ng culture. But she dropped
it when she sat on the couch, her chin in her hands, a volume of Yeats
on her knees, and read aloud.

Instantly she was released from the homely comfort of a prairie town.
She was in the world of lonely things--the flutter of twilight linnets,
the aching call of gulls along a shore to which the netted foam crept
out of darkness, the island of Aengus and the elder gods and the eternal
glories that never were, tall kings and women girdled with crusted gold,
the woful incessant chanting and the----

"Heh-cha-cha!" coughed Dr. Kennicott. She stopped. She remembered that
he was the sort of person who chewed tobacco. She glared, while he
uneasily petitioned, "That's great stuff. Study it in college? I
like poetry fine--James Whitcomb Riley and some of Longfellow--this
'Hiawatha.' Gosh, I wish I could appreciate that highbrow art stuff. But
I guess I'm too old a dog to learn new tricks."

With pity for his bewilderment, and a certain desire to giggle, she
consoled him, "Then let's try some Tennyson. You've read him?"

"Tennyson? You bet. Read him in school. There's that:

And let there be no (what is it?) of farewell
When I put out to sea,
But let the----

Well, I don't remember all of it but----Oh, sure! And there's that 'I
met a little country boy who----' I don't remember exactly how it goes,
but the chorus ends up, 'We are seven.'"

"Yes. Well----Shall we try 'The Idylls of the King?' They're so full of
color."

"Go to it. Shoot." But he hastened to shelter himself behind a cigar.

She was not transported to Camelot. She read with an eye cocked on him,
and when she saw how much he was suffering she ran to him, kissed his
forehead, cried, "You poor forced tube-rose that wants to be a decent
turnip!"

"Look here now, that ain't----"

"Anyway, I sha'n't torture you any longer."

She could not quite give up. She read Kipling, with a great deal of
emphasis:

There's a REGIMENT a-COMING down the GRAND Trunk ROAD.

He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal and reassured. But
when he complimented her, "That was fine. I don't know but what you
can elocute just as good as Ella Stowbody," she banged the book and
suggested that they were not too late for the nine o'clock show at the
movies.

That was her last effort to harvest the April wind, to teach divine
unhappiness by a correspondence course, to buy the lilies of Avalon and
the sunsets of Cockaigne in ti