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The Gospellers Works （2007年） Hurray! （2009年） Love NotesII （2009年）. But Judge Timberlane and his friends. Cass was meditating upon his rare gifts of ignorance when Jinny Marshland flew. Breathed Judge Timberlane.

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Preface The scene of this story, the small city of Grand Republic in Central Minnesota, is entirely imaginary, as are all the characters. But I know that the characters will be “identified,” each of them with several different real persons in each of the Minnesota cities in which I have happily lingered: in Minneapolis, St.

Paul, Winona, St. Cloud, Mankato, Fergus Falls and particularly, since it is only a little larger than “Grand Republic” and since I live there, in the radiant, sea-fronting, hillside city of Duluth. All such guesses will be wrong, but they will be so convincing that even the writer will be astonished to learn how exactly he has drawn some judge or doctor or banker or housewife of whom he has never heard, or regretful to discover how poisonously he is supposed to have described people of whom he is particularly fond. SINCLAIR LEWIS. Chapter 1 Until Jinny Marshland was called to the stand, the Judge was deplorably sleepy. The case of Miss Tilda Hatter vs.

The City of Grand Republic had been yawning its way through testimony about a not very interesting sidewalk. Plaintiff’s attorney desired to show that the city had been remarkably negligent in leaving upon that sidewalk a certain lump of ice which, on February 7, 1941, at or about the hour of 9:37 P.M., had caused the plaintiff to slip, to slide, and to be prone upon the public way, in a state of ignominy and sore pain. There had been an extravagant amount of data as to whether the lump of ice had been lurking sixteen, eighteen, or more than eighteen feet from the Clipper Hardware Store. And all that May afternoon the windows had been closed, to keep out street noises, and the court room had smelled, as it looked, like a schoolroom.

Timberlane, J., was in an agony of drowsiness. He was faithful enough, and he did not miss a word, but he heard it all as in sleep one hears malignant snoring. He was a young judge: the Honorable Cass Timberlane, of the Twenty–Second Judicial District, State of Minnesota. He was forty-one, and in his first year on the bench, after a term in Congress. He was a serious judge, a man of learning, a believer in the majesty of the law, and he looked like a tall Red Indian.

But he was wishing that he were out bass-fishing, or at home, reading Walden or asleep on a cool leather couch. Preferably asleep. All the spectators in the room, all five of them, were yawning and chewing gum. The learned counsel for the plaintiff, Mr. Hervey Plint, the dullest lawyer in Grand Republic, a middle-aged man with a miscellaneous sort of face, was questioning Miss Hatter. He was a word-dragger, an uh’er, a looker to the ceiling for new thoughts.

“Uh — Miss Hatter, now will you tell us what was the — uh — the purpose of your going out, that evening — I mean, I mean how did you happen to be out on an evening which — I think all the previous testimony agrees that it was, well, I mean, uh, you might call it an inclement evening, but not such as would have prevented the, uh, the adequate cleaning of the thoroughfares —” “Jekshn leading quest,” said the city attorney. “Jekshn stained,” said the Court.

“I will rephrase my question,” confided Mr. He was a willing rephraser, but the phrases always became duller and duller and duller. Sitting above them on the bench like Chief Iron Cloud, a lean figure of power, the young father of his people, Judge Timberlane started to repeat the list of presidents, a charm which usually would keep him awake.

He got through it fairly well, stumbling only on Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore, as was reasonable, but he remained as sleepy as ever. Without missing any of Miss Hatter’s more spectacular statements, His Honor plunged into the Counties of Minnesota, all eighty-seven of them, with their several county-seats. Aitkin — Aitkin Anoka — Anoka Becker — Detroit Lakes Beltrami — Bemidji He had reached “Olmsted — Rochester” when he perceived that Miss Hatter had gone back to her natural mummy-case, and the clerk was swearing in a witness who pricked His Honor into wakefulness. — How did I ever miss seeing her, in a city as small as this?

Certainly not four girls in town that are as pretty, he reflected. The new witness was a half-tamed hawk of a girl, twenty-three or -four, not tall, smiling, lively of eye. The light edged gently the clarity of her cheeks, but there was something daring in her delicate Roman nose, her fierce black hair. Her gray suit indicated prosperity, which in Grand Republic was respectability. — Be an exciting kid to know, thought Timberlane, J., that purist and precisionist and esteemed hunter of ducks, that chess-player and Latinist, who was a man unmarried — at least, unmarried since his recent and regrettable divorce. The young woman alighted on the oak witness-chair like a swallow on a tombstone.

Counselor Plint said gloomily, “Will you please just give us your, uh, your name and profession and address, please?” “Jinny Marshland — Virginia Marshland. I’m draftsman and designer for the Fliegend Fancy Box and Pasteboard Toy Manufacturing Company, and a kind of messenger — man of all work.” “Residence, please.” “I live up in Pioneer Falls, mostly.

I was born there, and I taught school there for a while. But you mean here in Grand Republic? I live with Miss Hatter, at 179 1/2 West Flandrau Street.” Profoundly, as one who doubts the eternal course of the planets, Mr. Plint worried, “You board with Miss Hatter?” “Yes, sir.” Jinny and Judge Cass Timberlane looked at each other.

He had been approving her voice. He loved his native city of Grand Republic, and esteemed the housewifery and true loyal hearts of its 43,000 daughters, but it disturbed him that so many of them had voices like the sound of a file being drawn across the edge of a sheet of brass. But Miss Marshland’s voice was light and flexible and round. — I WOULD fall for a girl merely because she has fine ankles and a clear voice, I who have maintained that the most wretched error in all romances is this invariable belief that because a girl has a good nose and a smooth skin, therefore she will be agreeable to live with and — well, make love to. The insanity that causes even superior men (meaning judges) to run passionately after magpies with sterile hearts.

This, after the revelations of female deception I’ve seen in divorce proceedings. I am corrupted by sentimentality. Plint was fretting his bone.

“Now, uh, Miss — Miss Marshland. Oh, yes, precisely.

Now as I was saying, Miss Marshland, several people have testified that there was a party — anyway, there were several guests at the Hatter residence that evening, and there was more or less eating and drinking, and what we want to know is, was there any sign — uh — I mean any sign of intoxicating beverages being consumed, I mean, particularly by Miss Hatter herself?” “No, she drank a coke. I might take a cocktail sometimes, but I’m sure Miss Hatter never touches a drop.” Charles Sayward, the city attorney, was roused from slumber to protest, “I move the testimony be stricken, as hearsay and irrelevant.” Judge Timberlane said gravely, “I must grant that motion, Mr. Sayward, but don’t you think you’re being a little technical?” “It is my humble understanding of court procedure, Your Honor, that it is entirely technical.” (On the Heather Club golf course they called each other “Charles” and “Cass.”) “On the other hand, Mr. City Attorney, you know that here in the Middlewest we pride ourselves on being less formal than the stately tribunals of Great Britain and our traditional East.

I may be so bold as to say that even in court, we’re almost human, and that on a day like this — you may not have noticed it, Mr. City Attorney, but it is somewhat somnolent — then we frequently permit any testimony that will give this jury —” He smiled at the honest but bored citizens, “an actual picture of the issue. However,” and now he smiled at Jinny, “I think you’d better confine yourself to answering the questions, without comment, Miss Marshland. Motion granted. Continue, Mr. Plint.” As Jinny went on, without noticeably obeying the Court’s command, Cass felt that the court-room air was fresher, that there might actually be some life and purpose to court proceedings.

She was perhaps twenty-four to his forty-one, but he insisted that Jinny and he were young together, and in antagonism to the doddering Mr. Plint, the cobwebbed and molding Charles Sayward (who was thirty-five, by the records) and the Assyrian antiquity of the jury. He wanted to lean over the sharp oak edge of his lofty desk and demand of Jinny, “See here. You know the jury will give the Hatter woman approximately half of whatever she’s suing for, no matter what nonsense we grind out. Let’s go off and forget all this.

I want to talk to you, and make it clear that I can be light-minded and companionable.” But it came to him that this would not be the way to impress Jinny. She thought that he was a judge and a venerable figure; she probably thought that he was more columnar than her young suitors with their dancing and babble. He straightened, he placed his right forefinger senatorially against his cheek, he cleared his throat, and for her, glancing down to see if he was successfully fooling her, he pretended that he was a judge on a bench. She was explaining, to Mr. Plint’s prompting, that she boarded at Miss Hatter’s, along with Tracy Oleson (secretary to that industrial titan, Mr. Wargate), Lyra Coggs the librarian, Eino Roskinen, and three other young people.

