CHAPTER XIX

Midmostof the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only by a shallow and insignificant creek, the city of Nautilus bakes and rattles and glistens. For hundreds of miles the tall corn springs in a jungle of undeviating rows, and the stranger who sweatily trudges the corn-walled roads is lost and nervous with the sense of merciless growth.

Nautilus is to Zenith what Zenith is to Chicago.

With seventy thousand people, it is a smaller Zenith but no less brisk. There is one large hotel to compare with the dozen in Zenith, but that one is as busy and standardized and frenziedly modern as its owner can make it. The only authentic difference between Nautilus and Zenith is that in both cases all the streets look alike but in Nautilus they do not look alike for so many miles.

The difficulty in defining its quality is that no one has determined whether it is a very large village or a very small city. There are houses with chauffeurs and Baccardi cocktails, but on August evenings all save a few score burghers sit in their shirt-sleeves on front porches. Across from the ten-story office building, in which a little magazine of the New Prose is published by a young woman who for five months lived in the cafés of Montparnasse, is an old frame mansion comfortable with maples, and a line of Fords and lumber-wagons in which the overalled farmers have come to town.

Iowa has the richest land, the lowest illiteracy rate, the largest percentages of native-born whites and motor-car owners, and the most moral and forward-looking cities of all the States, and Nautilus is the most Iowan city in Iowa. One out of every three persons above the age of sixty has spent a winter in California, and among them are the champion horseshoe pitcher of Pasadena and the woman who presented the turkey which Miss Mary Pickford, the cinema princess, enjoyed at her Christmas dinner in 1912.

Nautilus is distinguished by large houses with large lawns and by an astounding quantity of garages and lofty church spires. The fat fields run up to the edge of the city, and the scattered factories, the innumerable railroad side-tracks, and the scraggly cottages for workmen are almost amid the corn. Nautilus manufactures steel windmills, agricultural implements, including the celebrated Daisy Manure Spreader, and such corn-products as Maize Mealies, the renowned breakfast-food. It makes brick, it sells groceries wholesale, and it is the headquarters of the Cornbelt Coöperative Insurance Company.

One of its smallest but oldest industries is Mugford Christian College, which has two hundred and seventeen students, and sixteen instructors, of whom eleven are ministers of the Church of Christ. The well-known Dr. Tom Bissex is football coach, health director, and professor of hygiene, chemistry, physics, French, and German. Its shorthand and piano departments are known far beyond the limits of Nautilus, and once, though that was some years ago, Mugford held the Grinnell College baseball team down to a score of eleven to five. It has never been disgraced by squabbles over teaching evolutionary biology—it never has thought of teaching biology at all.

Martin left Leora at the Sims House, the old-fashioned, second-best hotel in Nautilus, to report to Dr. Pickerbaugh, Director of the Department of Public Health.

The department was on an alley, in a semi-basement at the back of that large graystone fungus, the City Hall. When he entered the drab reception-office he was highly received by the stenographer and the two visiting nurses. Into the midst of their flutterings—“Did you have a good trip, Doctor? Dr. Pickerbaugh didn’t hardly expect you till to-morrow, Doctor. Is Mrs. Arrowsmith with you, Doctor?”—charged Pickerbaugh, thundering welcomes.

Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh was forty-eight. He was a graduate of Mugford College and of the Wassau Medical School. He looked somewhat like President Roosevelt, with the same squareness and the same bristly mustache, and he cultivated the resemblance. He was a man who never merely talked; he either bubbled or made orations.

He received Martin with four “Well’s,” which he gave after the manner of a college cheer; he showed him through the Department, led him into the Director’s private office, gave him a cigar, and burst the dam of manly silence:

“Doctor, I’m delighted to have a man with your scientific inclinations. Not that I should consider myself entirely without them. In fact I make it a regular practise to set aside a period for scientific research, without a certain amount of which even the most ardent crusade for health methods would scarcely make much headway.”

It sounded like the beginning of a long seminar. Martin settled in his chair. He was doubtful about his cigar, but he found that it helped him to look more interested.

“But with me, I admit, it’s a matter of temperament. I have often hoped that, without any desire whatever for mere personal aggrandizement, the powers above may yet grant me the genius to become at once the Roosevelt and the Longfellow of the great and universally growing movement for public health measures is your cigar too mild, Doctor? or perhaps it would be better to say the Kipling of public health rather than the Longfellow, because despite the beautiful passages and high moral atmosphere of the Sage of Cambridge, his poetry lacked the swing and punch of Kipling.

“I assume you agree with me, or you will when you have had an opportunity to see the effect our work has on the city, and the success we have in selling the idea of Better Health, that what the world needs is a really inspired, courageous, overtowering leader—say a Billy Sunday of the movement—a man who would know how to use sensationalism properly and wake the people out of their sloth. Sometimes the papers, and I can only say they flatter me when they compare me with Billy Sunday, the greatest of all evangelists and Christian preachers—sometimes they claim that I’m too sensational. Huh! If they only could understand it, trouble is I can’t be sensational enough! Still, I try, I try, and— Look here. Here’s a placard, it was painted by my daughter Orchid and the poetry is my own humble effort, and let me tell you it gets quoted around everywhere:

You can’t get healthBy a pussyfoot stealth,So let’s every health-boosterCrow just like a rooster.

“Then there’s another—this is a minor thing; it doesn’t try to drive home general abstract principles, but it’d surprise you the effect it’s had on careless housewives, who of course don’t mean to neglect the health of their little ones and merely need instruction and a little pep put into them, and when they see a card like this, it makes ’em think:

Boil the milk bottles or by gumYou better buy your ticket to Kingdom Come.

“I’ve gotten quite a lot of appreciation in my small way for some of these things that didn’t hardly take me five minutes to dash off. Some day when you get time, glance over this volume of clippings—just to show you, Doctor, what you can do if you go at the Movement in the up-to-date and scientific manner. This one, about the temperance meeting I addressed in Des Moines—say, I had that hall, and it was jam-pack-full, lifting right up on their feet when I proved by statistics that ninety-three per cent. of all insanity is caused by booze! Then this—well, it hasn’t anything to do with health, directly, but it’ll just indicate the opportunity you’ll have here to get in touch with all the movements for civic weal.”

