She had walked up the railroad track with Hugh, this Sunday afternoon.

She saw Erik Valborg coming, in an ancient highwater suit, tramping sullenly and alone, striking at the rails with a stick.  For a second she unreasoningly wanted to avoid him, but she kept on, and she serenely talked about God, whose voice, Hugh asserted, made the humming in the telegraph wires.  Erik stared, straightened.  They greeted each other with “Hello.”

“Hugh, say how-do-you-do to Mr. Valborg.”

“Oh, dear me, he’s got a button unbuttoned,” worried Erik, kneeling.  Carol frowned, then noted the strength with which he swung the baby in the air.

“May I walk along a piece with you?”

“I’m tired.  Let’s rest on those ties.  Then I must be trotting back.”

They sat on a heap of discarded railroad ties, oak logs spotted with cinnamon-colored dry-rot and marked with metallic brown streaks where iron plates had rested.  Hugh learned that the pile was the hiding-place of Injuns; he went gunning for them while the elders talked of uninteresting things.

The telegraph wires thrummed, thrummed, thrummed above them; the rails were glaring hard lines; the goldenrod smelled dusty.  Across the track was a pasture of dwarf clover and sparse lawn cut by earthy cow-paths; beyond its placid narrow green, the rough immensity of new stubble, jagged with wheat-stacks like huge pineapples.

Erik talked of books; flamed like a recent convert to any faith.  He exhibited as many titles and authors as possible, halting only to appeal, “Have you read his last book?  Don’t you think he’s a terribly strong writer?”

She was dizzy.  But when he insisted, “You’ve been a librarian; tell me; do I read too much fiction?” she advised him loftily, rather discursively.  He had, she indicated, never studied.  He had skipped from one emotion to another.  Especially—­she hesitated, then flung it at him—­he must not guess at pronunciations; he must endure the nuisance of stopping to reach for the dictionary.

“I’m talking like a cranky teacher,” she sighed.

“No!  And I will study!  Read the damned dictionary right through.”  He crossed his legs and bent over, clutching his ankle with both hands.  “I know what you mean.  I’ve been rushing from picture to picture, like a kid let loose in an art gallery for the first time.  You see, it’s so awful recent that I’ve found there was a world—­well, a world where beautiful things counted.  I was on the farm till I was nineteen.  Dad is a good farmer, but nothing else.  Do you know why he first sent me off to learn tailoring?  I wanted to study drawing, and he had a cousin that’d made a lot of money tailoring out in Dakota, and he said tailoring was a lot like drawing, so he sent me down to a punk hole called Curlew, to work in a tailor shop.  Up to that time I’d only had three months’ schooling a year—­walked to school two miles, through snow up to my knees—­and Dad never would stand for my having a single book except schoolbooks.