tion of Theron Ware.' Do you know it?"

"Yes. It was clever. But hard. Man wanted to tear down, not build up.
Cynical. Oh, I do hope I'm not a sentimentalist. But I can't see any use
in this high-art stuff that doesn't encourage us day-laborers to plod
on."

Ensued a fifteen-minute argument about the oldest topic in the world:
It's art but is it pretty? Carol tried to be eloquent regarding honesty
of observation. Miss Sherwin stood out for sweetness and a cautious use
of the uncomfortable properties of light. At the end Carol cried:

"I don't care how much we disagree. It's a relief to have somebody
talk something besides crops. Let's make Gopher Prairie rock to its
foundations: let's have afternoon tea instead of afternoon coffee."

The delighted Bea helped her bring out the ancestral folding
sewing-table, whose yellow and black top was scarred with dotted lines
from a dressmaker's tracing-wheel, and to set it with an embroidered
lunch-cloth, and the mauve-glazed Japanese tea-set which she had brought
from St. Paul. Miss Sherwin confided her latest scheme--moral motion
pictures for country districts, with light from a portable dynamo
hitched to a Ford engine. Bea was twice called to fill the hot-water
pitcher and to make cinnamon toast.

When Kennicott came home at five he tried to be courtly, as befits the
husband of one who has afternoon tea. Carol suggested that Miss Sherwin
stay for supper, and that Kennicott invite Guy Pollock, the much-praised
lawyer, the poetic bachelor.

Yes, Pollock could come. Yes, he was over the grippe which had prevented
his going to Sam Clark's party.

Carol regretted her impulse. The man would be an opinionated politician,
heavily jocular about The Bride. But at the entrance of Guy Pollock she
discovered a personality. Pollock was a man of perhaps thirty-eight,
slender, still, deferential. His voice was low. "It was very good of you
to want me," he said, and he offered no humorous remarks, and did not
ask her if she didn't think Gopher Prairie was "the livest little burg
in the state."

She fancied that his even grayness might reveal a thousand tints of
lavender and blue and silver.

At supper he hinted his love for Sir Thomas Browne, Thoreau, Agnes
Repplier, Arthur Symons, Claude Washburn, Charles Flandrau. He presented
his idols diffidently, but he expanded in Carol's bookishness, in Miss
Sherwin's voluminous praise, in Kennicott's tolerance of any one who
amused his wife.