He was so much the man, the worker, the friend, that she liked him when she most tried to stand out against him; he was so much the successful executive that she did not want him to despise her.  His manner of sneering at what he called “parlor socialists” (though the phrase was not overwhelmingly new) had a power which made her wish to placate his company of well-fed, speed-loving administrators.  When he demanded, “Would you like to associate with nothing but a lot of turkey-necked, horn-spectacled nuts that have adenoids and need a hair-cut, and that spend all their time kicking about ‘conditions’ and never do a lick of work?” she said, “No, but just the same——­” When he asserted, “Even if your cavewoman was right in knocking the whole works, I bet some red-blooded Regular Fellow, some real He-man, found her a nice dry cave, and not any whining criticizing radical,” she wriggled her head feebly, between a nod and a shake.

His large hands, sensual lips, easy voice supported his self-confidence.  He made her feel young and soft—­as Kennicott had once made her feel.  She had nothing to say when he bent his powerful head and experimented, “My dear, I’m sorry I’m going away from this town.  You’d be a darling child to play with.  You are pretty!  Some day in Boston I’ll show you how we buy a lunch.  Well, hang it, got to be starting back.”

The only answer to his gospel of beef which she could find, when she was home, was a wail of “But just the same——­”

She did not see him again before he departed for Washington.

His eyes remained.  His glances at her lips and hair and shoulders had revealed to her that she was not a wife-and-mother alone, but a girl; that there still were men in the world, as there had been in college days.

That admiration led her to study Kennicott, to tear at the shroud of intimacy, to perceive the strangeness of the most familiar.

CHAPTER XXIV

I

All that midsummer month Carol was sensitive to Kennicott.  She recalled a hundred grotesqueries:  her comic dismay at his having chewed tobacco, the evening when she had tried to read poetry to him; matters which had seemed to vanish with no trace or sequence.  Always she repeated that he had been heroically patient in his desire to join the army.  She made much of her consoling affection for him in little things.  She liked the homeliness of his tinkering about the house; his strength and handiness as he tightened the hinges of a shutter; his boyishness when he ran to her to be comforted because he had found rust in the barrel of his pump-gun.  But at the highest he was to her another Hugh, without the glamor of Hugh’s unknown future.

There was, late in June, a day of heat-lightning.

Because of the work imposed by the absence of the other doctors the Kennicotts had not moved to the lake cottage but remained in town, dusty and irritable.  In the afternoon, when she went to Oleson & McGuire’s (formerly Dahl & Oleson’s), Carol was vexed by the assumption of the youthful clerk, recently come from the farm, that he had to be neighborly and rude.  He was no more brusquely familiar than a dozen other clerks of the town, but her nerves were heat-scorched.