Ayatul Kursi In Gujarati Pdf there. They were artistic and pretty refined. No indeed, they never got drunk, and if Tilda Hatter slipped on any ole lump of ice, that lump of ice was meant to be slipped on. Yes, she liked working for the Fliegend Company. She wasn’t, she beamed, much of a draftsman, but Mr.

Fliegend were so kind. She liked it better than schoolteaching; you had to be so solemn in school. She was not loquacious so much as gay and natural. It was all fantastically irregular, but City Attorney Sayward had given up trying to check her, and he looked up at Judge Timberlane with humorous helplessness.

The jury yearned over her as though they were her collective parent, and Counselor Plint had a notion, though he didn’t know how in the world it had come about, that she was a useful witness. Only George Hame, the court reporter, was unmoved, as he made his swift symbols in a pulpy-looking notebook. To George, all accents and all moods, the shrieks of the widows of murdered bootleggers, the droning of certified accountants explaining crooked ledgers, the grumble of Finnish or Polish homesteaders, were the same.

What was said never seemed the important thing to George, but whether he got it all down. The judge, his captain, could be unprofessionally enlivened by an unnecessary girl witness, after only five months on the bench, but George did not believe in women. He had a wife unremittingly productive of babies, for whose assembly-belt production he felt only accidentally responsible, and after sixteen years of court reporting, all witnesses, pretty or otherwise, were to him merely lumps of potato in a legal hash that was nourishing but tedious. Jinny Marshland finished her testimony, smiled at Cass, smiled at Tilda Hatter, and slipped out of the court room like a trout flicking down a stream.

The case reverted to mumbling, and the Judge reverted to the list of Minnesota counties and to a sleepiness which made his shoulders ache, his eyes feel dusty and swollen. With his right hand, the large hand of a woodsman or a hunter, he gravely stroked the lapel of his dark-gray jacket, smoothed his painfully refined dark-blue tie, as he repeated. Otter Tail County — Fergus Falls Pennington — Thief River Falls Pine — Pine City Pipestone — Pipestone Till half an hour ago he had been proud of the court room; of his high oak desk, jutting into the room like a prow, with a silken American flag, topped with a small gold eagle, erected beside the Judge’s leather chair.

He had been proud of the carved seal of Minnesota on the oak paneling behind the bench; of the restful dark-gray plaster walls; of the resplendently shiny oak benches, though they were hard upon the restless anatomy of the aching public. He had felt secure and busy, for this was his workshop, his studio, his laboratory, in which he was an artist-scientist, contributing to human progress and honor.

Now it was a stuffy coop, absurdly small for a court room, barely able to hold eighty people when crowded. Such portions of the Eternal Law as were represented by the Statutes of the State of Minnesota seemed dreary today, and he wanted to be out in the May breeze, walking with Jinny Marshland. Cass was considered a conscientious judge, but he adjourned today at five minutes before the usual four o’clock. He could eat no more bran. Before he could hasten out into the open air, however, he still had half an hour of chamber work. He was rather proud of Chambers No. 3, Radisson County Court House.

On his election, when he had taken the room over, it already looked scholarly and solid, with a cliff of law-books, a long oak table, a council of black leather chairs, and he had added the framed photographs of Justices Holmes, Cardozo, and Brandeis... And of the historic bag of ducks that Dr. Roy Drover and he had shot in 1939.

On his portly desk was a handsome bronze inkwell which he never used, and a stupendous bronze automatic cigar-lighter — a gift — which he had always disliked. He had to sign an injunction, to talk with a Swede who desired to be naturalized. Young Vincent Osprey, who overlaid with a high Yale Law School gloss a dullness almost equal to that of Mr. Hervey Plint, brought in a woman client, on the theory that she wanted wholesome advice about her coming divorce suit. She did not want advice; she wanted to get rid of her present spouse so that she could marry another with a more powerful kiss. But in most judicial districts of Minnesota, domestic-relations procedure is as fatherly and informal as a physician’s consultation, and Cass held forth to her. Nelson, a woman or a man has only four or five real friendships in his whole life.

To lose one of them is to lose a chance to give and to trust. Am I being too discursive?” “I t’ink so.” “Well look, Mrs.

Carlson —” “Mrs. Nelson.” “— Nelson. In a divorce, the children are terrified. Have you any children?” “Not by Nelson.” Judge Timberlane glanced at Mr. Osprey and shook his head. The lawyer yelped, “All right, Mrs. Nelson, you skip along now.

That’s all His Honor has to say.” When they were alone, Cass turned to Osprey, and it was to be seen that Osprey was his admirer. “No use, Vince.

Let it go through. I figure she’s hot to gallop to another marriage-bed. Otherwise I’d give her a red-hot lecture on the humiliations of divorce. I will facilitate any divorce, in case of cruelty — or extreme boredom, which is worse — but, Vince, divorce is hell. Don’t you ever divorce Cerise, no matter how extravagant you say she is.” “You bet your life I wouldn’t, Chief.

I’m crazy about that girl.” “You’re lucky. If it weren’t for my work, my life would be as empty as a traitor’s after a war. Ever since Blanche divorced me — why, Vince, I have nobody to show my little tin triumphs to. I envy Cerise and you. And I don’t seem to find any girl that will take Blanche’s place.” As he spoke, Cass was reflecting that, after all, Jinny Marshland was just another migratory young woman. “But what about Christabel Grau, Chief?

I thought you and she were half engaged,” bubbled Vincent Osprey. “Oh, Chris is a very kind girl. I guess that’s the trouble. I apparently want somebody who’s so intelligent that she’ll think I’m stupid, so independent that she’ll never need me, so gay and daring that she’ll think I’m slow.

That’s my pattern, Vince; that’s my fate.”. Chapter 2 The city of Grand Republic, Radisson County, Minnesota, eighty miles north of Minneapolis, seventy-odd miles from Duluth, has 85,000 population. It is large enough to have a Renoir, a school-system scandal, several millionaires, and a slum. It lies in the confluent valleys where the Big Eagle River empties into the Sorshay River, which flows west to the Mississippi. Grand Republic grew rich two generations ago through the uncouth robbery of forests, iron mines, and soil for wheat. With these almost exhausted, it rests in leafy quiet, wondering whether to become a ghost town or a living city. The Chamber of Commerce says that it has already become a city, but, in secret places where the two bankers on the school board cannot hear them, the better schoolteachers deny this.

At least there is in Grand Republic a remarkable number of private motor cars. It was a principal cause of his reputation for eccentricity that Cass Timberlane, on amiable spring days, walked the entire mile and a quarter from the court house to his home. He climbed up Joseph Renshaw Brown Way to Ottawa Heights, on which were the Renoir and the millionaires and most of the houses provided with Architecture.

He looked down on the Radisson County Court House, in which was his own court room, and he did not shudder. He was fondly accustomed to its romanticism and blurry inconvenience. It had been built in 1885 from the designs of an architect who was drunk upon Howard Pyle’s illustrations to fairy tales.

It was of a rich red raspberry brick trimmed with limestone, and it displayed a round tower, an octagonal tower, a minaret, a massive entrance with a portcullis, two lofty flying balconies of iron, colored-glass windows with tablets or stone petals in the niches above them, a green and yellow mosaic roof with scarlet edging, and the breathless ornamental stairway from the street up to the main entrance without which no American public building would be altogether legal. Cass knew that it was as archaic as armor and even less comfortable, yet he loved it as a symbol of the ancient and imperial law. It was his Westminster, his Sorbonne; it was the one place in which he was not merely a male in vulgar trousers, but a spiritual force such as might, with a great deal of luck and several hundreds of years, help to make of Grand Republic another Edinburgh. He had, too, an ancestral proprietary right in this legal palace, for his father had started off his furniture business (wholesale as well as retail, and therefore noble) by providing most of the chairs and desks for the court house. When he had reached Varennes Boulevard, circling along the cliffs on top of Ottawa Heights, Cass could see the whole city, the whole valley, with the level oat and barley fields on the uplands beyond. The Big Eagle River came in from the south, bearing the hot murmurous air from the great cornfields, from the country of the vanquished Sioux; the Sorshay River, which had been called the Sorcier by the coureurs de bois, two hundred years ago, wound from a northern darkness of swamp and lakes and impenetrable jackpine thickets, the country of the tawny Chippewas. At the junction of the rivers was the modern city, steel and cement and gasoline and electricity, as contemporary as Chicago if but one-fortieth the size and devoid of the rich raucousness of the Loop.