He held out a newspaper clipping in which, above a pen-and-ink caricature portraying him with large mustached head on a tiny body, was the headline:

DOC PICKERBAUGH BANNER BOOSTEROF EVANGELINE COUNTY LEADS BIGGO-TO-CHURCH DEMONSTRATION HERE

Pickerbaugh looked it over, reflecting, “That was a dandy meeting! We increased church attendance here seventeen per cent.! Oh, Doctor, you went to Winnemac and had your internship in Zenith, didn’t you? Well, this might interest you then. It’s from theZenith Advocate-Times, and it’s by Chum Frink, who, I think you’ll agree with me, ranks with Eddie Guest and Walt Mason as the greatest, as they certainly are the most popular, of all our poets, showing that you can bank every time on the literary taste of the American Public. Dear old Chum! That was when I was in Zenith to address the national convention of Congregational Sunday-schools, I happen to be a Congregationalist myself, on ‘The Morality of AiHealth.’ So Chum wrote this poem about me:”

Zenith welcomes with high hurrawA friend in Almus Pickerbaugh,The two-fisted fightin’ poet docWho stands for health like Gibraltar’s rock.He’s jammed with figgers and facts and fun,The plucky old, lucky old son—of—a—gun!

For a moment the exuberant Dr. Pickerbaugh was shy.

“Maybe it’s kind of immodest in me to show that around. And when I read a poem with such originality and swing, when I find a genu-ine vest-pocket masterpiece like this, then I realize that I’m not a poet at all, no matter how much my jingles may serve to jazz up the Cause of Health. My brain-children may teach sanitation and do their little part to save thousands of dear lives, but they aren’t literature, like what Chum Frink turns out. No, I guess I’m nothing but just a plain scientist in an office.

“Still, you’ll readily see how one of these efforts of mine, just by having a good laugh and a punch and some melody in it, does gild the pill and make careless folks stop spitting on the sidewalks, and get out into God’s great outdoors and get their lungs packed full of ozone and lead a real hairy-chested he-life. In fact you might care to look over the first number of a little semi-yearly magazine I’m just starting— I know for a fact that a number of newspaper editors are going to quote from it and so carry on the good work as well as boost my circulation.”

He handed to Martin a pamphlet entitledPickerbaugh Pickings.

In verse and aphorism,Pickingsrecommended good health, good roads, good business, and the single standard of morality. Dr. Pickerbaugh backed up his injunctions with statistics as impressive as those the Reverend Ira Hinkley had once used at Digamma Pi. Martin was edified by an item which showed that among all families divorced in Ontario, Tennessee, and Southern Wyoming in 1912, the appalling number of fifty-three per cent. of the husbands drank at least one glass of whisky daily.

Before this warning had sunk in, Pickerbaugh snatchedPickingsfrom him with a boyish, “Oh, you won’t want to read any more of my rot. You can look it over some future time. But this second volume of my clippings may perhaps interest you, just as a hint of what a fellow can do.”

While he considered the headlines in the scrapbook, Martin realized that Dr. Pickerbaugh was vastly better known than he had realized. He was exposed as the founder of the first Rotary Club in Iowa; superintendent of the Jonathan Edwards Congregational Sunday School of Nautilus; president of the Moccasin Ski and Hiking Club, of the West Side Bowling Club, and the 1912 Bull Moose and Roosevelt Club; organizer and cheer-leader of a Joint Picnic of the Woodmen, Moose, Elks, Masons, Oddfellows, Turnverein, Knights of Columbus, B’nai B’rith, and the Y. M. C. A.; and winner of the prizes both for reciting the largest number of Biblical texts and for dancing the best Irish jig at the Harvest Moon Soiree of the Jonathan Edwards Bible Class for the Grown-ups.

Martin read of him as addressing the Century Club of Nautilus on “A Yankee Doctor’s Trip Through Old Europe,” and the Mugford College Alumni Association on “Wanted: A Man-sized Feetball Coach for Old Mugford.” But outside of Nautilus as well, there were loud alarums of his presence.

He had spoken at the Toledo Chamber of Commerce Weekly Luncheon on “More Health— More Bank Clearings.” He had edified the National Interurban Trolley Council, meeting at Wichita, on “Health Maxims for Trolley Folks.” Seven thousand, six hundred Detroit automobile mechanics had listened to his observations on “Health First, Safety Second, and Booze Nowhere A-tall.” And in a great convention at Waterloo he had helped organize the first regiment in Iowa of the Anti-rum Minute Men.

The articles and editorials regarding him, in newspapers, house organs, and one rubber-goods periodical, were accompanied by photographs of himself, his buxom wife, and his eight bounding daughters, depicted in Canadian winter costumes among snow and icicles, in modest but easy athletic costumes, playing tennis in the backyard, and in costumes of no known genus whatever, frying bacon against a background of Northern Minnesota pines.

Martin felt strongly that he would like to get away and recover.

He walked back to the Sims House. He realized that to a civilized man the fact that Pickerbaugh advocated any reform would be sufficient reason for ignoring it.

When he had gone thus far, Martin pulled himself up, cursed himself for what he esteemed his old sin of superiorityto decent normal people.... Failure. Disloyalty. In medical school, in private practise, in his bullying health administration. Now again?

He urged, “This pep and heartiness stuff of Pickerbaugh’s is exactly the thing to get across to the majority of people the scientific discoveries of the Max Gottliebs. What do I care how much Pickerbaugh gases before conventions of Sunday School superintendents and other morons, as long as he lets me alone and lets me do my work in the lab and dairy inspection?”

He pumped up enthusiasm and came quite cheerfully and confidently into the shabby, high-ceilinged hotel bedroom where Leora sat in a rocker by the window.

“Well?” she said.

“It’s fine—gave me fine welcome. And they want us to come to dinner, to-morrow evening.”

“What’s he like?”

“Oh, he’s awfully optimistic—he puts things over—he— Oh, Leora, am I going to be a sour, cranky, unpopular, rotten failure again?”

His head was buried in her lap and he clung to her affection, the one reality in a world of chattering ghosts.

When the maples fluttered beneath their window in the breeze that sprang up with the beginning of twilight, when the amiable citizens of Nautilus had driven home to supper in their shaky Fords, Leora had persuaded him that Pickerbaugh’s flamboyance would not interfere with his own work, that in any case they would not remain in Nautilus forever, that he was impatient, and that she loved him dearly. So they descended to supper, an old-fashioned Iowa supper with corn fritters and many little dishes which were of interest after the loving but misinformed cooking of Leora, and they went to the movies and held hands and were not ill content.

The next day Dr. Pickerbaugh was busier and less buoyant. He gave Martin a notion of the details of his work.

Martin had thought of himself, freed from tinkering over cut fingers and ear-aches, as spending ecstatic days in the laboratory, emerging only to battle with factory-owners who defied sanitation. But he found that it was impossible to define his work, except that he was to do a little of everything that Pickerbaugh, the press, or any stray citizen of Nautilus might think of.

