At the door, she hinted: 

“Mr. Bjornstam, if you were I, would you worry when people thought you were affected?”

“Huh?  Kick ’em in the face!  Say, if I were a sea-gull, and all over silver, think I’d care what a pack of dirty seals thought about my flying?”

It was not the wind at her back, it was the thrust of Bjornstam’s scorn which carried her through town.  She faced Juanita Haydock, cocked her head at Maud Dyer’s brief nod, and came home to Bea radiant.  She telephoned Vida Sherwin to “run over this evening.”  She lustily played Tschaikowsky—­the virile chords an echo of the red laughing philosopher of the tar-paper shack.

(When she hinted to Vida, “Isn’t there a man here who amuses himself by being irreverent to the village gods—­Bjornstam, some such a name?” the reform-leader said “Bjornstam?  Oh yes.  Fixes things.  He’s awfully impertinent.”)

IV

Kennicott had returned at midnight.  At breakfast he said four several times that he had missed her every moment.

On her way to market Sam Clark hailed her, “The top o’ the mornin’ to yez!  Going to stop and pass the time of day mit Sam’l?  Warmer, eh?  What’d the doc’s thermometer say it was?  Say, you folks better come round and visit with us, one of these evenings.  Don’t be so dog-gone proud, staying by yourselves.”

Champ Perry the pioneer, wheat-buyer at the elevator, stopped her in the post-office, held her hand in his withered paws, peered at her with faded eyes, and chuckled, “You are so fresh and blooming, my dear.  Mother was saying t’other day that a sight of you was better ’n a dose of medicine.”

In the Bon Ton Store she found Guy Pollock tentatively buying a modest gray scarf.  “We haven’t seen you for so long,” she said.  “Wouldn’t you like to come in and play cribbage, some evening?” As though he meant it, Pollock begged, “May I, really?”

While she was purchasing two yards of malines the vocal Raymie Wutherspoon tiptoed up to her, his long sallow face bobbing, and he besought, “You’ve just got to come back to my department and see a pair of patent leather slippers I set aside for you.”

In a manner of more than sacerdotal reverence he unlaced her boots, tucked her skirt about her ankles, slid on the slippers.  She took them.

“You’re a good salesman,” she said.

“I’m not a salesman at all!  I just like elegant things.  All this is so inartistic.”  He indicated with a forlornly waving hand the shelves of shoe-boxes, the seat of thin wood perforated in rosettes, the display of shoe-trees and tin boxes of blacking, the lithograph of a smirking young woman with cherry cheeks who proclaimed in the exalted poetry of advertising, “My tootsies never got hep to what pedal perfection was till I got a pair of clever classy Cleopatra Shoes.”

“But sometimes,” Raymie sighed, “there is a pair of dainty little shoes like these, and I set them aside for some one who will appreciate.  When I saw these I said right away, ’Wouldn’t it be nice if they fitted Mrs. Kennicott,’ and I meant to speak to you first chance I had.  I haven’t forgotten our jolly talks at Mrs. Gurrey’s!”