The limestone magnificence of the Wargate Memorial Auditorium and the titanic Blue Ox National Bank Building (no less than twelve stories), the carved and educated granite of the Alexander Hamilton High School, the Pantheon of the Duluth & Twin Cities Railroad Station, the furnaces and prodigious brick sheds of the Wargate Wood Products Corporation plant and a setting of smaller factories, were all proofs of the Chamber of Commerce’s assertion that in a short time, perhaps twenty years or twenty centuries, Grand Republic would have a million inhabitants. But beyond the tracks, along the once navigable Sorshay River, the wooden warehouses and shaky tenements were so like the frontier village of seventy-five years ago that you imagined the wooden sidewalks of the 1860’s and the streets a churning of mud, with Chippewa squaws and Nova Scotia lumbermen in crimson jackets and weekly murder with axe handles.

Kenny Wargate, Manhattan-born and cynical daughter-inlaw of the Ruling Family, asserted that Grand Republic had leaped from clumsy youth to senility without ever having a dignified manhood. She jeered, “Your Grand Republic slogan is: tar-paper shanty to vacant parking lot in three generations.” But Judge Timberlane and his friends, loving the place as home, believed that just now, after woes and failures and haste and waste and experiment, Grand Republic was beginning to build up a kind of city new to the world, a city for all the people, a city for decency and neighborliness, not for ecclesiastical display and monarchial power and the chatter of tamed journalists and professors drinking coffee and eating newspapers in cafes. And if so many of the pioneers had been exploiters and slashers of the forest, the Wargates had been and now were builders of industries that meant homes and food for hundreds of immigrant families from the fiords, from New England hills.

Cass often pondered thus as he walked along Varennes Boulevard. As he rounded a curve of the bluff-top, he could look northward, and there, at the city’s edge, was the true Northland, in the stretches of pine and birch and poplar that framed the grim eye of Dead Squaw Lake. And he loved it as he could never love the lax and steamy and foolishly laughing isles he had once seen in the Caribbean. Through all of his meditation ran his startled remembrance of Jinny Marshland on the witness stand. He was still indignant that in a city so small as Grand Republic he had never seen her. But he knew that, for all his talk at public dinners about Midwestern Democracy, the division between the proprietors and the serfs was as violent in Grand Republic as in London. The truckdriver might call Boone Havock, the contractor, “Boone,” when they met in the Eitelfritz Brauhaus (as with remarkable frequency they did meet), but he would never enter Boone’s house or his church, and as for Boone’s asylum, the Federal Club, neither the truckdriver nor any Scandinavian or Finn with less than $10,000 income nor any recognizable Jew whatever would be allowed even to gawk through the leaded-glass windows (imported).

Even Lucius Fliegend, Jinny’s Jewish employer, that fine and sensitive old man, could not belong to the Federal Club, but had to play his noontime chess in the Athletic Club. And as a professing member of Democracy, Cass was ashamed that not since he had been elected judge had he once been in the Athletic Club. He would remedy that right away. He was abnormally conscious of the universal and multiple revolution just then, in the early 1940’s, from sulfa drugs and surrealism and semantics to Hitler, but he was irritated by all the Voices, by the radio prophets and the newspaper-column philosophers. He had had two competent years in Washington as a Member of Congress.

Sick of the arguments, he had refused to be re-elected, yet now that he was back in his native town, sometimes he missed the massacres in the Coliseum, and felt a little bored and futile. And ever since his divorce from the costly and clattering Blanche, he had been lonely. Could a Jinny Marshland cure his loneliness, his confusions in the skyrocketing world? Then he rebuked himself. Why should a charming girl, probably a dancer to phonographs, have any desire to cure the lonelinesses of forty-year-old single gentlemen? There was tenderness and loyalty in Jinny, he felt, but what would she want with a judge whom she would find out not to be a judge at all but another gaunt and early-middle-aged man who played the flute? Thus he raged and longed as he neared his house.

It is understood that the newer psychiatrists, like the older poets, believe that patients do fall in love at first sight. Cass’s house was sometimes known as “Bergheim” and sometimes as “the old Eisenherz place.” It had been built as a summer residence — in those days it had seemed to be quite out in the country — by Simon Eisenherz, greatest of the Radisson County pioneers, in 1888, and purchased by Cass’s father, Owen Timberlane, in 1929.

Owen had died there, less than a year later, leaving it jointly to his wife, Marah, and to Cass, along with a local fortune of forty or fifty thousand dollars. The house was somber and somehow tragic, and when Cass’s mother died there, also, and he took Blanche, his wife, to it, she had hated it as much as he himself loved it. As a boy he had considered it the wonderful castle, the haunt of power and beauty, which no ordinary mortal like a Timberlane could ever hope to own complete. He still felt so. George Hame, his court reporter, said that Bergheim was a wooden model of the court house, and it did have a circular tower and an octagonal conservatory, now called the “sun room.” It was painted a dark green, merely because it had always been painted dark green.

Over the porches there were whole gardens of jig-saw blossoms, and two of the windows were circular, and one triangular, with ruby glass. Cass admitted everything derisive that was said about this monstrosity, and went on loving it, and explaining that if you opened all of the windows all of the time, it wasn’t airless inside — not very — not on a breezy day. As he came up the black-and-white marble walk to the bulbous carriage-porch, a black kitten, an entire stranger, was sitting on a step. It said “meow,” not whiningly but in a friendly mood, as between equals, and it looked at Cass in a way that dared him to invite it in for a drink. He was a lover of cats, and he had had none since the ancient and misanthropic Stephen had died, six months before. He had a lively desire to own this little black clown, all black, midnight black, except for its sooty yellow eyes.

It would play on the faded carpets when he came home from the court room to the still loneliness that, in the old house, was getting on his nerves. “Well, how are you, my friend?” he said. The kitten said she was all right. And about some cream now —?

“Kitten, I can’t steal you from some child who’s out looking for you. It wouldn’t be right to invite you in.” The kitten did not answer anything so naive and prudish. It merely said, with its liquid and trusting glance, that Cass was its god, beyond all gods. It frisked, and dabbled at a fly with its tiny black paw, and looked up at him to ask, “How’s that?” “You are a natural suborner of perjury and extremely sweet,” admitted Cass, as he scooped it up and took it through the huge oak door, down the dim hallway to the spacious kitchen and to Mrs. Higbee, his cook-general.

Higbee was sixty years old, and what is known as “colored,” which meant that she was not quite so dark of visage as Webb Wargate after his annual Florida tanning. She was graceful and sensible and full of love and loyalty. She was in no way a comic servant; she was like any other wholesome Middle–Class American, with an accent like that of any other emigree from Ohio.

It must be said that Mrs. Higbee was not singularly intelligent; only slightly more intelligent than Mrs. Boone Havock or Mrs. Webb Wargate; not more than twice as intelligent as Mrs. Vincent Osprey.

She was an Episcopalian, and continued to be one, for historic reasons, though she was not greatly welcomed in the more fashionable temples of that faith. Judge Timberlane depended on her good sense rather more than he did on that of George Hame or his friend Christabel Grau. Higbee took the black kitten, tickled it under the chin, and remarked. “Our cat?” “I’m afraid so. I’ve stolen it.” “Well, I understand a black cat is either very good luck or very bad luck, I forget which, so we can take a chance on it.

What’s its name?” “What is it? A her?” “Let’s see. Um, I think so.” “How about ‘Cleo’? You know — from Cleopatra. The Egyptians worshiped cats, and Cleopatra was supposed to be thin and dark and uncanny, like our kitten.” But he was not thinking of Queen Cleopatra. He was thinking of Jinny Marshland, and the thought was uneasy with him. “All right, Judge.

You, Cleo, I’m going to get those fleas off you right away tomorrow, and no use your kicking.” Cass marveled, “Has she got fleas?” “Has — she — got — fleas! Judge, don’t you ever take a real good look at females?” “Not often.

Higbee, you know I’m dining out tonight — at Dr. Drover’s.” “Yes. You’ll get guinea hen. And that caramel ice cream. And Miss Grau. You won’t be home early.” “Anything else I ought to know about the party?” “Not a thing.... Will you look at that Cleo!

