“I never read a novel till I got ‘Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall’ out of the library at Curlew.  I thought it was the loveliest thing in the world!  Next I read ‘Barriers Burned Away’ and then Pope’s translation of Homer.  Some combination, all right!  When I went to Minneapolis, just two years ago, I guess I’d read pretty much everything in that Curlew library, but I’d never heard of Rossetti or John Sargent or Balzac or Brahms.  But——­Yump, I’ll study.  Look here!  Shall I get out of this tailoring, this pressing and repairing?”

“I don’t see why a surgeon should spend very much time cobbling shoes.”

“But what if I find I can’t really draw and design?  After fussing around in New York or Chicago, I’d feel like a fool if I had to go back to work in a gents’ furnishings store!”

“Please say ‘haberdashery.’”

“Haberdashery?  All right.  I’ll remember.”  He shrugged and spread his fingers wide.

She was humbled by his humility; she put away in her mind, to take out and worry over later, a speculation as to whether it was not she who was naive.  She urged, “What if you do have to go back?  Most of us do!  We can’t all be artists—­myself, for instance.  We have to darn socks, and yet we’re not content to think of nothing but socks and darning-cotton.  I’d demand all I could get—­whether I finally settled down to designing frocks or building temples or pressing pants.  What if you do drop back?  You’ll have had the adventure.  Don’t be too meek toward life!  Go!  You’re young, you’re unmarried.  Try everything!  Don’t listen to Nat Hicks and Sam Clark and be a ’steady young man’—­in order to help them make money.  You’re still a blessed innocent.  Go and play till the Good People capture you!”

“But I don’t just want to play.  I want to make something beautiful.  God!  And I don’t know enough.  Do you get it?  Do you understand?  Nobody else ever has!  Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“And so——­But here’s what bothers me:  I like fabrics; dinky things like that; little drawings and elegant words.  But look over there at those fields.  Big!  New!  Don’t it seem kind of a shame to leave this and go back to the East and Europe, and do what all those people have been doing so long?  Being careful about words, when there’s millions of bushels off wheat here!  Reading this fellow Pater, when I’ve helped Dad to clear fields!”

“It’s good to clear fields.  But it’s not for you.  It’s one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.  I thought that myself, when I first came to the prairie.  ‘Big—­new.’  Oh, I don’t want to deny the prairie future.  It will be magnificent.  But equally I’m hanged if I want to be bullied by it, go to war on behalf of Main Street, be bullied and bullied by the faith that the future is already here in the present, and that all of us must stay and worship wheat-stacks and insist that this is ’God’s