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.

IV

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.

CHAPTER XIII

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.