She knows where the refrigerator is, already!” In Cass’s set, which was largely above the $7000 line, it was as obligatory to dress for party dinners as in London, and anyway, he rather liked his solid tallness in black and white. He dawdled in his bedroom, not too moonily thinking of Jinny yet conscious of her. A bright girl like that would do things with this room which, he admitted, habit and indifference and too much inheritance of furniture had turned into a funeral vault. It was a long room with meager windows and a fireplace bricked-up years ago. The wide bed was of ponderous black walnut, carved with cherubs that looked like grapes and grapes that looked like cherubs, and on it was a spread of yellowed linen. The dresser was of black walnut also, with a mortuary marble slab; the wardrobe was like three mummy-cases on end, though not so gay; and littered over everything were books on law and economics and Minnesota history.

“It is a gloomy room. No wonder Blanche insisted on sleeping in the pink room.” He heard a friendly, entirely conversational “Meow?” and saw that the gallant Cleo had come upstairs to explore. All cats have to know about every corner of any house they choose to honor, but sometimes they are timid about caves under furniture. There have, indeed, been complaining and tiresome cats.

But Cleo talked to him approvingly about her new home. For so young and feminine a feline, she was a complete Henry M. She looked at the old bedspread and patted its fringe. She circulated around under the old Chinese teakwood chair, in which no one had ever sat and which no one even partly sane would ever have bought. She glanced into the wardrobe, and cuffed a shoelace which tried to trip her. She said, “All right — fine” to Cass, and went on to the other rooms. In that stilly house he continued to hear her jaunty cat-slang till she had gone into the gray room, the last and largest of the six master’s-bedrooms.

Then he jumped, at a long and terrified moan. He hurried across the hall. Cleo was crouched, staring at the bed upon which had died his mother, that silent and bitter woman christened Marah Nord. The tiny animal shivered and whimpered till he compassionately snatched it up and cuddled it at his neck. It shivered once more and, as he took it back to his own den, it began timidly to purr, in a language older than the Egyptian. “Too many ghosts in this house, Cleo.

You must drive them out — you and SHE. I have lived too long among shadows.”. Chapter 3 Bound for Dr. Drover’s and the presumable delights of dinner, he walked down Varennes Boulevard, past the houses of the very great: the red-roofed Touraine chateau of Webb Wargate, the white-pillared brick Georgian mansion (with a terrace, and box-trees in wine jars) of the fabulous contractor, Boone Havock, and the dark granite donjon and the bright white Colonial cottage (oversize) in which dwelt and mutually hated each other the rival bankers Norton Trock and John William Prutt.

On his judge’s salary, without the inheritance from his father, Cass could never have lived in this quarter. It was the Best Section; it was Mayfair, where only Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and the more Gothic Methodists — all Republicans and all golf-players — lived on a golden isle amid the leaden surges of democracy. He turned left on Schoolcraft Way, into a neighborhood not so seraphic yet still soundly apostolic and Republican, and came to the square yellow-brick residence of his friend, Dr. Roy said, and quite often, that his place might not be so fancy as some he knew, but it was the only completely air-conditioned house in town, and it had, in the Etruscan catacombs of its basement, the most powerful oil furnace and the best game-room, or rumpus room — with a red-and-silver bar, a billiard table, a dance-floor, and a rifle-range — in all of Grand Republic, which is to say in all of the Western Hemisphere.

With the possible exception of Bradd Criley the lawyer, Dr. Drover was Cass’s closest friend. Roy was two years older than Cass, who was two years older than Bradd, and it is true that in boyhood, four years make a generation, yet from babyhood to college days, Cass and Roy and Bradd had formed an inseparable and insolently exclusive gang, to the terror of all small animals within hiking distance of Grand Republic. They did such pleasurable killing together; killing frogs, killing innocent and terrified snakes, killing gophers, and later, when they reached the maturity of shot guns, killing ducks and snipe and rabbits. Like Indians they had roamed this old Chippewa Indian land, familiars of swamp and crick (not creek), cousins to the mink and mushrat (not muskrat), heroes of swimming hole and ice-skating and of bobsledding down the long, dangerous Ottawa Heights. And once, finding a midden filled with stone slivers, they had been very near to their closest kin, the unknown Indians of ten thousand years ago, who came here for stone weapons when the last glacier was retreating.

Growing older, they had shown variations of civilization and maturity. Bradd Criley had become a fancy fellow, wavy-haired and slick about his neckties, a dancing man and a seducer of girls, adding industry to his natural talents for the destruction of women. Cass Timberlane had gone bookish and somewhat moral. Only Roy Drover, graduating from medical school and becoming a neat surgeon, a shrewd diagnostician, a skillful investor of money and, before forty, a rich man, had remained entirely unchanged, a savage and a small boy. He preferred surgery, but in a city as small as Grand Republic, he could not specialize entirely, and he kept up his practice as a physician. At forty-three, Dr. Drover looked fifty.

He was a large man, tall as Cass Timberlane and much thicker, with a frontier mustache, a long black 1870-cavalryman mustache, a tremendous evangelical voice, and a wide but wrinkled face. In a way, he was not a doctor at all. He cared nothing for people except as he could impress them with his large house, his log fishing-lodge, named “Roy’s Rest,” in the Arrowhead Lake Region, and his piratical airplane trips to Florida, where he noisily played roulette and, taking no particular pains to conceal it from his wife, made love to manicure girls posing as movie actresses and completely fooling the contemptuously shrewd Dr.

When Roy was drunk — that did not happen often, and never on a night before he was to operate — he got into fights with doormen and taxi-drivers, and always won them, and always got forgiven by the attendant policeman, who recognized him as one of their own hearty sort, as a medical policeman. He played poker, very often and rather late, and he usually won. He read nothing except the Journal of the American Medical Association, the newspapers, and his ledger.

Because he liked to have humble customers call him “Doc,” he believed that he was a great democrat, but he hated all Jews, Poles, Finns, and people from the Balkans, and he always referred to Negroes as “darkies” or “smokes.” He said loudly, “Speaking as a doctor, I must tell you that it is a scientifically proven fact that all darkies, without exception, are mentally just children, and when you hear of a smart one, he’s just quoting from some renegade white man. Down South, at Orlando, I got to talking to some black caddies, and they said, ‘Yessir, Mr.

White Man, you’re dead right. We don’t want to go No’th. Up there, they put you to work!’ All the darkies are lazy and dumb, but that’s all right with me. They’ll never have a better friend than I am, and they all know it, because they can see I understand ’em!” Roy’s most disgusted surprise had been in meeting a New York internist who told him that in that Sidon there was an orchestra made up of doctors, who put their spare time in on Mozart instead of duck-hunting.

From land investments, which he made in co-operation with Norton Trock, Roy had enough capital to make sure that his two sons would not have to be driven and martyred doctors, like him, but could become gentlemanly brokers. Roy and his pallid wife, Lillian, were considered, in Grand Republic, prime examples of the Happy Couple.

She hated him, and dreaded his hearty but brief embraces, and prayed that he would not turn the two boys, William Mayo Drover and John Erdmann Drover, into his sort of people, Sound, Sensible, Successful Citizens with No Nonsense about Them. Cass Timberlane knew, in moments of mystic enlightenment, that whether or not Roy Drover was his best friend, there was no question but that Roy was his most active enemy. He had for years mocked Cass’s constant reading, his legal scruples, his failure to make slick investments, and his shocking habit of listening to Farmer–Laborites. After Cass had become a judge, Roy grumbled, “I certainly wish I could make my money as easy as that guy does — sitting up there on his behind and letting the other fellows do the work.” Tonight, Cass sighed that Roy would certainly ridicule Jinny Marshland, if he ever met that young woman. But Roy had been his intimate since before he could remember.

There had never been any special reason for breaking with him and, like son with father, like ex-pupil with ex-teacher, Cass had an uneasy awe of his senior and a longing — entirely futile — to make an impression on him. Cass’s pride in being elected to Congress and the bench was less than in being a better duck-shot than Roy.

There were present, for dinner and two tables of bridge, the Drovers, Cass, Christabel Grau, the Boone Havocks, and the Don Pennlosses. Chris Grau was the orphaned daughter of a wagon-manufacturer. She was much younger than the others, and she was invited as an extra-woman partner for Cass. She was a plump and rather sweet spinster of thirty-two who, until the recent taking off, had suffered from too much affectionate mother. She not only believed that in the natural course of events Cass would fall in love with her and marry her, but also that there is any natural course of events. Rose Pennloss, wife of the rather dull and quite pleasant Donald, the grain-dealer, was Cass’s sister, but Cass and she liked each other and let each other alone. It was Boone Havock and his immense and parrot-squawking wife Queenie who were the great people, the belted earl and terraced countess, of the occasion; they were somewhat more energetic and vastly more wealthy than Dr.

