Mrs. Westlake was affable.  Carol felt that she was expected to explain; and while she was mentally asserting that she’d be hanged if she’d explain, she was explaining: 

“Hugh captured that Valborg boy up the track.  They became such good friends.  And I talked to him for a while.  I’d heard he was eccentric, but really, I found him quite intelligent.  Crude, but he reads—­reads almost the way Dr. Westlake does.”

“That’s fine.  Why does he stick here in town?  What’s this I hear about his being interested in Myrtle Cass?”

“I don’t know.  Is he?  I’m sure he isn’t!  He said he was quite lonely!  Besides, Myrtle is a babe in arms!”

“Twenty-one if she’s a day!”

“Well——­Is the doctor going to do any hunting this fall?”

II

The need of explaining Erik dragged her back into doubting.  For all his ardent reading, and his ardent life, was he anything but a small-town youth bred on an illiberal farm and in cheap tailor shops?  He had rough hands.  She had been attracted only by hands that were fine and suave, like those of her father.  Delicate hands and resolute purpose.  But this boy—­powerful seamed hands and flabby will.

“It’s not appealing weakness like his, but sane strength that win animate the Gopher Prairies.  Only——­Does that mean anything?  Or am I echoing Vida?  The world has always let ‘strong’ statesmen and soldiers—­the men with strong voices—­take control, and what have the thundering boobies done?  What is ‘strength’?

“This classifying of people!  I suppose tailors differ as much as burglars or kings.

“Erik frightened me when he turned on me.  Of course he didn’t mean anything, but I mustn’t let him be so personal.

“Amazing impertinence!

“But he didn’t mean to be.

“His hands are firm.  I wonder if sculptors don’t have thick hands, too?

“Of course if there really is anything I can do to help the boy——­

“Though I despise these people who interfere.  He must be independent.”

III

She wasn’t altogether pleased, the week after, when Erik was independent and, without asking for her inspiration, planned the tennis tournament.  It proved that he had learned to play in Minneapolis; that, next to Juanita Haydock, he had the best serve in town.  Tennis was well spoken of in Gopher Prairie and almost never played.  There were three courts:  one belonging to Harry Haydock, one to the cottages at the lake, and one, a rough field on the outskirts, laid out by a defunct tennis association.

Erik had been seen in flannels and an imitation panama hat, playing on the abandoned court with Willis Woodford, the clerk in Stowbody’s bank.  Suddenly he was going about proposing the reorganization of the tennis association, and writing names in a fifteen-cent note-book bought for the purpose at Dyer’s.  When he came to Carol he was so excited over being an organizer that he did not stop to talk of himself and Aubrey Beardsley for more than ten minutes.  He begged, “Will you get some of the folks to come in?” and she nodded agreeably.