er,
the lies about my having been 'a tower of strength and legal wisdom'
which some day a preacher will spin over my lean dry body."

He looked down at his table-desk, fingering the starry enameled vase.

She could not comment. She pictured herself running across the room
to pat his hair. She saw that his lips were firm, under his soft faded
mustache. She sat still and maundered, "I know. The Village Virus.
Perhaps it will get me. Some day I'm going----Oh, no matter. At least,
I am making you talk! Usually you have to be polite to my garrulousness,
but now I'm sitting at your feet."

"It would be rather nice to have you literally sitting at my feet, by a
fire."

"Would you have a fireplace for me?"

"Naturally! Please don't snub me now! Let the old man rave. How old are
you, Carol?"

"Twenty-six, Guy."

"Twenty-six! I was just leaving New York, at twenty-six. I heard Patti
sing, at twenty-six. And now I'm forty-seven. I feel like a child, yet
I'm old enough to be your father. So it's decently paternal to imagine
you curled at my feet. . . . Of course I hope it isn't, but we'll
reflect the morals of Gopher Prairie by officially announcing that it
is! . . . These standards that you and I live up to! There's one thing
that's the matter with Gopher Prairie, at least with the ruling-class
(there is a ruling-class, despite all our professions of democracy).
And the penalty we tribal rulers pay is that our subjects watch us
every minute. We can't get wholesomely drunk and relax. We have to be
so correct about sex morals, and inconspicuous clothes, and doing our
commercial trickery only in the traditional ways, that none of us can
live up to it, and we become horribly hypocritical. Unavoidably. The
widow-robbing deacon of fiction can't help being hypocritical. The
widows themselves demand it! They admire his unctuousness. And look at
me. Suppose I did dare to make love to--some exquisite married woman.
I wouldn't admit it to myself. I giggle with the most revolting
salaciousness over La Vie Parisienne, when I get hold of one in Chicago,
yet I shouldn't even try to hold your hand. I'm broken. It's the
historical Anglo-Saxon way of making life miserable. . . . Oh, my dear,
I haven't talked to anybody about myself and all our selves for years."

"Guy! Can't we do something with the town? Really?"

"No, we can't!" He disposed of it like a judge ruling out an improper
objection; returned to matters less uncomfortably ener