Drover, and it was said that Boone was one of the sixteen most important men in Minnesota. He had started as a lumberjack and saloon-bouncer and miner and prizefighter — indeed, he had never left off, and his success in railroad-contracting, bridge-building, and factory-construction was due less to his knowledge of how to handle steel than to his knowledge of how to battle with steel-workers. But he owned much of the stock in the genteel Blue Ox National Bank, and he was received with flutters in the gray-velvet and stilly office of the bank-president, Norton Trock. Queenie Havock had the brassiest voice and the most predictable anti-labor prejudices in Grand Republic; her hair looked like brass, and her nose looked somewhat like brass, and she was such a brass-hearted, cantankerous, vain, grasping, outrageous old brazen harridan that people describing her simply had to add, “But Queenie does have such a sense of humor and such a kind heart.” It was true.

She had the odd and interesting sense of humor of a grizzly bear. For a town which was shocked by the orgies of New York and Hollywood, there was a good deal of drinking in Grand Republic. All of them, except Chris Grau and Roy Drover, had three cocktails before dinner. Roy had four. Throughout dinner, and during vacations from the toil of bridge, the standard conversation of their class and era was carried on.

If Cass and his sister, Rose, did not chime in, they were too accustomed to the liturgy to be annoyed by it. This was the credo, and four years later, the war would make small difference in its articles: Maids and laundresses are now entirely unavailable; nobody at all has any servants whatsoever; and those who do have, pay too much and get nothing but impertinence. Strikes must be stopped by law, but the Government must never in any way interfere with industry. All labor leaders are crooks.

The rank and file are all virtuous, but misled by these leaders. The rank and file are also crooks. Children are now undisciplined and never go to bed till all-hours, but when we were children, we went to bed early and cheerfully. All public schools are atrocious, but it is not true that the teachers are underpaid, and, certainly, taxes must be kept down. Taxes, indeed, are already so oppressive that not one of the persons here present knows where his next meal or even his next motor car will come from, and these taxes are a penalty upon the industrious and enterprising, imposed by a branch of the Black Hand called “Bureaucracy.” America will not get into this war between Hitler and Great Britain, which will be over by June, 1942. But we are certainly against Fascism — because why? — because Fascism just means Government Control, and we’re against Government Control in Germany OR in the United States!

When our Government quits interfering and gives Industry the green light to go ahead, then we’ll show the world what the American System of Free Enterprise can do to provide universal prosperity. Boone Havock can still, at sixty, lick any seven Squareheads in his construction gangs; he carries on his enterprises not for profit — for years and years that has been entirely consumed by these taxes — but solely out of a desire to give work to the common people. He once provided a fine running shower-bath for a gang in Kittson County, but none of the men ever used it, and though he himself started with a shovel, times have changed since then, and all selfless love for the job has departed. Drover also carries on solely out of patriotism. The wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a woman who has so betrayed her own class that she believes that miners and Negroes and women are American citizens, ought to be compelled by law to stay home. We rarely go to the movies, but we did just happen to see a pretty cute film about gang-murder.

The Reverend Dr. Quentin Yarrow, pastor of St. Anselm’s P.E., is a fine man, very broad-minded and well-read, and just as ready to take a drink or shoot a game of golf as any regular guy. Jay Laverick, of the flour mills, is a fine man, a regular guy, always ready to shoot a game of golf or take a drink, but he has been hitting up the hard stuff pretty heavy since his little wife passed away, and he ought to remarry.

Cass should certainly remarry, and we suspect that it is Chris Grau, also present, whom Cass has chosen and already kissed — at least. You can’t change human nature.

We don’t fall for any of these ‘isms. While we appreciate wealth — it shows that a man has ability — maybe Berthold Eisenherz, with his brewery and half the properties on the Blue Ox Range that are still producing iron ore, and this damn showy picture of his by some Frenchman named Renoir, is TOO wealthy. He never shoots golf or shoots ducks, which looks pretty queer for a man rich as that. What the devil does he do with himself? Some of these smart-aleck critics claim that Middlewestern businessmen haven’t changed much since that book — what’s its name? — by this Communist writer, Upton Sinclair —“Babbitt,” is it?

— not changed much since that bellyache appeared, some twenty years ago. Well, we’d like to tell those fellows that in these twenty-odd years, the American businessman has changed completely. He has traveled to Costa Rica and Cuba and Guatemala, as well as Paris, and in the Reader’s Digest he has learned all about psychology and modern education. He’s been to a symphony concert, and by listening to the commentators on the radio, he has now become intimate with every branch of Foreign Affairs.

“As an ex-Congressman, don’t you think that’s true?” demanded Don Pennloss. “Why, I guess it is,” said Cass. He had tried to bring into the conversation the name of Jinny Marshland, but he had found no links between her and taxes or Costa Rica. Now he blurted, “Say, I had a pleasant experience in court today.” Roy Drover scoffed, “You mean you’re still working there? The State still paying you good money for just yelling ‘Overruled!’ every time a lawyer belches?” “They seem to be.

Well, we had a pretty dull sidewalk case but one witness was an unusually charming girl —” “We know. You took her into your chambers and conferred with her!” bellowed Boone Havock. He’s no fat wolf like you, you lumberjack!” screamed Queenie. “Good gracious, I didn’t know it was so late.

Quarter past eleven. Can I give you a lift, Cass?” said Chris Grau. Chapter 4 “I’ll drop you at your house, and if you ask me very prettily, I’ll come in for a night-cap,” said Chris, outside the Drovers’. “No, I’ll tell you: I’ll drive you home in your car, and then walk back to my house.” “Walk? At this time of night? Why, it’s almost two miles!” “People have walked two miles.” “Not unless they were playing golf.” “All right, I’ll borrow a cane from Roy and a condensed-milk can and knock it all the way back.” “Cassy, you are the most contrary man living!” He hated being called “Cassy,” like a slave in Harriet Beecher Stowe, and he did not want Chris at his house. For the hour or two before he went to bed, late as usual, he wanted to be alone.

He had to look after the welfare of his new friend, Cleo. He wanted to think, at least to think of what it was that he wanted to think about. And, like most men who sometimes complain of being lonely, he just liked to be alone. Chris did not go on teasing him.

He had to admit that, fusser and arranger and thwarted mother though she was, Chris liked to do whatever her men wanted. At thirty-two, Christabel Grau was a round and soft and taffy-colored virgin with strands of gray. If Jinny Marshland was like Cleo, a thin and restless and exciting young cat, Chris was the serene tabby cuddled and humming on the hearth. As they drove to her home, she speculated, with an unusual irritation, “Didn’t you think they were dull tonight?” “I thought they talked about as usual.” “No, you didn’t. For some reason, you were sizing them up tonight, and that started me noticing that — Oh, they’re all darlings, and so smart — my, I bet there isn’t a doctor at the Mayos’ that’s as clever as Roy — but they always make the same jokes, and they’re so afraid of seeming sentimental.

Roy wouldn’t ever admit how he loves his collection of Florida shells, and of course Boone is as moony as a girl about his Beethoven records, and Queenie says he’ll sit by himself for hours listening to ’em, even the hard quartets, and he’s read all the lives of the composers, but he pretends he just has the records to show off. We’re all so scared of getting out of the groove here, don’t you think?” “Yes — yes,” said Cass, who hadn’t heard a word. “But I do love Grand Republic so.” “Yes.” Chris lived on the top floor of her ancestral mansion on Beltrami Avenue South, in the old part of town, in the valley. And on that street Cass had been born. Forty years ago it had been the citadel of the select residential district, where dwelt all that was rich and seemly. Cass’s present home, Bergheim, was aged, but the other houses on Ottawa Heights had been built since 1900. These new mansions did well in the matter of Mount Vernon pillars and lumpy French-farmhouse towers, but they were plain as warehouses compared with the Beltrami Avenue relics, which had an average of twenty-two wooden gargoyles apiece, and one of which exhibited not only a three-story tower but had a Tudor chimney running through it.

Many of these shrines had been torn down to save taxes, and others turned into a home for nuns, a home for pious Lutheran old ladies, a business college, a Y.W.C.A. In seventy years, the Belgravia of Grand Republic had been built and become an historic ruin, and men whose own frail tissues had already lasted more than eighty years, looking upon a granite castle now become a school for the anxious daughters of improbable gentry, whispered in awe, “Why, that house is old as the hills — almost seventy-five years old!” But Chris Grau, after her mother’s death, had thriftily remodeled their three-story-and-basement residence into seven apartments, keeping the top floor for herself and renting the rest.