He was to placate voluble voters who came in to complain of everything from the smell of sewer-gas to the midnight beer parties of neighbors; he was to dictate office correspondence to the touchy stenographer, who was not a Working Girl but a Nice Girl Who Was Working; to give publicity to the newspapers; to buy paper-clips and floor-wax and report-blanks at the lowest prices; to assist, in need, the two part-time physicians in the city clinic; to direct the nurses and the two sanitary inspectors; to scold the Garbage Removal Company; to arrest—or at least to jaw at—all public spitters; to leap into a Ford and rush out to tack placards on houses in which were infectious diseases; to keep a learned implacable eye on epidemics from Vladivostok to Patagonia, and to prevent (by methods not very clearly outlined) their coming in to slay the yeomanry and even halt the business activities of Nautilus.

But there was a little laboratory work: milk tests, Wassermanns for private physicians, the making of vaccines, cultures in suspected diphtheria.

“I get it,” said Leora, as they dressed for the dinner at Pickerbaugh’s. “Your job will only take about twenty-eight hours a day, and the rest of the time you’re perfectly welcome to spend in research, unless somebody interrupts you.”

The home of Dr. and Mrs. Almus Pickerbaugh, on the steeple-prickly West Side, was a Real Old-fashioned Home. It was a wooden house with towers, swings, hammocks, rather mussy shade trees, a rather mangy lawn, a rather damp arbor, and an old carriage-house with a line of steel spikes along the ridge-pole. Over the front gate was the name:UNEEDAREST.

Martin and Leora came into a shambles of salutations and daughters. The eight girls, from pretty Orchid aged nineteen to the five-year-old twins, surged up in a tidal wave of friendly curiosity and tried to talk all at once.

Their hostess was a plump woman with an air of worried trustfulness. Her conviction that everything was all right was constantly struggling with her knowledge that a great many things seemed to be all wrong. She kissed Leora while Pickerbaugh was pump-handling Martin. Pickerbaugh had a way of pressing his thumb into the back of your hand which was extraordinarily cordial and painful.

He immediately drowned out even his daughters by an oration on the Home Nest:

“Here you’ve got an illustration of Health in the Home. Look at these great strapping girls, Arrowsmith! Never been sick a day in their lives—practically—and though Mother does have her sick-headaches, that’s to be attributed to the early neglect of her diet, because while her father, the old deacon—and a fine upstanding gentleman of the old school he was, too, if there ever was one, and a friend of Nathaniel Mugford, to whom more than any other we owe not only the foundation of Mugford College but also the tradition of integrity and industry which have produced our present prosperity— BUT he had no knowledge of diet or sanitation, and I’ve always thought—”

The daughters were introduced as Orchid, Verbena, Daisy, Jonquil, Hibisca, Narcissa, and the twins, Arbuta and Gladiola.

Mrs. Pickerbaugh sighed:

“I suppose it would be dreadfully conventional to call them My Jewels— I do so hate these conventional phrases that everybody uses, don’t you?—but that’s what they really are to their mother, and the Doctor and I have sometimes wished— Of course when we’d started giving them floral names we had to keep it up, but if we’d started with jewels, just think of all the darling names we might have used, like Agate and Cameo and Sardonyx and Beryl and Topaz and Opal and Esmeralda and Chrysoprase—itisChrysoprase, isn’t it, not Chrysalis? Oh, well, many people have congratulated us on their names as it is. You know the girls are getting quite famous—their pictures in so many papers, and we have a Pickerbaugh Ladies’ Baseball Team all our own—only the Doctor has to play on it now, because I’m beginning to get a little stout.”

Except by their ages, it was impossible to tell the daughters apart. They were all bouncing, all blond, all pretty, all eager, all musical, and not merely pure but clamorously clean-minded. They all belonged to the Congregational Sunday School, and to either the Y. W. C. A. or the Camp Fire Girls; they were all fond of picnicking; and they could all of them, except the five-year-old twins, quote practically without error the newest statistics showing the evils of alcohol.

“In fact,” said Dr. Pickerbaugh, “wethink they’re a very striking brood of chickabiddies.”

“They certainly are!” quivered Martin.

“But best of all, they are able to help me put over the doctrine of theMens Sanain theCorpus Sano. Mrs. Pickerbaugh and I have trained them to sing together, both in the home and publicly, and as an organization we call them the Healthette Octette.”

“Really?” said Leora, when it was apparent that Martin had passed beyond speech.

“Yes, and before I get through with it I hope to popularize the name Healthette from end to end of this old nation, and you’re going to see bands of happy young women going around spreading their winged message into every dark corner. Healthette Bands! Beautiful and pure-minded and enthusiastic and good basket-ball players! I tell you,they’llmake the lazy and wilful stir their stumps! They’ll shame the filthy livers and filthy talkers into decency! I’ve already worked out a poem-slogan for the Healthette Bands. Would you like to hear it?

Winsome young womanhood wins with a smileBoozers, spitters, and gamblers from things that are vile.Our parents and teachers have explained the cause of life,So against the evil-minded we’ll also make strife.We’ll shame them, reclaim them, from bad habits, you bet!Better watch out, Mr. Loafer, I am a Healthette!

“But of course an even more important Cause is—and I was one of the first to advocate it—having a Secretary of Health and Eugenics in the cabinet at Washington—”

On the tide of this dissertation they were swept through a stupendous dinner. With a hearty “Nonsense, nonsense, man, of course you want a second helping—this is Hospitality Hall!” Pickerbaugh so stuffed Martin and Leora with roast duck, candied sweet potatoes, and mince pie that they became dangerously ill and sat glassy-eyed. But Pickerbaugh himself did not seem to be affected. While he carved and gobbled, he went on discoursing till the dining-room, with its old walnut buffet, its Hoffmann pictures of Christ, and its Remington pictures of cowpunchers, seemed to vanish, leaving him on a platform beside a pitcher of ice-water.

Not always was he merely fantastic. “Dr. Arrowsmith, Itell you we’re lucky men to be able to get a living out of doing our honest best to make the people in a he-town like this well and vital. I could be pulling down eight or ten thousand a year in private practise, and I’ve been told I could make more than that in the art of advertising, yet I’m glad, and my dear ones are glad with me, to take a salary of four thousand. Think of our having a job where we’ve got nothing to sell but honesty and decency and the brotherhood o’ man!”

Martin perceived that Pickerbaugh meant it, and the shame of the realization kept him from leaping up, seizing Leora, and catching the first freight train out of Nautilus.

After dinner the younger daughters desired to love Leora, in swarms. Martin had to take the twins on his knees and tell them a story. They were remarkably heavy twins, but no heavier than the labor of inventing a plot. Before they went to bed, the entire Healthette Octette sang the famous Health Hymn (written by Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh) which Martin was to hear on so many bright and active public occasions in Nautilus. It was set to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but as the twins’ voices were energetic and extraordinarily shrill, it had an effect all its own:

Oh, are you out for happiness or are you out for pelf?You owe it to the grand old flag to cultivate yourself,To train the mind, keep clean the streets, and ever guard your health,Then we’ll all go marching on.

