et.

And they weren't readers anyway--they were publishers. He had almost
forgotten that. Inciters to violence, instigators of strife, polluters
of the mind ... Good Lord, he was beginning to sound like
crack-brained ex-Senator Arnold!

V

Mrs. Klein was shaking out a rug on the front porch. She smiled at
him. "Not much to do here, for a city man, is there?"

"I'm not bored," he said, "for some reason. You have a beautiful
daughter, Mrs. Klein."

"I'd feel happier about her looks if she'd marry somebody," Mrs. Klein
said dryly. "Seems to me they're wasted this way."

Doak sat on the glider. What was it someone had said about marriage?
Oh, yes--that it combined the ultimate in temptation with the ultimate
in opportunity.

He said, "I'm surprised she isn't married. The men around here must be
blind or mute."

"Oh, she's had enough offers," Mrs. Klein answered. She laid the rug
over the porch railing. "But she's a fussy stubborn girl." She sat in
her chair. "You a married man, Mr. Parker?"

He shook his head. "Never had the time nor the money--and besides they
all said no to me."

"I'll bet. With that hair of yours and that fine head, with those
eyes, I'll _bet_ they said no."

"Why, thank you!" Doak said. "You have a number of good points,
yourself, Mrs. Klein."

"My popovers and my coffee, maybe," she agreed. "And my figure wasn't
bad, a decade or two back. But I never had Martha's looks. That's from
her dad's side of the family."

"Handsome, were they?"

"Oh, yes. High falutin' people, scholars and beauties who owned half
the land in the county, at one time. Old Wisconsin Germans. I'm Irish
myself."

Bright scintillating dialogue, stirring the quick response. But he
felt as relaxed as though he had hay in his hair. He looked out at the
deserted road, at the fields beyond, at the clouds on the clear
horizon. Rural summer--a quiet Saturday morning in the agricultural
Midwest only nineteen minutes from Chicago.

People spoke of other worlds and here was one, nineteen minutes from
Chicago. And last night, under the lucidate, the town banker had gone
to another world, three hundred years away, had gone back to the magic
of Burns.

A great lad for the ladies, Bobbie Burns, and a great love for the
people. A poet with revolutionary leanings, all heart, a bleeder and a
believer. Studious, Doak sat, on the front porch in another world.

Were the people so stupid they couldn't be trusted with words? Th