“Chris is an A 1 business-woman,” said Roy Drover, and Roy would know. Cass was “just coming in for a second, for one drink,” but he felt relaxed, he felt at home, and wanted to linger in that room, feminine yet firm, lilac-scented, with soft yellow walls and chairs in blue linen, with many flowers and a Dutch-tile fireplace and all the newest new books about psychology and Yugo–Slavian prime ministers, many of which Chris had started to read. She mixed a highball for him, without talking about it. She had excellent Bourbon — she was a good and intelligent woman. She sat on the arm of his chair, a chair that was just deep enough for him; she smoothed his hair, without ruffling it, she kissed his temple, without being moist, and she slipped away and sat casually in her own chair before he had time to think about whether he had any interest in caresses tonight.

“Yes, we were all awfully obvious, tonight,” she meditated. “Why didn’t you bawl us out?” “I’m not an uplifter, Chris. People are what they are. You learn that in law-practice. I haven’t the impertinence to tell old friends how I think they ought to talk.” “You pretend to be nothing but scholarship and exactness, but you’re really all affection for the people you know.” “You’ll be saying I’m a sentimentalist next, Chris.” “Well, aren’t you? You even love cats.” “Hate ’em!” — Why did I lie like that? “Cassy, I— Oh, I’m sorry, CASS!” — She even sees when I’m offended, without my having to rub her nose in it.

I could be very solid and comfortable if I married her. She’d give warmth to that chilly old house. We belong together; we’re both Old Middlewest, informal but not rackety. Let’s see: Chris must be nine years younger than I am, and — She was talking on: “Speaking of uplift, I’ll never give up hoping that some day you’ll be a United States Senator or on the Supreme Court Bench. There isn’t a man in the United States who has more to give the public.” “No, no, Chris, that’s sheer illusion. I’m simply a backwoods lawyer. You know, any legal gent looks considerably larger and brighter, up there on the bench.” “I won’t have you —” “Besides, I feel lost in Washington.

One brown rabbit doesn’t mean much in that menagerie of cassowaries.” “What IS a cassowary?” “Eh? Damned if I know. I think it’s a bird.” “I’ll look it up, right now.” “Not now. I really want to talk to you.” “Well, it’s about time!” They smiled, secretly and warmly. She seemed to him as intimate and trusty as his own self when she went on: “Maybe it was because Blanche was so ambitious that you disliked Washington. An impossible wife for you!” “I didn’t dislike the place — people walking under the trees in the evening, like a village. It’s just that I have some kind of an unformulated idea that I want to be identified with Grand Republic — help in setting up a few stones in what may be a new Athens.

It’s this northern country — you know, stark and clean — and the brilliant lakes and the tremendous prairies to the westward — it may be a new kind of land for a new kind of people, and it’s scarcely even started yet.” “Oh, I know!” — She loves this place, too. She has roots, where Blanche has nothing but aerial feelers. She’s thirty-two. She could still have half a dozen children.

I’d like children around me, and not just Mrs. Higbee and Cleo and a radio and a chessboard. Chris came, not too impulsively, to kneel before him and clasp both his hands, as she said trustingly: “Of course you know best. The only reason why I’d like to see you in the Senate is that Grand Republic would be so proud of you!” Her eyes were all his, her voice was gentle, and her lips were not far from his. “Though maybe that’s silly, Cass, because I guess the town couldn’t be any prouder of you than it is already — no prouder than I am, right now!” There was a scent of apple-blossoms about her. He leaned forward. Without moving, she seemed to be giving herself to him.

Her hand was at her soft bosom and her lips lifted. Then, from far off, he heard the wailing of a frightened kitten, gallant but hard-pressed. Without willing it, he was on his feet, blurting good night, hastening home to the small black absurdity of Cleo. Chapter 5 His panic was gone before he had stepped like a soldier eight blocks in that nipping northern air and begun to mount the Heights. The streets were friendly with the fresh-leaved elms and maples for which Grand Republic was notable; the cherries were in blossom, and the white lilacs and mountain ash.

There were dark groves along the way, and alleys that rose sharply and vanished around curves, there were gates in brick walls and hedges; a quality by night which was odd and exciting to Cass Timberlane, a life to be guessed at, not too plain. This was no prairie town, flat and rectangular, with every virtue and crusted sin exposed. As he climbed, he could see the belated lights of farmhouses on the uplands across the valley, the lights of buses down on Chippewa Avenue, and in simplicity he loved his city now instead of fretting that its typical evening conversation was dull — as dull as that of Congressmen in the cloakroom or newspaper correspondents over the poker table.

But he fretted over himself and his perilous single state, with nervousness about the fact that Chris Grau was likely at any time to pick him up and marry him. — No, I’ll never marry again. I’d never be a good husband.

I’m too solemn — maybe too stuffy. I’m too devoted to the law. — I must get married. I can’t carry on alone. Life is too meaningless when you have no one for whom you want to buy gifts, or steal them.

— If I did marry, I think that this time I could make a go of it. I understand women a LITTLE better now. I shouldn’t have minded Blanche’s love of tinsel, but just laughed at her.

And Chris thinks of other people. With her, I’d be happier and happier as the years went by — — Lord, that sounds so aged! It was her youth that I liked so much in that girl on the witness-stand yesterday — or today, was it? What was her name again — Virginia something?... I can’t see her any more! In law-school, at the University of Minnesota, Cass had listened to a lecture by that great advocate, Hugo Lebanon of Minneapolis, had gone up glowingly to talk with him, and had been invited to dinner at the Lebanon marble palace on Lake of the Isles.

There was a tall, pale, beautiful daughter named Blanche. So Cass married the daughter. She was emphatic about being a pure Anglo–Saxon who went right back, even if Warwickshire remained curiously unstirred about her going right back, to a gray stone house in Warwick. She was the more vigorously pure about it because there were whispers of Jewish blood. She found it hard to put up with the mongrel blood of the furniture-dealing Timberlanes, and she was revolted when Cass estimated that through his father, he was three-eighths British stock, one-sixteenth French Canadian, and one-sixteenth Sioux Indian — whence, he fondly believed, came his tall, high-cheeked spareness — and through his mother he was two-eighths Swedish, one-eighth German, one-eighth Norwegian. Blanche did not, after the magnitude and salons of Minneapolis, much like Grand Republic.

When she came there as a bride, in 1928, the Renoir had not yet arrived, so there was no one to talk to. She encouraged Cass to run for Congress; she served rye, with her own suave hands, to aldermen and county commissioners. Cass and she attained Washington, and she loved it like a drunkard, and loved the chance of meeting — at least of being in the same populous rooms with — French diplomats and Massachusetts senators and assorted Roosevelts. When Cass felt swamped, as a lone representative among more than four hundred, when he longed for the duck pass and his law-office and the roaring of Roy Drover, when he refused to run for re-election, Blanche rebelled. She was not going back to listen to Queenie Havock shrieking about her love-life, she shouted, and Cass could not blame her, though he did sigh that there were also other sounds audible in Grand Republic.

There was a mild, genial Englishman, Fox Boneyard, an importer of textiles, who lived in New York but was often about Washington; he had the unfortunate illusions about beautiful American women that Englishmen sometimes do have, and he also had more money than the Honorable Cass Timberlane. Blanche married him. During the divorce, Cass did have sense enough to refuse to pay alimony to a woman who was marrying a richer man, and who had never consented to having children.

But he still loved Blanche enough to hate her, and to hate convulsively the sight of a coat she had left behind, and the wrinkles in it that had come from her strong shoulders. He underwent the familiar leap from partisanship and love to enmity and a sick feeling that he had been betrayed. He grimly finished his last days in Congress, and then quite dramatically went to pieces.

He was a feeling man, and with a whisky breath and unshaved, he was an interesting figure in water-front cafes in Trinidad and Cartagena, and to his white cruel love he paid the tribute of being sick in toilets and talking to other saintly idiots about having lost his soul. But even love for Blanche could not keep Cass Timberlane at this romantic business for more than two months, and after another six, most of them sedately spent in and about the Temple in London, he returned to the affection of Grand Republic, and practised law for three more years before he was elected to the bench. Election was not easy. The routine politicians disliked him because he had left Congress, because he could not be guided, and because he made fun of all clauses in political speeches beginning with “than whom.” The churches, particularly the Lutherans, who were powerful in Radisson County, disapproved of him because he had been divorced. The Republicans were doubtful about him because he had been amiable with Farmer–Labor leaders, and the Farmer–Laborites distrusted him because he lived in a large house. In fact, there was really no reason for his being elected except that he was known to be honest, courageous, and learned, and that he had once lent a grateful and active Norwegian farmer five dollars.

