charge the fees that those fellows do.  If a specialist stung you for a hundred-dollar consultation-fee and told you to go to New York to duck Dave’s nagging, you’d do it, to save the hundred dollars!  But you know me—­I’m your neighbor—­you see me mowing the lawn—­you figure I’m just a plug general practitioner.  If I said, ‘Go to New York,’ Dave and you would laugh your heads off and say, ’Look at the airs Will is putting on.  What does he think he is?’

“As a matter of fact, you’re right.  You have a perfectly well-developed case of repression of sex instinct, and it raises the old Ned with your body.  What you need is to get away from Dave and travel, yes, and go to every dog-gone kind of New Thought and Bahai and Swami and Hooptedoodle meeting you can find.  I know it, well ’s you do.  But how can I advise it?  Dave would be up here taking my hide off.  I’m willing to be family physician and priest and lawyer and plumber and wet-nurse, but I draw the line at making Dave loosen up on money.  Too hard a job in weather like this!  So, savvy, my dear?  Believe it will rain if this heat keeps——­”

“But, Will, he’d never give it to me on my say-so.  He’d never let me go away.  You know how Dave is:  so jolly and liberal in society, and oh, just loves to match quarters, and such a perfect sport if he loses!  But at home he pinches a nickel till the buffalo drips blood.  I have to nag him for every single dollar.”

“Sure, I know, but it’s your fight, honey.  Keep after him.  He’d simply resent my butting in.”

He crossed over and patted her shoulder.  Outside the window, beyond the fly-screen that was opaque with dust and cottonwood lint, Main Street was hushed except for the impatient throb of a standing motor car.  She took his firm hand, pressed his knuckles against her cheek.

“O Will, Dave is so mean and little and noisy—­the shrimp!  You’re so calm.  When he’s cutting up at parties I see you standing back and watching him—­the way a mastiff watches a terrier.”

He fought for professional dignity with, “Dave ’s not a bad fellow.”

Lingeringly she released his hand.  “Will, drop round by the house this evening and scold me.  Make me be good and sensible.  And I’m so lonely.”

“If I did, Dave would be there, and we’d have to play cards.  It’s his evening off from the store.”

“No.  The clerk just got called to Corinth—­mother sick.  Dave will be in the store till midnight.  Oh, come on over.  There’s some lovely beer on the ice, and we can sit and talk and be all cool and lazy.  That wouldn’t be wrong of us, would it!”

“No, no, course it wouldn’t be wrong.  But still, oughtn’t to——­” He saw Carol, slim black and ivory, cool, scornful of intrigue.

“All right.  But I’ll be so lonely.”

Her throat seemed young, above her loose blouse of muslin and machine-lace.

“Tell you, Maud:  I’ll drop in just for a minute, if I happen to be called down that way.”