“You must let yourself go more when you’re drawing.”

“Don’t know if I can.  I’ve started kind of late.  But listen!  What do you think I’ve done this two weeks?  I’ve read almost clear through a Latin grammar, and about twenty pages of Caesar.”

“Splendid!  You are lucky.  You haven’t a teacher to make you artificial.”

“You’re my teacher!”

There was a dangerous edge of personality to his voice.  She was offended and agitated.  She turned her shoulder on him, stared through the back window, studying this typical center of a typical Main Street block, a vista hidden from casual strollers.  The backs of the chief establishments in town surrounded a quadrangle neglected, dirty, and incomparably dismal.  From the front, Howland & Gould’s grocery was smug enough, but attached to the rear was a lean-to of storm streaked pine lumber with a sanded tar roof—­a staggering doubtful shed behind which was a heap of ashes, splintered packing-boxes, shreds of excelsior, crumpled straw-board, broken olive-bottles, rotten fruit, and utterly disintegrated vegetables:  orange carrots turning black, and potatoes with ulcers.  The rear of the Bon Ton Store was grim with blistered black-painted iron shutters, under them a pile of once glossy red shirt-boxes, now a pulp from recent rain.

As seen from Main Street, Oleson & McGuire’s Meat Market had a sanitary and virtuous expression with its new tile counter, fresh sawdust on the floor, and a hanging veal cut in rosettes.  But she now viewed a back room with a homemade refrigerator of yellow smeared with black grease.  A man in an apron spotted with dry blood was hoisting out a hard slab of meat.

Behind Billy’s Lunch, the cook, in an apron which must long ago have been white, smoked a pipe and spat at the pest of sticky flies.  In the center of the block, by itself, was the stable for the three horses of the drayman, and beside it a pile of manure.

The rear of Ezra Stowbody’s bank was whitewashed, and back of it was a concrete walk and a three-foot square of grass, but the window was barred, and behind the bars she saw Willis Woodford cramped over figures in pompous books.  He raised his head, jerkily rubbed his eyes, and went back to the eternity of figures.

The backs of the other shops were an impressionistic picture of dirty grays, drained browns, writhing heaps of refuse.

“Mine is a back-yard romance—­with a journeyman tailor!”

She was saved from self-pity as she began to think through Erik’s mind.  She turned to him with an indignant, “It’s disgusting that this is all you have to look at.”

He considered it.  “Outside there?  I don’t notice much.  I’m learning to look inside.  Not awful easy!”

“Yes. . . .  I must be hurrying.”

As she walked home—­without hurrying—­she remembered her father saying to a serious ten-year-old Carol, “Lady, only a fool thinks he’s superior to beautiful bindings, but only a double-distilled fool reads nothing but bindings.”