But he was a judge now, and the district had the fixed habit of him, and if he would only marry a sound churchwoman, like Christabel Grau, and give a little more attention to the Chamber of Commerce and to his bridge game, he might go on forever, a sound and contented Leading Citizen. Chapter 6 He was thinking of Chris Grau as he entered the long hallway of Bergheim, lit only by a bogus-ancient pierced-brass lamp. Then Cleo, the midnight-colored kitten, was galloping up to him, warming his ankles, purring frantically, and with that ecstatic rhythm there came back to him Jinny Marshland’s name and the vision of her face that he had lost: the surprising smallness of her face, the absurd hawk nose, the jaunty hair hanging to her shoulders, the bright curiosity in her eyes, her plunging youthful walk. He lifted Cleo and thought how light Jinny would be to lift. Cleo sat in his lap while he worked out a chess-problem for nightcap; she moaned only a little when he played the flute for a moment; and when he put her back into the box filled with clipped paper that Mrs. Higbee had provided behind the kitchen stove, Cleo made a business of curling round and sleeping, as a cat who belonged there and liked it. “A very sound kitten,” Cass pronounced, and went comfortably up to bed, pleasant in the thought that tomorrow the kitten would be here, that some time this week he could most certainly see Jinny.

He awoke rigid under the familiar torture which some dozen times a year the mysterious Enemy inflicted upon him: the torture of being bored by the too-frequent presence of his own self, bored to cold emptiness by the inescapable and unchanging sight and sound of Cass Timberlane, a man whom he usually respected, sometimes found slightly funny, but of whose complaints and futile plans, round and round in the mind, of whose demands for incessant attention, of whose mirrored gawky face, of whose heavy voice, a murky cloud forever in the air about him, he was sick to a state of fury. Could he never get away from that man? Was he condemned forever to awaken to the sight of that thick brown plowman’s-hand on the blanket, to the intrusiveness of that man’s inevitable whining daydream: “I will find my companion; I’ll go on a journey somewhere and I’ll find her; I’ll tell her about Grand Republic and she’ll want to come here, and we’ll have a real family, with trust and serenity, and I’ll be a judge that — people will say, ‘His court is the model of fairness and mercy,’ and she will be glad of it; SHE—” Oh, so that intrusive man was going to fall in love now, was he, with his “Look at me! How exciting I am!” If he could only forget the name and essence of Cass Timberlane and be blissfully submerged, not in some rainbow-striped Oversoul but in the tenderness of one other person. Then he was sick of being sick of too-much-self, and with the bright thought of Jinny he drove out his tired brooding upon his brooding. She actually did exist. He had seen her.

In her was tolerant friendship, and in her fresh cheeks and young bosom there was promise of salvation by passion. With her he could escape into the refuge of the Quiet Mind, away equally from the lonely Cass and from a world of booming politics and oratory. Was Jinny too young for him?

He was only forty-one, and stronger than any of these jazz-mad youngsters. And she would make him still younger, along with her.

He went to sleep in dreams of a Jinny to whom, actually, he had never said anything whatever except, “I think you’d better confine yourself to answering the questions, without comment, Miss Marshland.” There was nothing of the repining hermit in the Cass who leaped up in the morning, greeted Cleo, who considered his toes very funny, had a shower-bath and a scrupulous shave (telling himself, as always, that the electric razor was a very fine Modern Invention), greeted Mrs. Higbee, wolfed griddle cakes and sausages, and tramped out upon the fresh May morning and the courts of law. George Hame, his court-reporter, greeted him filially, though George was only three years younger, and filled his inkwell and his water carafe and opened his mail.

The mail was of the usual: sixteen widows who had been cheated, of whom seven sounded as though they ought to have been; and sixteen organizations which desired the Judge to send in a little contribution. The other two judges of the district came in cordially: Judge Stephen Douglas Blackstaff, the Old Roman, and Judge Conrad Flaaten, who was Lutheran but gay. Judge Blackstaff wanted a cigarette and Judge Flaaten wanted advice, and between them and the mail and George Hame’s admiration, Cass felt like his own man again, resolute and happy in his workshop. When he marched out into the court room and the bailiff pounded his table and the nine persons present, besides the jury and the officers of court, all made motions somewhat like rising in his honor, then all the dread of too-much-self had gone out of Cass, along with much of his excitement about a stray young woman named Marshland, and he was again the tribal chieftain on his leather throne. The case of Miss Tilda Hatter vs.

The City of Grand Republic was concluded, and her many friends will be pleased to know that the jury was out for only sixteen minutes and awarded her $200 out of the $500 for which she had sued. Judge Timberlane reflected that Miss Hatter was almost certain to put on a spread for Jinny and her other boarders, with Bourbon, Coca–Cola, liverwurst, stuffed olives, and chocolate layer cake. He went for lunch not to the proper Federal Club, where bankers and lawyers and grain-dealers sat around being high-class, but to the Athletic Club, which admitted Jews and Unitarians. He hoped to see Lucius Fliegend, the pasteboard-toy manufacturer, Jinny’s boss. On his way he went along Chippewa Avenue and saw the humble magnificence of the town’s business center: the up-rearing limestone and aluminum of the Blue Ox National Bank, the bookshop that with a building of imitation half-timber tried to suggest the romance and antiquity of England, the one complete department store, Tarr’s Emporium, with four vast floors crammed with treasures from Burma and Minneapolis, and the Bozard Beaux Arts Women’s Specialty Shops, which everyone said was just as smart as New York or Halle Brothers of Cleveland. Among the bustling citizens who looked like everybody else on every principal avenue from Bangor to Sacramento, there were trout-fishermen in high boots and Finnish section-hands and Swedish corn — planters from the prairie.

Grand Republic was metropolitan-looking in its black-glass and green-marble shop fronts, its uniformed traffic policemen with Sam Browne belts and pistol holsters, its florists’ windows and La Marquise French Candy Shop, but it was small enough so that he was greeted — usually as “Judge,” often as “Cass,” occasionally as “Jedge”— five times on every block, while the Policemen touched their caps in salute. Grand Republic was small enough so that a Mrs. George Hame had at least met a Mrs. Webb Wargate, and ventured to say, in church lobby, “Well, how is your boy Jamie doing in school, Mrs. Wargate?” It was small enough so that the Judge could know how the whole city worked, but it was also small enough so that Harley Bozard, coming out of his shop, already knew that Cass had taken Chris Grau home last evening, and leered, “What’s this I hear you’re going to drive into the matrimonial slew again, Cass?” It was all friendly; it restored his soul. He was too used to them to note the hideousness of a black old stone hotel with massive portals and torn lace curtains, and the car-parking lots that were like sores on the wholesome limbs of the streets, or to reflect that the only design for planning the city had always been the dollar-sign.

What of that, when he could be greeted “H’ are you, old boy!” by Frank Brightwing, the real-estate man, who was melodiously drunk on every Saturday evening and on every Sunday morning, at the Baptist Church, was as unaffectedly pious and hopeful as the cherubs he so much resembled. The moment Cass was inside the railroad-station noisiness of the Athletic Club, he hunted up Lucius Fliegend, a gentle person with a thin beard, who might have been a professor of Greek. He confessed, “Lucius, I’m ashamed that I haven’t been around here lately, looking for a game of chess.” “You young fellows, you politicians, don’t appreciate chess. In the good old days here, the lumbermen and the gamblers in iron-leases used to go out and steal a million dollars and come home and drink a quart of red-eye and sit down to six hours of chess. Now, they steal only a thousand, and then play bridge and drink gin, a lady’s drink.

Will you choose your pawn?” After the game (which Lucius won), Cass spoke abruptly, for this was an honest and understanding man. “Yesterday in court I saw a young lady who says she works for you.

Miss Marshland. I’d like to really meet her.” “Jinny is a lovely girl.

Erica and I are fond of her. She is ambitious, but not in the sharp, bitter way of so many of these young career women. She’s quite a good draftsman. She has a nice fantastic taste — she does some very funny pasteboard dolls for me.