A healthy mind in A clean body,A healthy mind in A clean body,A healthy mind in A clean body,The slogan for one and all.

As a bedtime farewell, the twins then recited, as they had recently recited at the Congregational Festival, one of their father’s minor lyrics:

What does little birdie sayOn the sill at break o’ day?“Hurrah for health in NautilusFor Pa and Ma and all of us,Hurray, hurray, hurray!”

“There, my popsywopsies, up to bed we go!” said Mrs. Pickerbaugh. “Don’t you think, Mrs. Arrowsmith, they’renatural-born actresses? They’re not afraid of any audience, and the way they throw themselves into it—perhaps not Broadway, but the more refined theaters in New York would just love them, and maybe they’ve been sent to us to elevate the drama. Upsy go.”

During her absence the others gave a brief musical program.

Verbena, the second oldest, played Chaminade. (“Of course we all love music, and popularize it among the neighbors, but Verby is perhaps the only real musical genius in the family.”) But the unexpected feature was Orchid’s cornet solo.

Martin dared not look at Leora. It was not that he was sniffily superior to cornet solos, for in Elk Mills, Wheatsylvania, and surprisingly large portions of Zenith, cornet solos were done by the most virtuous females. But he felt that he had been in a madhouse for dozens of years.

“I’ve never been so drunk in my life. I wish I could get at a drink and sober up,” he agonized. He made hysterical and completely impractical plans for escape. Then Mrs. Pickerbaugh, returning from the still audible twins, sat down at the harp.

While she played, a faded woman and thickish, she fell into a great dreaming, and suddenly Martin had a picture of her as gay, good, dove-like maiden who had admired the energetic young medical student, Almus Pickerbaugh. She must have been a veritable girl of the late eighties and the early nineties, the naïve and idyllic age of Howells, when young men were pure, when they played croquet and sang Swanee River; a girl who sat on a front porch enchanted by the sweetness of lilacs, and hoped that when Almus and she were married they would have a nickel-plated baseburner stove and a son who would become a missionary or a millionaire.

For the first time that evening, Martin managed to put a respectable heartiness into his “Enjoyed that s’ much.” He felt victorious, and somewhat recovered from his weakness.

But the evening’s orgy was only begun.

They played word-games, which Martin hated and Leora did very badly indeed. They acted charades, at which Pickerbaugh was tremendous. The sight of him on the floor in his wife’s fur coat, being a seal on an ice-floe, was incomparable. Then Martin, Orchid, and Hibisca (aged twelve) had to present a charade, and there were complications.

Orchid was as full of simple affections, of smilings and pattings and bouncings, as her younger sisters, but she was nineteen and not altogether a child. Doubtless she was as pure-minded and as devoted to Clean and Wholesome Novels as Dr. Pickerbaugh stated, and he stated it with frequency, but she was not unconscious of young men, even though they were married.

She planned to enact the worddoleful, with a beggar asking a dole, and a corncrib full. As they skipped upstairs to dress, she hugged Martin’s arm, frisked beside him, and murmured, “Oh, Doctor, I’m so glad Daddy has you for assistant—somebody that’s young and good-looking. Oh, was that dreadful of me? But I mean: you look so athletic and everything, and the other assistant director—don’t tell Daddy I said so, but he was an old crank!”

He was conscious of brown eyes and unshadowed virginal lips. As Orchid put on her agreeably loose costume as a beggar, he was also conscious of ankles and young bosom. She smiled at him, as one who had long known him, and said loyally, “We’ll show ’em! I know you’re a dan-dy actor!”

When they bustled downstairs, as she did not take his arm, he took hers, and he pressed it slightly and felt alarmed and relinquished it with emphasis.

Since his marriage he had been so absorbed in Leora, as lover, as companion, as helper, that till this hour his most devastating adventure had been a glance at a pretty girl in a train. But the flushed young gaiety of Orchid disturbed him. He wanted to be rid of her, he hoped that he would not be altogether rid of her, and for the first time in years he was afraid of Leora’s eyes.

There were acrobatic feats later, and a considerable prominence of Orchid, who did not wear stays, who loved dancing, and who praised Martin’s feats in the game of “Follow the Leader.”

All the daughters save Orchid were sent to bed, and the rest of the fête consisted of what Pickerbaugh called “a little quiet scientific conversation by the fireside,” made up of his observations on good roads, rural sanitation, Ideals in politics, and methods of letter filing in health departments. Through this placid hour, or it may have been an hour and a half, Martin saw that Orchid was observing his hair, his jaw, his hands, and he had, and dismissed, and had again a thought about the innocent agreeableness of holding her small friendly paw.

He also saw that Leora was observing both of them, and he suffered a good deal, and had practically no benefit whatever from Pickerbaugh’s notes on the value of disinfectants. When Pickerbaugh predicted for Nautilus, in fifteen years, a health department thrice as large, with many full-time clinic and school physicians and possibly Martin as director (Pickerbaugh himself having gone off to mysterious and interesting activities in a Larger Field), Martin merely croaked, “Yes, that’d be—be fine,” while to himself he was explaining, “Damn that girl, I wish she wouldn’t shake herself at me.”

At half-past eight he had pictured his escape as life’s highest ecstasy; at twelve he took leave with nervous hesitation.

They walked to the hotel. Free from the sight of Orchid, brisk in the coolness, he forgot the chit and pawed again the problem of his work in Nautilus.

“Lord, I don’t know whether I can do it. To work under that gas-bag, with his fool pieces about boozers—”

“They weren’t so bad,” protested Leora.

“Bad? Why, he’s probably the worst poet that ever lived, and he certainly knows less about epidemiology than I thought any one man could ever learn, all by himself. But when it comes to this—what was it Clif Clawson used to call it?—by the way, wonder what’s ever become of Clif; haven’t heard from him for a couple o’ years—when it comes to this ‘overpowering Christian Domesticity’— Oh, let’s hunt for a blind-pig and sit around with the nice restful burglars.”

She insisted, “I thought his poems were kind of cute.”

“Cute! What a word!”

“It’s no worse than the cuss-words you’re always using! But the cornet yowling by that awful oldest daughter— Ugh!”

“Well, now she played darn’ well!”

“Martin, the cornet is the kind of an instrument my brother would play. And you so superior about the doctor’s poetry and my saying ‘cute’! You’re just as much a backwoods hick as I am, and maybe more so!”

