They reached Gopher Prairie at nine in the evening.

“You look kind of hot,” said Kennicott.

“Yes.”

“Joralemon is an enterprising town, don’t you think so?” She broke.  “No!  I think it’s an ash-heap.”

“Why, Carrie!”

He worried over it for a week.  While he ground his plate with his knife as he energetically pursued fragments of bacon, he peeped at her.

CHAPTER XXV

“Carrie’s all right.  She’s finicky, but she’ll get over it.  But I wish she’d hurry up about it!  What she can’t understand is that a fellow practising medicine in a small town like this has got to cut out the highbrow stuff, and not spend all his time going to concerts and shining his shoes. (Not but what he might be just as good at all these intellectual and art things as some other folks, if he had the time for it!)” Dr. Will Kennicott was brooding in his office, during a free moment toward the end of the summer afternoon.  He hunched down in his tilted desk-chair, undid a button of his shirt, glanced at the state news in the back of the Journal of the American Medical Association, dropped the magazine, leaned back with his right thumb hooked in the arm-hole of his vest and his left thumb stroking the back of his hair.

“By golly, she’s taking an awful big chance, though.  You’d expect her to learn by and by that I won’t be a parlor lizard.  She says we try to ‘make her over.’  Well, she’s always trying to make me over, from a perfectly good M. D. into a damn poet with a socialist necktie!  She’d have a fit if she knew how many women would be willing to cuddle up to Friend Will and comfort him, if he’d give ’em the chance!  There’s still a few dames that think the old man isn’t so darn unattractive!  I’m glad I’ve ducked all that woman-game since I’ve been married but——­Be switched if sometimes I don’t feel tempted to shine up to some girl that has sense enough to take life as it is; some frau that doesn’t want to talk Longfellow all the time, but just hold my hand and say, ’You look all in, honey.  Take it easy, and don’t try to talk.’

“Carrie thinks she’s such a whale at analyzing folks.  Giving the town the once-over.  Telling us where we get off.  Why, she’d simply turn up her toes and croak if she found out how much she doesn’t know about the high old times a wise guy could have in this burg on the Q.T., if he wasn’t faithful to his wife.  But I am.  At that, no matter what faults she’s got, there’s nobody here, no, nor in Minn’aplus either, that’s as nice-looking and square and bright as Carrie.  She ought to of been an artist or a writer or one of those things.  But once she took a shot at living here, she ought to stick by it.  Pretty——­Lord yes.  But cold.  She simply doesn’t know what passion is.  She simply hasn’t got an i-dea how hard it is for a full-blooded man to go on pretending to be satisfied with just being endured.  It gets awful tiresome, having to feel like a criminal just because I’m normal.  She’s getting so she doesn’t even care for my kissing her.  Well——­