“No, you’re a scientist.  Oh, I will try and get the music out of Mr. Elder.  Only, why can’t he let it come out, instead of being ashamed of it, and always talking about hunting dogs?  But I will try.  Is it all right now?”

“Sure.  But there’s one other thing.  You might give me some attention, too!”

“That’s unjust!  You have everything I am!”

“No, I haven’t.  You think you respect me—­you always hand out some spiel about my being so ‘useful.’  But you never think of me as having ambitions, just as much as you have——­”

“Perhaps not.  I think of you as being perfectly satisfied.”

“Well, I’m not, not by a long shot!  I don’t want to be a plug general practitioner all my life, like Westlake, and die in harness because I can’t get out of it, and have ’em say, ’He was a good fellow, but he couldn’t save a cent.’  Not that I care a whoop what they say, after I’ve kicked in and can’t hear ’em, but I want to put enough money away so you and I can be independent some day, and not have to work unless I feel like it, and I want to have a good house—­by golly, I’ll have as good a house as anybody in this town!—­and if we want to travel and see your Tormina or whatever it is, why we can do it, with enough money in our jeans so we won’t have to take anything off anybody, or fret about our old age.  You never worry about what might happen if we got sick and didn’t have a good fat wad salted away, do you!”

“I don’t suppose I do.”

“Well then, I have to do it for you.  And if you think for one moment I want to be stuck in this burg all my life, and not have a chance to travel and see the different points of interest and all that, then you simply don’t get me.  I want to have a squint at the world, much’s you do.  Only, I’m practical about it.  First place, I’m going to make the money—­I’m investing in good safe farmlands.  Do you understand why now?”

“Yes.”

“Will you try and see if you can’t think of me as something more than just a dollar-chasing roughneck?”

“Oh, my dear, I haven’t been just!  I am difficile.  And I won’t call on the Dillons!  And if Dr. Dillon is working for Westlake and McGanum, I hate him!”

CHAPTER XV

That December she was in love with her husband.

She romanticized herself not as a great reformer but as the wife of a country physician.  The realities of the doctor’s household were colored by her pride.

Late at night, a step on the wooden porch, heard through her confusion of sleep; the storm-door opened; fumbling over the inner door-panels; the buzz of the electric bell.  Kennicott muttering “Gol darn it,” but patiently creeping out of bed, remembering to draw the covers up to keep her warm, feeling for slippers and bathrobe, clumping down-stairs.

From below, half-heard in her drowsiness, a colloquy in the pidgin-German of the farmers who have forgotten the Old Country language without learning the new: