home.  I feel I’ve got something to say about running Gopher Prairie, but you take it in a big city of two-three hundred thousand, and I’m just one flea on the dog’s back.  And then I like country driving, and the hunting in the fall.  Do you know Gopher Prairie at all?”

“No, but I hear it’s a very nice town.”

“Nice?  Say honestly——­Of course I may be prejudiced, but I’ve seen an awful lot of towns—­one time I went to Atlantic City for the American Medical Association meeting, and I spent practically a week in New York!  But I never saw a town that had such up-and-coming people as Gopher Prairie.  Bresnahan—­you know—­the famous auto manufacturer—­he comes from Gopher Prairie.  Born and brought up there!  And it’s a darn pretty town.  Lots of fine maples and box-elders, and there’s two of the dandiest lakes you ever saw, right near town!  And we’ve got seven miles of cement walks already, and building more every day!  Course a lot of these towns still put up with plank walks, but not for us, you bet!”

“Really?”

(Why was she thinking of Stewart Snyder?)

“Gopher Prairie is going to have a great future.  Some of the best dairy and wheat land in the state right near there—­some of it selling right now at one-fifty an acre, and I bet it will go up to two and a quarter in ten years!”

“Is——­Do you like your profession?”

“Nothing like it.  Keeps you out, and yet you have a chance to loaf in the office for a change.”

“I don’t mean that way.  I mean—­it’s such an opportunity for sympathy.”

Dr. Kennicott launched into a heavy, “Oh, these Dutch farmers don’t want sympathy.  All they need is a bath and a good dose of salts.”

Carol must have flinched, for instantly he was urging, “What I mean is—­I don’t want you to think I’m one of these old salts-and-quinine peddlers, but I mean:  so many of my patients are husky farmers that I suppose I get kind of case-hardened.”