“Why, gee, Leora, I never knew you to get sore about nothing before! And can’t you understand how important— You see, a man like Pickerbaugh makes all public health work simply ridiculous by his circusing and his ignorance. If he said that fresh air was a good thing, instead of making me open my windows it’d make me or any other reasonable personclose ’em. And to use the word ‘science’ in those flop-eared limericks or whatever you call ’em—it’s sacrilege!”

“Well, if you want toknow, Martin Arrowsmith, I’ll have no more of these high jinks with that Orchid girl! Practically hugging her when you came downstairs, and then mooning at her all evening! I don’t mind your cursing and being cranky and even getting drunk, in a reasonable sort of way, but ever since the lunch when you told me and that Fox woman, ‘I hope you girls won’t mind, but I just happen to remember that I’m engaged to both of you’— You’re mine, and I won’t have any trespassers. I’m a cavewoman, and you’d better learn it, and as for that Orchid, with her simper and her stroking your arm and her great big absurd feet— Orchid! She’s no orchid! She’s a bachelor’s button!”

“But, honest, I don’t even remember which of the eight she was.”

“Huh! Then you’ve been making love to all of ’em, that’s why. Drat her! Well, I’m not going to go on scrapping about it. I just wanted to warn you, that’s all.”

At the hotel, after giving up the attempt to find a short, jovial, convincing way of promising that he would never flirt with Orchid, he stammered, “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay down and walk a little more. I’ve got to figure this health department business out.”

He sat in the Sims House office—singularly dismal it was, after midnight, and singularly smelly.

“That fool Pickerbaugh! I wish I’d told him right out that we know hardly anything about the epidemiology of tuberculosis, for instance.

“Just the same, she’s a darling child. Orchid! She’s like an orchid—no, she’s too healthy. Be a great kid to go hunting with. Sweet. And she acted as if I were her own age, not an old doctor. I’ll be good, oh, I’ll be good, but— I’d like to kiss her once,good! She likes me. Those darling lips, like—like rosebuds!

“Poor Leora. I nev’ was so astonished in my life. Jealous. Well, she’s got a right to be! No woman ever stood by a man like— Lee, sweet, can’t you see, idiot, if I skipped round the corner with seventeen billion Orchids, it’d be you I loved, and never anybody but you!

“I can’t go round singing Healthette Octette Pantalettestuff. Even if it did instruct people, which it don’t. Be almost better to let ’em die than have to live and listen to—

“Leora said I was a ‘backwoods hick.’ Let me tell you, young woman, as it happens I am a Bachelor of Arts, and you may recall the kind of books the ‘backwoods hick’ was reading to you last winter, and even Henry James and everybody and— Oh, she’s right. I am. I do know how to make pipets and agar, but— And yet some day I want to travel like Sondelius—

“Sondelius! God! If it were he I was working for, instead of Pickerbaugh, I’d slave for him—

“Or does he pull the bunk, too?

“Now that’s just what I mean. That kind of phrase. ‘Pull the bunk’! Horrible!

“Hell! I’ll use any kind of phrase I want to! I’m not one of your social climbers like Angus. The way Sondelius cusses, for instance, and yet he’s used to all those highbrows—

“And I’ll be so busy here in Nautilus that I won’t even be able to go on reading. Still— I don’t suppose they read much, but there must be quite a few of these rich men here that know about nice houses. Clothes. Theaters. That stuff.

“Rats!”

He wandered to an all-night lunch-wagon, where he gloomily drank coffee. Beside him, seated at the long shelf which served as table, beneath the noble red-glass window with a portrait of George Washington, was a policeman who, as he gnawed a Hamburger sandwich, demanded:

“Say, ain’t you this new doctor that’s come to assist Pickerbaugh? Seen you at City Hall.”

“Yes. Say, uh, say how does the city like Pickerbaugh? How do you like him? Tell me honestly, because I’m just starting in, and, uh— You get me.”

With his spoon held inside the cup by a brawny thumb, the policeman gulped his coffee and proclaimed, while the greasy friendly cook of the lunch-wagon nodded in agreement:

“Well, if you want the straight dope, he hollers a good deal, but he’s one awful brainy man. He certainly can sling the Queen’s English, and jever hear one of his poems? They’re darn’ bright. I’ll tell you: There’s some people say Pickerbaugh pulls the song and dance too much, but way I figure it, course maybe for you and me, Doctor, it’d be all right if he just looked after the milk and the garbage and the kids’ teeth. But there’s a lot of careless, ignorant, foreign slobs that need tobe jollied into using their konks about these health biznai, so’s they won’t go getting sick with a lot of these infectious diseases and pass ’em on to the rest of us, and believe me, old Doc Pickerbaugh is the boy that gets the idea into their noodles!

“Yes, sir, he’s a great old coot—he ain’t a clam like some of these docs. Why, say, one day he showed up at the St. Patrick picnic, even if he is a dirty Protestant, and him and Father Costello chummed up like two old cronies, and darn’ if he didn’t wrestle a fellow half his age, and awful’ near throw him, yes, you bet he did, he certainly give that young fellow a run for his money all right! We fellows on the Force all like him, and we have to grin, the way he comes around and soft-soaps us into doing a lot of health work that by law we ain’t hardly supposed to do, you might say, instead of issuing a lot of fool orders. You bet. He’s a real guy.”

“I see,” said Martin, and as he returned to the hotel he meditated:

“But think of what Gottlieb would say about him.

“Damn Gottlieb! Damn everybody except Leora!

“I’m not going to fail here, way I did in Wheatsylvania.

“Some day Pickerbaugh will get a bigger job— Huh! He’s just the kind of jollying fourflusher thatwouldclimb! But anyway, I’ll have my training then, and maybe I’ll make a real health department here.

“Orchid said we’d go skating this winter—

“DamnOrchid!”

Martinfound in Dr. Pickerbaugh a generous chief. He was eager to have Martin invent and clamor about his own Causes and Movements. His scientific knowledge was rather thinner than that of the visiting nurses, but he had little jealousy, and he demanded of Martin only the belief that a rapid and noisy moving from place to place is the means (and possibly the end) of Progress.

In a two-family house on Social Hill, which is not a hill but a slight swelling in the plain, Martin and Leora found an upper floor. There was a simple pleasantness in these continuous lawns, these wide maple-shaded streets, and a joy in freedom from the peering whisperers of Wheatsylvania.

Suddenly they were being courted by the Nice Society of Nautilus.

A few days after their arrival Martin was summoned to the telephone to hear a masculine voice rasping:

“Hello. Martin? I bet you can’t guess who this is!”

Martin, very busy, restrained his desire to observe, “You win—g’ by!” and he buzzed, with the cordiality suitable to a new Assistant Director:

“No, I’m afraid I can’t.”

“Well, make a guess.”

“Oh— Clif Clawson?”

“Nope. Say, I see you’re looking fine. Oh, I guess I’ve got you guessing this time! Go on! Have another try!”

