“The diagnosis of my Village Virus is simple enough.  I was born in an Ohio town about the same size as Gopher Prairie, and much less friendly.  It’d had more generations in which to form an oligarchy of respectability.  Here, a stranger is taken in if he is correct, if he likes hunting and motoring and God and our Senator.  There, we didn’t take in even our own till we had contemptuously got used to them.  It was a red-brick Ohio town, and the trees made it damp, and it smelled of rotten apples.  The country wasn’t like our lakes and prairie.  There were small stuffy corn-fields and brick-yards and greasy oil-wells.

“I went to a denominational college and learned that since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.  From college I went to New York, to the Columbia Law School.  And for four years I lived.  Oh, I won’t rhapsodize about New York.  It was dirty and noisy and breathless and ghastly expensive.  But compared with the moldy academy in which I had been smothered——!  I went to symphonies twice a week.  I saw Irving and Terry and Duse and Bernhardt, from the top gallery.  I walked in Gramercy Park.  And I read, oh, everything.

“Through a cousin I learned that Julius Flickerbaugh was sick and needed a partner.  I came here.  Julius got well.  He didn’t like my way of loafing five hours and then doing my work (really not so badly) in one.  We parted.

“When I first came here I swore I’d ‘keep up my interests.’  Very lofty!  I read Browning, and went to Minneapolis for the theaters.  I thought I was ‘keeping up.’  But I guess the Village Virus had me already.  I was reading four copies of cheap fiction-magazines to one poem.  I’d put off the Minneapolis trips till I simply had to go there on a lot of legal matters.

“A few years ago I was talking to a patent lawyer from Chicago, and I realized that——­I’d always felt so superior to people like Julius Flickerbaugh, but I saw that I was as provincial and behind-the-times as Julius. (Worse!  Julius plows through the Literary Digest and the Outlook faithfully, while I’m turning over pages of a book by Charles Flandrau that I already know by heart.)

“I decided to leave here.  Stern resolution.  Grasp the world.  Then I found that the Village Virus had me, absolute:  I didn’t want to face new streets and younger men—­real competition.  It was too easy to go on making out conveyances and arguing ditching cases.  So——­That’s all of the biography of a living dead man, except the diverting last chapter, the lies about my having been ‘a tower of strength and legal wisdom’ which some day a preacher will spin over my lean dry body.”

He looked down at his table-desk, fingering the starry enameled vase.

She could not comment.  She pictured herself running across the room to pat his hair.  She saw that his lips were firm, under his soft faded mustache.  She sat still and maundered, “I know.  The Village Virus.  Perhaps it will get me.  Some day I’m going——­Oh, no matter.  At least, I am making you talk!  Usually you have to be polite to my garrulousness, but now I’m sitting at your feet.”