Well i haven ben tacking aney ting for about one & 1/2 Mont but i dont get better so i like to heir Wat you tink about it i feel like dis Disconfebil feeling around the Stomac after eating and dat Pain around Heard and down the arm and about 3 to 3 1/2 Hour after Eating i feel weeak like and dissy and a dull Hadig.  Now you gust lett mee know Wat you tink about mee, i do Wat you say.

V

She encountered Guy Pollock at the drug store.  He looked at her as though he had a right to; he spoke softly.  “I haven’t see you, the last few days.”

“No.  I’ve been out in the country with Will several times.  He’s so——­Do you know that people like you and me can never understand people like him?  We’re a pair of hypercritical loafers, you and I, while he quietly goes and does things.”

She nodded and smiled and was very busy about purchasing boric acid.  He stared after her, and slipped away.

When she found that he was gone she was slightly disconcerted.

VI

She could—­at times—­agree with Kennicott that the shaving-and-corsets familiarity of married life was not dreary vulgarity but a wholesome frankness; that artificial reticences might merely be irritating.  She was not much disturbed when for hours he sat about the living-room in his honest socks.  But she would not listen to his theory that “all this romance stuff is simply moonshine—­elegant when you’re courting, but no use busting yourself keeping it up all your life.”

She thought of surprises, games, to vary the days.  She knitted an astounding purple scarf, which she hid under his supper plate. (When he discovered it he looked embarrassed, and gasped, “Is today an anniversary or something?  Gosh, I’d forgotten it!”)

Once she filled a thermos bottle with hot coffee a corn-flakes box with cookies just baked by Bea, and bustled to his office at three in the afternoon.  She hid her bundles in the hall and peeped in.

The office was shabby.  Kennicott had inherited it from a medical predecessor, and changed it only by adding a white enameled operating-table, a sterilizer, a Roentgen-ray apparatus, and a small portable typewriter.  It was a suite of two rooms:  a waiting-room with straight chairs, shaky pine table, and those coverless and unknown magazines which are found only in the offices of dentists and doctors.  The room beyond, looking on Main Street, was business-office, consulting-room, operating-room, and, in an alcove, bacteriological and chemical laboratory.  The wooden floors of both rooms were bare; the furniture was brown and scaly.

Waiting for the doctor were two women, as still as though they were paralyzed, and a man in a railroad brakeman’s uniform, holding his bandaged right hand with his tanned left.  They stared at Carol.  She sat modestly in a stiff chair, feeling frivolous and out of place.