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the houses of college acquaintances.
Sometimes she one-stepped demurely; sometimes, in dread of life's
slipping past, she turned into a bacchanal, her tender eyes excited, her
throat tense, as she slid down the room.
During her three years of library work several men showed diligent
interest in her--the treasurer of a fur-manufacturing firm, a teacher, a
newspaper reporter, and a petty railroad official. None of them made
her more than pause in thought. For months no male emerged from the
mass. Then, at the Marburys', she met Dr. Will Kennicott.

CHAPTER II
IT was a frail and blue and lonely Carol who trotted to the flat of the
Johnson Marburys for Sunday evening supper. Mrs. Marbury was a
neighbor and friend of Carol's sister; Mr. Marbury a traveling
representative of an insurance company. They made a specialty of
sandwich-salad-coffee lap suppers, and they regarded Carol as their
literary and artistic representative. She was the one who could be
depended upon to appreciate the Caruso phonograph record, and the
Chinese lantern which Mr. Marbury had brought back as his present
from San Francisco. Carol found the Marburys admiring and therefore
admirable.
This September Sunday evening she wore a net frock with a pale pink
lining. A nap had soothed away the faint lines of tiredness beside her
eyes. She was young, naive, stimulated by the coolness. She flung her
coat at the chair in the hall of the flat, and exploded into the

green-plush living-room. The familiar group were trying to be
conversational. She saw Mr. Marbury, a woman teacher of gymnastics
in a high school, a chief clerk from the Great Northern Railway offices,
a young lawyer. But there was also a stranger, a thick tall man of
thirty-six or -seven, with stolid brown hair, lips used to giving orders,
eyes which followed everything good-naturedly, and clothes which you
could never quite remember.
Mr. Marbury boomed, "Carol, come over here and meet Doc
Kennicott--Dr. Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie. He does all our
insurance-examining up in that neck of the woods, and they do say he's
some doctor!"
As she edged toward the stranger and murmured nothing in particular,
Carol remembered that Gopher Prairie was a Minnesota wheat-prairie
town of something over three thousand people.
"Pleased to meet you," stated Dr. Kennicott. His hand was strong; the
palm soft, but the back weathered, showing golden hairs against firm
red skin.
He looked at her as though she was an agreeable discovery. She tugged
her hand free and fluttered, "I must go out to the kitchen and help Mrs.
Marbury." She did not speak to him again till, after she had heated the
rolls and passed the paper napkins, Mr. Marbury captured her with a
loud, "Oh, quit fussing now. Come over here and sit down and tell us
how's tricks." He herded her to a sofa with Dr. Kennicott, who was
rather vague about the eyes, rather drooping of bulky shoulder, as
though he was wondering what he was expected to do next. As their
host left them, Kennicott awoke:
"Marbury tells me you're a high mogul in the public library. I was
surprised. Didn't hardly think you were old enough I thought you were
a girl, still in college maybe."
"Oh, I'm dreadfully old. I expect to take to a lip-stick, and to find a gray
hair any morning now."

"Huh! You must be frightfully old--prob'ly too old to be my
granddaughter, I guess!"
Thus in the Vale of Arcady nymph and satyr beguiled the hours;
precisely thus, and not in honeyed pentameters, discoursed Elaine and
the worn Sir Launcelot in the pleached alley.
"How do you like your work?" asked the doctor.
"It's pleasant, but sometimes I feel shut off from things--the steel stacks,
and the everlasting cards smeared all over with red rubber stamps."
"Don't you get sick of the city?"
"St. Paul? Why, don't you like it? I don't know of any lovelier view
than when you stand on Summit Avenue and look across Lower Town
to the Mississippi cliffs and the upland farms beyond."
"I know but----Of course I've spent nine years around the Twin
Cities--took my B.A. and M.D. over at the U., and had my internship in
a hospital in Minneapolis, but still, oh well, you don't get to know folks
here, way you do up home. I feel I've got something to say about
running Gopher Prairie, but you take it in a big city of two-three
hundred thousand, and I'm just one flea on the dog's back. And then I
like country driving, and the hunting in the fall. Do you know Gopher
Prairie at all?"
"No, but I hear it's a very nice town."
"Nice? Say honestly----Of course I may be prejudiced, but I've seen an
awful lot of towns--one time