her too blackly dull nor too
flashily crimson, and a vicious nail-brush which simply tore out the
motor grease that had grown into the lines of his hands. Also he added a
book.

The book was a rhetoric. Milt knew perfectly that there was an
impertinence called grammar, but it had never annoyed him much. He knew
that many persons preferred "They were" to "They was," and were nervous
in the presence of "ain't." One teacher in St. Cloud had buzzed
frightfully about these minutiae. But Milt discovered that grammar was
only the beginning of woes. He learned that there were such mental
mortgages as figures of speech and the choice of synonyms. He had always
known, but he had never passionately felt that the invariable use of
"hell," "doggone," and "You bet!" left certain subtleties unexpressed.
Now he was finding subtleties which he had to express.

As joyously adventurous as going on day after day was his
experimentation in voicing his new observations. He gave far more
eagerness to it than Claire Boltwood had. Gustily intoning to Vere de
Vere, who was the perfect audience, inasmuch as she never had anything
to say but "Mrwr," and didn't mind being interrupted in that, he
clamored, "The prairies are the sea. In the distance they are kind of
silvery--no--they are dim silver; and way off on the skyline are the
Islands of the--of the---- Now what the devil was them, were those,
islands in the mythology book in high school? Of the--Blessed? Great
snakes' boots, you're an ignorant cat, Vere! Hesperyds? No! Hesperides!
Yea, bo'! Now that man in the hotel: 'May I trouble you for the train
guide? Thanks so much!' But how much is so much?"

As Claire's days were set free by her consciousness of sun and brown
earth, so Milt's odyssey was only the more valorous in his endeavor to
criticize life. He saw that Mac's lunch room had not been an altogether
satisfactory home; that Mac's habit of saying to dissatisfied customers,
"If you don't like it, get out," had lacked something of courtesy.
Staring at towns along the way, Milt saw that houses were not merely
large and comfortable, or small and stingy; but that there was an
interesting thing he remembered hearing his teachers call "good taste."

He was not the preoccupied Milt of the garage but a gay-eyed gallant,
the evening when he gave a lift to the school-teacher and drove her from
the district school among the wild roses and the corn to her home in the
next town. She was a neat, t