“It would be rather nice to have you literally sitting at my feet, by a fire.”

“Would you have a fireplace for me?”

“Naturally!  Please don’t snub me now!  Let the old man rave.  How old are you, Carol?”

“Twenty-six, Guy.”

“Twenty-six!  I was just leaving New York, at twenty-six.  I heard Patti sing, at twenty-six.  And now I’m forty-seven.  I feel like a child, yet I’m old enough to be your father.  So it’s decently paternal to imagine you curled at my feet. . . .  Of course I hope it isn’t, but we’ll reflect the morals of Gopher Prairie by officially announcing that it is! . . .  These standards that you and I live up to!  There’s one thing that’s the matter with Gopher Prairie, at least with the ruling-class (there is a ruling-class, despite all our professions of democracy).  And the penalty we tribal rulers pay is that our subjects watch us every minute.  We can’t get wholesomely drunk and relax.  We have to be so correct about sex morals, and inconspicuous clothes, and doing our commercial trickery only in the traditional ways, that none of us can live up to it, and we become horribly hypocritical.  Unavoidably.  The widow-robbing deacon of fiction can’t help being hypocritical.  The widows themselves demand it!  They admire his unctuousness.  And look at me.  Suppose I did dare to make love to—­some exquisite married woman.  I wouldn’t admit it to myself.  I giggle with the most revolting salaciousness over La Vie Parisienne, when I get hold of one in Chicago, yet I shouldn’t even try to hold your hand.  I’m broken.  It’s the historical Anglo-Saxon way of making life miserable. . . .  Oh, my dear, I haven’t talked to anybody about myself and all our selves for years.”

“Guy!  Can’t we do something with the town?  Really?”

“No, we can’t!” He disposed of it like a judge ruling out an improper objection; returned to matters less uncomfortably energetic:  “Curious.  Most troubles are unnecessary.  We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards.  So we raise the devil just for pleasure—­wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.  Here in Gopher Prairie we’ve cleared the fields, and become soft, so we make ourselves unhappy artificially, at great expense and exertion:  Methodists disliking Episcopalians, the man with the Hudson laughing at the man with the flivver.  The worst is the commercial hatred—­the grocer feeling that any man who doesn’t deal with him is robbing him.  What hurts me is that it applies to lawyers and doctors (and decidedly to their wives!) as much as to grocers.  The doctors—­you know about that—­how your husband and Westlake and Gould dislike one another.”

“No!  I won’t admit it!”

He grinned.

“Oh, maybe once or twice, when Will has positively known of a case where Doctor—­where one of the others has continued to call on patients longer than necessary, he has laughed about it, but——­”