ck of his hand with an
exploring finger.

"You say I'm so darn materialistic. How can I help it, unless I have you
to stir me up?"

She did not answer. She could not think.

"You say a doctor could cure a town the way he does a person. Well, you
cure the town of whatever ails it, if anything does, and I'll be your
surgical kit."

She did not follow his words, only the burring resoluteness of them.

She was shocked, thrilled, as he kissed her cheek and cried, "There's
no use saying things and saying things and saying things. Don't my arms
talk to you--now?"

"Oh, please, please!" She wondered if she ought to be angry, but it was
a drifting thought, and she discovered that she was crying.

Then they were sitting six inches apart, pretending that they had never
been nearer, while she tried to be impersonal:

"I would like to--would like to see Gopher Prairie."

"Trust me! Here she is! Brought some snapshots down to show you."

Her cheek near his sleeve, she studied a dozen village pictures. They
were streaky; she saw only trees, shrubbery, a porch indistinct in leafy
shadows. But she exclaimed over the lakes: dark water reflecting wooded
bluffs, a flight of ducks, a fisherman in shirt sleeves and a wide straw
hat, holding up a string of croppies. One winter picture of the edge of
Plover Lake had the air of an etching: lustrous slide of ice, snow in
the crevices of a boggy bank, the mound of a muskrat house, reeds in
thin black lines, arches of frosty grasses. It was an impression of cool
clear vigor.

"How'd it be to skate there for a couple of hours, or go zinging along
on a fast ice-boat, and skip back home for coffee and some hot wienies?"
he demanded.

"It might be--fun."

"But here's the picture. Here's where you come in."

A photograph of a forest clearing: pathetic new furrows straggling among
stumps, a clumsy log cabin chinked with mud and roofed with hay.
In front of it a sagging woman with tight-drawn hair, and a baby
bedraggled, smeary, glorious-eyed.

"Those are the kind of folks I practise among, good share of the time.
Nels Erdstrom, fine clean young Svenska. He'll have a corking farm in
ten years, but now----I operated his wife on a kitchen table, with my
driver giving the anesthetic. Look at that scared baby! Needs some woman
with hands like yours. Waiting for you! Just look at that baby's eyes,
look how he's begging----"

"Don't! They hurt me. Oh, it would be sweet to help him--so swee