She said to him, and sincerely, “My!  You can do anything, with your brains and tact and that heavenly voice.  You were so good in ’The Girl from Kankakee.’  You made me feel terribly stupid.  If you’d gone on the stage, I believe you’d be just as good as anybody in Minneapolis.  But still, I’m not sorry you stuck to business.  It’s such a constructive career.”

“Do you really think so?” yearned Raymie, across the apple-sauce.

It was the first time that either of them had found a dependable intellectual companionship.  They looked down on Willis Woodford the bank-clerk, and his anxious babycentric wife, the silent Lyman Casses, the slangy traveling man, and the rest of Mrs. Gurrey’s unenlightened guests.  They sat opposite, and they sat late.  They were exhilarated to find that they agreed in confession of faith: 

“People like Sam Clark and Harry Haydock aren’t earnest about music and pictures and eloquent sermons and really refined movies, but then, on the other hand, people like Carol Kennicott put too much stress on all this art.  Folks ought to appreciate lovely things, but just the same, they got to be practical and—­they got to look at things in a practical way.”

Smiling, passing each other the pressed-glass pickle-dish, seeing Mrs. Gurrey’s linty supper-cloth irradiated by the light of intimacy, Vida and Raymie talked about Carol’s rose-colored turban, Carol’s sweetness, Carol’s new low shoes, Carol’s erroneous theory that there was no need of strict discipline in school, Carol’s amiability in the Bon Ton, Carol’s flow of wild ideas, which, honestly, just simply made you nervous trying to keep track of them.

About the lovely display of gents’ shirts in the Bon Ton window as dressed by Raymie, about Raymie’s offertory last Sunday, the fact that there weren’t any of these new solos as nice as “Jerusalem the Golden,” and the way Raymie stood up to Juanita Haydock when she came into the store and tried to run things and he as much as told her that she was so anxious to have folks think she was smart and bright that she said things she didn’t mean, and anyway, Raymie was running the shoe-department, and if Juanita, or Harry either, didn’t like the way he ran things, they could go get another man.

About Vida’s new jabot which made her look thirty-two (Vida’s estimate) or twenty-two (Raymie’s estimate), Vida’s plan to have the high-school Debating Society give a playlet, and the difficulty of keeping the younger boys well behaved on the playground when a big lubber like Cy Bogart acted up so.

About the picture post-card which Mrs. Dawson had sent to Mrs. Cass from Pasadena, showing roses growing right outdoors in February, the change in time on No. 4, the reckless way Dr. Gould always drove his auto, the reckless way almost all these people drove their autos, the fallacy of supposing that these socialists could carry on a government for as much as six months if they ever did have a chance to try out their theories, and the crazy way in which Carol jumped from subject to subject.