, not looking at her. She could
see that his hand trembled on the crank. When he did glance at her, as
he drove off, it was apologetically, miserably. His foot was shaking on
the clutch pedal.

The dust behind his car concealed him. For twenty miles she was silent,
save when she burst out to her father, "I do hope you're enjoying the
trip. It's so easy to make people unhappy. I wonder---- No. Had to be
done."

CHAPTER VIII

THE DISCOVERY OF CANNED SHRIMPS AND HESPERIDES

On the morning when Milt Daggett had awakened to sunshine in the woods
north of Gopher Prairie, he had discovered the golden age. As mile on
mile he jogged over new hills, without having to worry about getting
back to his garage in time to repair somebody's car, he realized that
for the past two years he had forced himself to find contentment in
building up a business that had no future.

Now he laughed and whooped; he drove with one foot inelegantly and
enchantingly up on the edge of the cowl; he made Lady Vere de Vere bow
to astounded farmers; he went to the movies every evening--twice, in
Fargo; and when the chariot of the young prince swept to the brow of a
hill, he murmured, not in the manner of a bug-driver but with a stinging
awe, "All that big country! Ours to see, puss! We'll settle down some
day and be solid citizens and raise families and wheeze when we walk,
but---- All those hills to sail over and---- Come on! Lez sail!"

Milt attended the motion pictures every evening, and he saw them in a
new way. As recently as one week before he had preferred those earnest
depictions in which hard-working, moral actors shoot one another, or
ride the most uncomfortable horses up mountainsides. But now, with a
mental apology to that propagandist of lowbrowism, the absent Mac, he
chose the films in which the leading men wore evening clothes, and no
one ever did anything without being assisted by a "man." Aside from the
pictures Milt's best tutors were traveling men. Though he measured every
cent, and for his campfire dinners bought modest chuck steaks, he had at
least one meal a day at a hotel, to watch the traveling men.

To Claire, traveling men were merely commercial persons in hard-boiled
suits. She identified them with the writing-up of order-slips on long
littered writing-tables, and with hotels that reduced the delicate arts
of dining and sleeping to gray greasiness. But Milt knew traveling men.
He knew that not only were they the mi