stand for your thinking I'm nothing but a dollar-chasing----"

"Stop it! Quick! I'm not hurting your feelings! I'm not criticizing! I'm
the adoring least one of thy harem. I just mean----"

Two days later, with pictures, wicker chairs, a rug, she had made the
waiting-room habitable; and Kennicott admitted, "Does look a lot better.
Never thought much about it. Guess I need being bullied."

She was convinced that she was gloriously content in her career as
doctor's-wife.

VII

She tried to free herself from the speculation and disillusionment which
had been twitching at her; sought to dismiss all the opinionation of an
insurgent era. She wanted to shine upon the veal-faced bristly-bearded
Lyman Cass as much as upon Miles Bjornstam or Guy Pollock. She gave a
reception for the Thanatopsis Club. But her real acquiring of merit
was in calling upon that Mrs. Bogart whose gossipy good opinion was so
valuable to a doctor.

Though the Bogart house was next door she had entered it but three
times. Now she put on her new moleskin cap, which made her face small
and innocent, she rubbed off the traces of a lip-stick--and fled across
the alley before her admirable resolution should sneak away.

The age of houses, like the age of men, has small relation to their
years. The dull-green cottage of the good Widow Bogart was twenty years
old, but it had the antiquity of Cheops, and the smell of mummy-dust.
Its neatness rebuked the street. The two stones by the path were painted
yellow; the outhouse was so overmodestly masked with vines and lattice
that it was not concealed at all; the last iron dog remaining in Gopher
Prairie stood among whitewashed conch-shells upon the lawn. The hallway
was dismayingly scrubbed; the kitchen was an exercise in mathematics,
with problems worked out in equidistant chairs.

The parlor was kept for visitors. Carol suggested, "Let's sit in the
kitchen. Please don't trouble to light the parlor stove."

"No trouble at all! My gracious, and you coming so seldom and all, and
the kitchen is a perfect sight, I try to keep it clean, but Cy will
track mud all over it, I've spoken to him about it a hundred times if
I've spoken once, no, you sit right there, dearie, and I'll make a fire,
no trouble at all, practically no trouble at all."

Mrs. Bogart groaned, rubbed her joints, and repeatedly dusted her hands
while she made the fire, and when Carol tried to help she lamented,
"Oh, it doesn't matter; guess