The stenographer was waiting to take letters, and Martin had not yet learned to become impersonal and indifferent in her presence. He said with a perceptible tartness:

“Oh, I suppose it’s President Wilson. Look here—”

“Well, Mart, it’s Irve Watters! What do you know about that!”

Apparently the jester expected large gratification, but it took ten seconds for Martin to remember who Irving Watters might be. Then he had it: Watters, the appalling normal medical student whose faith in the good, the true, the profitable, had annoyed him at Digamma Pi. He made his response as hearty as he could:

“Well, well, what you doing here, Irve?”

“Why, I’m settled here. Been here ever since internship. And got a nice little practise, too. Look, Mart, Mrs. Watters and I want you and your wife— I believe you are married, aren’t you?—to come up to the house for dinner, to-morrow evening, and I’ll put you onto all the local slants.”

The dread of Watters’s patronage enabled Martin to lie vigorously:

“Awfully sorry—awfully sorry—got a date for to-morrow evening and the next evening.”

“Then come have lunch with me to-morrow at the Elks’ Club, and you and your wife take dinner with us Sunday noon.”

Hopelessly, “I don’t think I can make it for lunch but— Well, we’ll dine with you Sunday.”

It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends. Martin’s imaginative dismay at being caught here by Watters was not lessened when Leora and he reluctantly appeared on Sunday at one-thirty and were by a fury of Old Friendship dragged back into the days of Digamma Pi.

Watters’s house was new, and furnished in a highly built-in and leaded-glass manner. He had in three years of practise already become didactic and incredibly married; he had put on weight and infallibility; and he had learned many new things about which to be dull. Having been graduated a year earlier than Martin and having married an almost rich wife, he was kind and hospitable with an emphasis which aroused a desire to do homicide. His conversation was a series of maxims and admonitions:

“If you stay with the Department of Public Health for a couple of years and take care to meet the right people, you’ll be able to go into very lucrative practise here. It’s a fine town—prosperous—so few dead beats.

“You want to join the country club and take up golf. Best opportunity in the world to meet the substantial citizens. I’ve picked up more than one high-class patient there.

“Pickerbaugh is a good active man and a fine booster but he’s got a bad socialistic tendency. These clinics—outrageous—the people that go to them that can afford to pay! Pauperizepeople. Now this may startle you—oh, you had a lot of crank notions when you were in school, but you aren’t the only one that does some thinking for himself!—sometimes I believe it’d be better for the general health situation if there weren’t any public health departments at all, because they get a lot of people into the habit of going to free clinics instead of to private physicians, and cut down the earnings of the doctors and reduce their number, so there are less of us to keep a watchful eye on sickness.

“I guess by this time you’ve gotten over the funny ideas you used to have about being practical—‘commercialism’ you used to call it. You can see now that you’ve got to support your wife and family, and if you don’t, nobody else is going to.

“Any time you want a straight tip about people here, you just come to me. Pickerbaugh is a crank—he won’t give you the right dope—the people you want to tie up with are the good, solid, conservative, successful business men.”

Then Mrs. Watters had her turn. She was meaty with advice, being the daughter of a prosperous person, none other than Mr. S. A. Peaseley, the manufacturer of the Daisy Manure Spreader.

“You haven’t any children?” she sobbed at Leora. “Oh, you must! Irving and I have two, and you don’t know what an interest they are to us, and they keep us so young.”

Martin and Leora looked at each other pitifully.

After dinner, Irving insisted on their recalling the “good times we used to have together at the dear old U.” He took no denial. “You always want to make folks think you’re eccentric, Mart. You pretend you haven’t any college patriotism, but I know better— I know you’re showing off—you admire the old place and our profs just as much as anybody. Maybe I know you better than you do yourself! Come on, now; let’s give a long cheer and sing ‘Winnemac, Mother of Brawny Men.’”

And, “Don’t be silly; of course you’re going to sing,” said Mrs. Watters, as she marched to the piano, with which she dealt in a firm manner.

When they had politely labored through the fried chicken and brick ice cream, through the maxims, gurglings, and memories, Martin and Leora went forth and spoke in tongues:

“Pickerbaugh must be a saint, if Watters roasts him. I begin to believe he has sense enough to come in when it rains.”

In their common misery they forgot that they had been agitated by a girl named Orchid.

Between Pickerbaugh and Irving Watters, Martin was drafted into many of the associations, clubs, lodges, and “causes” with which Nautilus foamed; into the Chamber of Commerce, the Moccasin Ski and Hiking Club, the Elks’ Club, the Oddfellows, and the Evangeline County Medical society. He resisted, but they said in a high hurt manner, “Why, my boy, if you’re going to be a public official, and if you have the slightest appreciation of their efforts to make you welcome here—”

Leora and he found themselves with so many invitations that they, who had deplored the dullness of Wheatsylvania, complained now that they could have no quiet evenings at home. But they fell into the habit of social ease, of dressing, of going places without nervous anticipation. They modernized their rustic dancing; they learned to play bridge, rather badly, and tennis rather well; and Martin, not by virtue and heroism but merely by habit, got out of the way of resenting the chirp of small talk.

Probably they were never recognized by their hostesses as pirates, but considered a Bright Young Couple who, since they were protégés of Pickerbaugh, must be earnest and forward-looking, and who, since they were patronized by Irving and Mrs. Watters, must be respectable.

Watters took them in hand and kept them there. He had so thick a rind that it was impossible for him to understand that Martin’s frequent refusals of his invitations could conceivably mean that he did not wish to come. He detected traces of heterodoxy in Martin, and with affection, diligence, and an extraordinarily heavy humor he devoted himself to the work of salvation. Frequently he sought to entertain other guests by urging, “Come on now, Mart, let’s hear some of those crazy ideas of yours!”

His friendly zeal was drab compared with that of his wife. Mrs. Watters had been reared by her father and by her husband to believe that she was the final fruit of the ages, and she set herself to correct the barbarism of the Arrowsmiths. She rebuked Martin’s damns, Leora’s smoking, and both theirtheories of bidding at bridge. But she never nagged. To have nagged would have been to admit that there were persons who did not acknowledge her sovereignty. She merely gave orders, brief, humorous, and introduced by a strident “Now don’t be silly,” and she expected that to settle the matter.

Martin groaned, “Oh, Lord, between Pickerbaugh and Irve, it’s easier to become a respectable member of society than to go on fighting.”

But Watters and Pickerbaugh were not so great a compulsion to respectability as the charms of finding himself listened to in Nautilus as he never had been in Wheatsylvania, and of finding himself admired by Orchid.

