She was equally irritated, when the motor returned through Gopher Prairie, to find that she was proud of sharing in Bresnahan’s kudos as people waved, and Juanita Haydock leaned from a window.  She said to herself, “As though I cared whether I’m seen with this fat phonograph!” and simultaneously, “Everybody has noticed how much Will and I are playing with Mr. Bresnahan.”

The town was full of his stories, his friendliness, his memory for names, his clothes, his trout-flies, his generosity.  He had given a hundred dollars to Father Klubok the priest, and a hundred to the Reverend Mr. Zitterel the Baptist minister, for Americanization work.

At the Bon Ton, Carol heard Nat Hicks the tailor exulting: 

“Old Perce certainly pulled a good one on this fellow Bjornstam that always is shooting off his mouth.  He’s supposed to of settled down since he got married, but Lord, those fellows that think they know it all, they never change.  Well, the Red Swede got the grand razz handed to him, all right.  He had the nerve to breeze up to Perce, at Dave Dyer’s, and he said, he said to Perce, ’I’ve always wanted to look at a man that was so useful that folks would pay him a million dollars for existing,’ and Perce gave him the once-over and come right back, ‘Have, eh?’ he says.  ‘Well,’ he says, ’I’ve been looking for a man so useful sweeping floors that I could pay him four dollars a day.  Want the job, my friend?’ Ha, ha, ha!  Say, you know how lippy Bjornstam is?  Well for once he didn’t have a thing to say.  He tried to get fresh, and tell what a rotten town this is, and Perce come right back at him, ’If you don’t like this country, you better get out of it and go back to Germany, where you belong!’ Say, maybe us fellows didn’t give Bjornstam the horse-laugh though!  Oh, Perce is the white-haired boy in this burg, all rightee!”

V

Bresnahan had borrowed Jackson Elder’s motor; he stopped at the Kennicotts’; he bawled at Carol, rocking with Hugh on the porch, “Better come for a ride.”

She wanted to snub him.  “Thanks so much, but I’m being maternal.”

“Bring him along!  Bring him along!” Bresnahan was out of the seat, stalking up the sidewalk, and the rest of her protests and dignities were feeble.

She did not bring Hugh along.

Bresnahan was silent for a mile, in words, But he looked at her as though he meant her to know that he understood everything she thought.

She observed how deep was his chest.

“Lovely fields over there,” he said.

“You really like them?  There’s no profit in them.”

He chuckled.  “Sister, you can’t get away with it.  I’m onto you.  You consider me a big bluff.  Well, maybe I am.  But so are you, my dear—­and pretty enough so that I’d try to make love to you, if I weren’t afraid you’d slap me.”

“Mr. Bresnahan, do you talk that way to your wife’s friends?  And do you call them ’sister’?”