She knew that they were thinking of becoming shocked, but Juanita Haydock was admiring, at least.  She swaggered on: 

“I’m sure I’m going to ruin Will as a respectable practitioner——­Is he a good doctor, Dr. Gould?”

Kennicott’s rival gasped at this insult to professional ethics, and he took an appreciable second before he recovered his social manner.  “I’ll tell you, Mrs. Kennicott.”  He smiled at Kennicott, to imply that whatever he might say in the stress of being witty was not to count against him in the commercio-medical warfare.  “There’s some people in town that say the doc is a fair to middlin’ diagnostician and prescription-writer, but let me whisper this to you—­but for heaven’s sake don’t tell him I said so—­don’t you ever go to him for anything more serious than a pendectomy of the left ear or a strabismus of the cardiograph.”

No one save Kennicott knew exactly what this meant, but they laughed, and Sam Clark’s party assumed a glittering lemon-yellow color of brocade panels and champagne and tulle and crystal chandeliers and sporting duchesses.  Carol saw that George Edwin Mott and the blanched Mr. and Mrs. Dawson were not yet hypnotized.  They looked as though they wondered whether they ought to look as though they disapproved.  She concentrated on them: 

“But I know whom I wouldn’t have dared to go to Colorado with!  Mr. Dawson there!  I’m sure he’s a regular heart-breaker.  When we were introduced he held my hand and squeezed it frightfully.”

“Haw!  Haw!  Haw!” The entire company applauded.  Mr. Dawson was beatified.  He had been called many things—­loan-shark, skinflint, tightwad, pussyfoot—­but he had never before been called a flirt.

“He is wicked, isn’t he, Mrs. Dawson?  Don’t you have to lock him up?”

“Oh no, but maybe I better,” attempted Mrs. Dawson, a tint on her pallid face.

For fifteen minutes Carol kept it up.  She asserted that she was going to stage a musical comedy, that she preferred cafe parfait to beefsteak, that she hoped Dr. Kennicott would never lose his ability to make love to charming women, and that she had a pair of gold stockings.  They gaped for more.  But she could not keep it up.  She retired to a chair behind Sam Clark’s bulk.  The smile-wrinkles solemnly flattened out in the faces of all the other collaborators in having a party, and again they stood about hoping but not expecting to be amused.

Carol listened.  She discovered that conversation did not exist in Gopher Prairie.  Even at this affair, which brought out the young smart set, the hunting squire set, the respectable intellectual set, and the solid financial set, they sat up with gaiety as with a corpse.

Juanita Haydock talked a good deal in her rattling voice but it was invariably of personalities:  the rumor that Raymie Wutherspoon was going to send for a pair of patent leather shoes with gray buttoned tops; the rheumatism of Champ Perry; the state of Guy Pollock’s grippe; and the dementia of Jim Howland in painting his fence salmon-pink.