He had been seeking a precipitation test for the diagnosis of syphilis which should be quicker and simpler than the Wassermann. His slackened fingers and rusty mind were becoming used to the laboratory and to passionate hypotheses when he was dragged away to help Pickerbaugh in securing publicity. He was coaxed into making his first speech: an address on “What the Laboratory Teaches about Epidemics” for the Sunday Afternoon Free Lecture Course of the Star of Hope Universalist Church.

He was flustered when he tried to prepare his notes, and on the morning of the affair he was chill as he remembered the dreadful thing he would do this day, but he was desperate with embarrassment when he came up to the Star of Hope Church.

People were crowding in; mature, responsible people. He quaked, “They’re coming to hearme, and I haven’t got a darn’ thing to say to ’em!” It made him feel the more ridiculous that they who presumably wished to listen to him should not be aware of him, and that the usher, profusely shaking hands at the Byzantine portal, should bluster, “You’ll find plenty room right up the side aisles, young man.”

“I’m the speaker for the afternoon.”

“Oh, oh, yes, oh, yes, Doctor. Right round to the Bevis Street entrance, if you please, Doctor.”

In the parlors he was unctuously received by the pastor and a committee of three, wearing morning clothes and a manner of Christian intellectuality.

They held his hand in turn, they brought up rustling womento meet him, they stood about him in a polite and twittery circle, and dismayingly they expected him to say something intelligent. Then, suffering, ghastly frightened, dumb, he was led through an arched doorway into the auditorium. Millions of faces were staring at his apologetic insignificance—faces in the curving lines of pews, faces in the low balcony, eyes which followed him and doubted him and noted that his heels were run down.

The agony grew while he was prayed over and sung over.

The pastor and the lay chairman of the Lecture Course opened with suitable devotions. While Martin trembled and tried to look brazenly at the massed people who were looking at him, while he sat nude and exposed and unprotected on the high platform, the pastor made announcement of the Thursday Missionary Supper and the Little Lads’ Marching Club. They sang a brief cheerful hymn or two— Martin wondering whether to sit or stand—and the chairman prayed that “our friend who will address us to-day may have power to put his Message across.” Through the prayer Martin sat with his forehead in his hand, feeling foolish, and raving, “I guess this is the proper attitude—they’re all gawping at me—gosh, won’t he ever quit?—oh, damn it, now what was that point I was going to make about fumigation?—oh, Lord, he’s winding up and I’ve got to shoot!”

Somehow, he was standing by the reading-desk, holding it for support, and his voice seemed to be going on, producing reasonable words. The blur of faces cleared and he saw individuals. He picked out a keen old man and tried to make him laugh and marvel.

He found Leora, toward the back, nodding to him, reassuring him. He dared to look away from the path of faces directly in front of him. He glanced at the balcony—

The audience perceived a young man who was being earnest about sera and vaccines but, while his voice buzzed on, that churchly young man had noted two silken ankles distinguishing the front row of the balcony, had discovered that they belonged to Orchid Pickerbaugh and that she was flashing down admiration.

At the end Martin had the most enthusiastic applause ever known—all lecturers, after all lectures, are gratified by that kind of applause—and the chairman said the most flattering things ever uttered, and the audience went out with the mostremarkable speed ever witnessed, and Martin discovered himself holding Orchid’s hand in the parlors while she warbled, in the most adorable voice ever heard, “Oh, Dr. Arrowsmith, you were just wonderful! Most of these lecturers are old stuffs, but you put it right over! I’m going to do a dash home and tell Dad. He’ll be so tickled!”

Not till then did he find that Leora had made her way to the parlors and was looking at them like a wife.

As they walked home Leora was eloquently silent.

“Well, did you like my spiel?” he said, after a suitable time of indignant waiting.

“Yes, it wasn’t bad. It must have been awfully hard to talk to all those stupid people.”

“Stupid? What d’you mean by ‘stupid’? They got me splendidly. They were fine.”

“Were they? Well anyway, thank Heaven, you won’t have to keep up this silly gassing. Pickerbaugh likes to hear himself talk too well to let you in on it very often.”

“I didn’t mind it. Fact, don’t know but what it’s a good thing to have to express myself publicly now and then. Makes you think more lucidly.”

“As for instance the nice, lovely, lucid politicians!”

“Now you look here, Lee! Of course we know your husband is a mutt, and no good outside the laboratory, but I do think you mightpretendto be a little enthusiastic over the first address he’s ever made—the very first he’s ev-er tackled—when it went off so well.”

“Why, silly, I was enthusiastic. I applauded a lot. I thought you were terribly smart. It’s just— There’s other things I think you can do better. What shall we do to-night; have a cold snack at home or go to the cafeteria?”

Thus was he reduced from hero to husband, and he had all the pleasures of inappreciation.

He thought about his indignities the whole week, but with the coming of winter there was a fever of dully sprightly dinners and safely wild bridge and their first evening at home, their first opportunity for secure and comfortable quarreling, was on Friday. They sat down to what he announced as “getting back to some real reading, like physiology and a little of this fellow Arnold Bennett—nice quiet reading,” but which consisted of catching up on the news notes in the medical journals.

He was restless. He threw down his magazine. He demanded:

“What’re you going to wear at Pickerbaugh’s snow-picnic to-morrow?”

“Oh, I haven’t— I’ll find something.”

“Lee, I want to ask you: Why the devil did you say I talked too much at Dr. Strafford’s last evening? I know I’ve got most of the faults going, but I didn’t know talking too much was one of ’em.”

“It hasn’t been, till now.”

“’Till now’!”

“You look here, Sandy Arrowsmith! You’ve been pouting like a bad brat, all week. What’s the matter with you?”

“Well, I— Gosh, it makes me tired! Here everybody is so enthusiastic about my Star of Hope spiel—that note in theMorning Frontiersman, and Pickerbaugh says Orchid said it was a corker—and you never so much as peep!”

“Didn’t I applaud? But— It’s just that I hope you aren’t going to keep up this drooling.”

“You do, do you! Well, let me tell you Iamgoing to keep it up! Not that I’m going to talk a lot of hot air. I gave ’em straight science, last Sunday, and they ate it up. I hadn’t realized it isn’t necessary to be mushy, to hold an audience. And the amount of good you can do! Why, I got across more Health Instruction and ideas about the value of the lab in that three-quarters of an hour than— I don’t care for being a big gun but it’s fine to have people where they have to listen to what you’ve got to say and can’t butt in, way they did in Wheatsylvania. You bet I’m going to keep up what you so politely call my damn’ fool drooling—”

“Sandy, it may be all right for some people, but not for you. I can’t tell you—that’s one reason why I haven’t said more about your talk— I can’t tell you how astonished I am to hear you, who’re always sneering at what you call sentimentality, simply weeping over the Dear Little Tots!”

“I never said that—never used the phrase and you know it. And by God!Youtalk about sneering! Just let me tell you that the Public Health Movement, by correcting early faults in children, by looking after their eyes and tonsils and so on, can save millions of lives and make a future generation—”

“I know it! I love children much more than you do! But I mean all this ridiculous simpering—”

“Well, gosh, somebody has to do it. You can’t work with people till you educate ’em. There’s where old Pick, even if he is an imbecile, does such good work with his poems and all that stuff. Prob’ly be a good thing if I could write ’em—golly, wonder if I couldn’t learn to?”

“They’re horrible!”

“Now there’s a fine consistency for you! The other evening you called ’em ‘cute.’”

“I don’t have to be consistent. I’m a mere woman. You, Martin Arrowsmith, you’d be the first to tell me so. And for Dr. Pickerbaugh they’re all right, but not for you. You belong in a laboratory, finding out things, not advertising them. Do you remember once in Wheatsylvania for five minutes you almost thought of joining a church and being a Respectable Citizen? Are you going on for the rest of your life, stumbling into respectability and having to be dug out again? Will you never learn you’re a barbarian?”

“By God, I am! And—what was that other lovely thing you called me?— I’m also, soul of my soul, a damn’ backwoods hick! And a fine lot you help! When I want to settle down to a decent and useful life and not go ’round antagonizing people, you, the one that ought to believe in me, you’re the first one to crab!”

“Maybe Orchid Pickerbaugh would help you better.”

“She probably would! Believe me, she’s a darling, and she did appreciate my spiel at the church, and if you think I’m going to sit up all night listening to you sneering at my work and my friends— I’m going to have a hot bath. Goodnight!”

In the bath he gasped that it was impossible he should have been quarreling with Leora. Why! She was the only person in the world, besides Gottlieb and Sondelius and Clif Clawson—by the way, where was Clif? still in New York? didn’t Clif owe him a letter? but anyway— He was a fool to have lost his temper, even if she was so stubborn that she wouldn’t adjust her opinions, couldn’t see that he had a gift for influencing people. Nobody would ever stand by him as she had, and he loved her—

He dried himself violently; he dashed in with repentances; they told each other that they were the most reasonable persons living; they kissed with eloquence; and then Leora reflected:

“Just the same, my lad, I’m not going to help you fool yourself. You’re not a booster. You’re a lie-hunter. Funny, you’d think to hear about these lie-hunters, like Professor Gottlieb and your old Voltaire, they couldn’t be fooled. But maybe they were like you: always trying to get away from the tiresome truth, always hoping to settle down and be rich, always selling their souls to the devil and then going and double-crossing the poor devil. I think— I think—” She sat up in bed, holding her temples in the labor of articulation. “You’re different from Professor Gottlieb. He never makes mistakes or wastes time on—”

“He wasted time at Hunziker’s nostrum factory all right, and his title is ‘Doctor,’ not ‘Professor,’ if youmustgive him a—”

“If he went to Hunziker’s he had some good reason. He’s a genius; he couldn’t be wrong. Or could he, even he? Butanyway: you, Sandy, you have to stumble every so often; have to learn by making mistakes. I will say one thing: you learn from your crazy mistakes. But I get a little tired, sometimes, watching you rush up and put your neck in every noose—like being a blinking orator or yearning over your Orchid.”

“Well by golly! After I come in here trying to make peace! It’s a good thingyounever make any mistakes! But one perfect person in a household is enough!”

He banged into bed. Silence. Soft sounds of “Mart—Sandy!” He ignored her, proud that he could be hard with her, and so fell asleep. At breakfast, when he was ashamed and eager, she was curt.

“I don’t care to discuss it,” she said.

In that wry mood they went on Saturday afternoon to the Pickerbaughs’ snow picnic.

Dr. Pickerbaugh owned a small log cabin in a scanty grove of oaks among the hillocks north of Nautilus. A dozen of them drove out in a bob-sled filled with straw and blue woolly robes. The sleigh bells were exciting and the children leaped out to run beside the sled.

The school physician, a bachelor, was attentive to Leora; twice he tucked her in, and that, for Nautilus, was almost compromising. In jealousy Martin turned openly and completely to Orchid.

He grew interested in her not for the sake of discipliningLeora but for her own rosy sweetness. She was wearing a tweed jacket, with a tam, a flamboyant scarf, and the first breeches any girl had dared to display in Nautilus. She patted Martin’s knee, and when they rode behind the sled on a perilous toboggan, she held his waist, resolutely.

She was calling him “Dr. Martin” now, and he had come to a warm “Orchid.”

At the cabin there was a clamor of disembarkation. Together Martin and Orchid carried in the hamper of food; together they slid down the hillocks on skiis. When their skiis were entangled, they rolled into a drift, and as she clung to him, unafraid and unembarrassed, it seemed to him that in the roughness of tweeds she was but the softer and more wonderful—eyes fearless, cheeks brilliant as she brushed the coating of wet snow from them, flying legs of a slim boy, shoulders adorable in their pretense of sturdy boyishness—

But “I’m a sentimental fool! Leora was right!” he snarled at himself. “I thought you had some originality! And poor little Orchid—she’d be shocked if she knew how sneak-minded you are!”

But poor little Orchid was coaxing, “Come on, Dr. Martin, let’s shoot off that high bluff. We’re the only ones that have any pep.”

“That’s because we’re the only young ones.”

“It’s because you’re so young. I’m dreadfully old. I just sit and moon when you rave about your epidemics and things.”

He saw that, with her infernal school physician, Leora was sliding on a distant slope. It may have been pique and it may have been relief that he was licensed to be alone with Orchid, but he ceased to speak to her as though she were a child and he a person laden with wisdom; ceased to speak to her as though he were looking over his shoulder. They raced to the high bluff. They skiied down it and fell; they had one glorious swooping slide, and wrestled in the snow.

They returned to the cabin together, to find the others away. She stripped off her wet sweater and patted her soft blouse. They ferreted out a thermos of hot coffee, and he looked at her as though he was going to kiss her, and she looked back at him as though she did not mind. As they laid out the food they hummed with the intimacy of understanding, and when she trilled, “Now hurry up, lazy one, and put those cups on thathorrid old table,” it was as one who was content to be with him forever.

They said nothing compromising, they did not hold hands, and as they rode home in the electric snow-flying darkness, though they sat shoulder by shoulder he did not put his arms about her except when the bob-sled slewed on sharp corners. If Martin was exalted with excitement, it was presumably caused by the wholesome exercises of the day. Nothing happened and nobody looked uneasy. At parting all their farewells were cheery and helpful.

And Leora made no comments, though for a day or two there was about her a chill air which the busy Martin did not investigate.

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