And she’s beautiful, but she’s also a frail, over-engined girl who will either burn herself out or fall in love with some appealing scamp who’ll break her heart, unless some solid man traps her first.” “But would she LIKE a solid man?” “I doubt it. And, though he’d find it interesting, I don’t know how much he’d enjoy nursing a young black panther.” “She’s probably already engaged.” “I don’t think so; merely has a lot of young men friends. But with all her fire, she’s domestic. Her father is a druggist up here in Pioneer Falls, a pleasant fellow.

He taught Jinny her Latin at the age of ten. Of course she forgot it at the age of twelve. She’s a good girl and —” “When will you invite us to dinner together?” “Some time soon.” “No! Much sooner than that!” “Very well.

Next Saturday evening, provided Jinny isn’t out canoeing with some handsome young man.” “Excellent!” He was thinking of that “handsome young man” and astonished to find in himself a jealousy not coy but bitter and real. He hated jealousy and all its rotten fruits, as he had seen them in court, hated that sour suspiciousness which ferments in love, yet over a girl to whom he had once said just fourteen words, he was mildly homicidal toward an imaginary young man. “I seem to be falling in love,” he thought profoundly.

Chapter 7 Cass was disappointed when Mrs. Fliegend telephoned to him not to dress for dinner. He would have liked to show Jinny how stately he could be.

But she reported that Jinny was “so thrilled to meet you; she thinks you were wonderful on the bench — so wise — and of course Lucius and I do, too, Judge.” He stroked Cleo, and sounded like her. After pondering on precedents, he decided that it was far enough on in the spring for him to wear his white-flannel suit, with the tie from Marshall Field’s. While he put these on, gravely, as though he were studying a brief, he wondered how much he was going to like Jinny. So far, he merely loved her. Would she be one of these Professional Youths?

Would she reek with gum and with the slang suitable to it: “Oh boy!” and “No soap” and “That’s what you think”? “Oh, quit it!” he said, aloud — and Cleo promised that she would. He was so elegant tonight that he drove to the Fliegends’, instead of walking. The Fliegends’ bulky old brown house was on South Beltrami, a block from Chris Grau’s.

He felt guilty of disloyalty to Chris in loving young Jinny, but he felt even wickeder as he reflected that though he had been born only three blocks from the Fliegends’, he had not been in their house since boyhood, and could not remember its rooms. Probably Chris and Bradd Criley and Boone Havock had never been inside it.

In “The Friendly City,” as we call it, we don’t shoot Jews and Catholics and Socialists and saints. We just don’t go calling on them. Fliegend was beaming on him at the door, while he imagined her saying, “You phony politician! You’ve never condescended to come to our house till you wanted us to play procurers for you. You, the great Anglo–Saxon judge and gentleman — you Sioux bastard!

Get out!” Mrs. Fliegend must have wondered why Judge Timberlane seemed so pleased by her mild greeting. Looking past his hosts into the square living-room which made up half the first floor, he saw no Jinny, but only a great blankness where she should have been. — Maybe she isn’t coming? Ditched me for that young man in the canoe?

Fliegend was soothing him, “Oh, she’ll be here, Judge!” — Is my youthful romance as obvious as all that? Remembering it only from childhood, he had expected the interior of the Fliegend house to be Oriental and over-rich. But it was the elder German and Yankee pioneers who had satin-brocaded walls and Tudor fireplaces. Here, the walls were of white paneled wood, dotted with old maps of Minnesota and portraits of its early heroes: Ramsey, Sibley, Steele, Pike, Taliaferro. “I didn’t know you were such a collector of Minnesota items,” said Cass. — That sounded fatuous and condescending. I didn’t mean to be.

Lucius explained, “I was born in Minnesota, in Long Prairie, and my father before me, near Marine Mills, where my grandfather settled. He fought through the Civil War, in the Third Minnesota. We are of the old generation.” Cass was meditating upon his rare gifts of ignorance when Jinny Marshland flew into the room. She was no wild little hawk now, but a young lady. Her hair was put up, sleek and tamed, and she wore a dress of soft black with, at her pleated black girdle, one silver rose. She was quick-moving and friendly, and her greeting was almost excessive: “I’m terrified to meet you, Judge, after seeing you in court. I thought you were going to send me to Stillwater for contempt.

You won’t now, will you?” Yet no spark came to him from her, and she was just another pretty girl, another reed bending to the universal south wind. The other guests, a couple who came in with shy bumptiousness, made him feel as guilty at his neglect of them as had the Fliegends. They were Dr.

Silbersee, refugee Jewish eye-ear-throat specialist from Vienna, ‘cellist in the amateur double-quartet that was Grand Republic’s only musical wonder, and his wife Helma, who was equally serious about the piano, Apfelkuchen, and the doctrines of the post-Freudian psychoanalysts. Cass had been fretting all week, after his session with Chris Grau, that the local conversation was dull. He had wished, for the benefit of his unconscious protegee Jinny, to exhibit what he conceived to be a real European conversazione, complete with Rhine wine and seltzer.

He got it, too, this evening, and he didn’t care much for it. He realized again, as he had in Washington and in waterfront dives in Trinidad, that most conversation is dull. Aside from shop-talk, which includes the whispering of lovers, anything printed, a time-table or the rich prose of a tomato-catsup label, is more stimulating than any talk, even the screaming of six economists and an intellectual actress.

At dinner, the Fliegends and the Silbersees said that this fellow Hitler was no good, that it had been warm today, that it might be warmer tomorrow, that Toscanini was a good conductor, that rents in Grand Republic were very high just now, and that there was a Little Armenian Restaurant in Milwaukee. It was, in perfection, New York, minus the taxi horns, and still Cass was not satisfied, and, so far as he could see, neither was Jinny. At first, as the conversation took fire, she hadn’t so much as a chip to throw into it. She sat mute, with her hands folded small and flat and meek, and she had no observations on the subject of Debussy, regarding which Lucius had represented her as highly eloquent. Cass decided that she was stupid, and that there wasn’t much to be said for himself either.

But he noticed how quickly her dark eyes turned from speaker to speaker; how she weighed, and did not think very much of, her ponderous elders. Slowly he was hypnotized by her again; he felt her independence and her impatience to do things. Restless under this middle-aged droning, he wanted to be on her side. And he was a little afraid of her. But he made a good deal of progress in his romance. To his original fourteen words of address to her, he had now added sixty-seven others, including, “No, no, you weren’t late.

I think I was ahead of time. I guess my watch is fast.” No flowery squire could have said it more colorfully. The Fliegends were lenient hosts, and after dinner (roast goose and potato pancakes, such heavenly stuff as Grand Republic rarely knew), they wedged the Silbersees in beside the grand piano, and sent Cass and Jinny “out to see the garden.” Like most houses in Grand Republic, where the first settlers huddled together instead of taking ten acres for each garden, the Fliegend abode was too close to its neighbors. But they had planted cedar hedges, and made a pool surrounded with wicker benches that were, surprisingly, meant to be sat upon.

Cass and Jinny did sit upon them, and he did not in the least feel that he was sitting upon a pink cloud. He was anxious to find out, while still posing as a big superior man, whether Jinny considered him a stuffy old party. “Nice dinner,” he said.

“Wasn’t it?” “This, uh, this Roy Harris they were talking about — do you know his music?” “Just a little.” “Uh —” “I’ve just heard some of it played.” “Yes, uh — I guess — I guess Dr. Silbersee is a very fine musician.” “Yes, isn’t he.” “Yes.” “You’ve heard him play, Judge?” “Yes, uh — oh yes, I’ve heard him play. A very fine ‘cellist.” “Of course I don’t know music well enough to tell, but I think he must be and —” Then it broke: “Jinny!

Were you bored tonight?” “How?” “Our pompous talk.” “Why, I thought it was lovely talk. I was so interested about the conductors: Mitropoulos and Bruno Walter.” “Oh. You like musicians?” “Love ’em.

If I really knew any. But one thing did bother me.” “What?” “I thought YOU were bored. I was watching you, Judge.” “And I was watching you.” “Two kids among the grown-ups!” They both laughed very much, and he was grateful for being included in her conspiracy of youth. The silent Jinny talked enough now. “I thought they were all so nice, and oh boy!

Are they ever learned! I guess the people in Vienna must be like them.

But I wanted to hear YOU talk.” “Why?” It was too flagrant even to be called “fishing.” “I wanted to know how do criminals get that way, and can you help them, and — I’ll bet they’re awed by you.” “Not much.” “I would be. I was sort of disappointed by the court room, though. I thought there’d be a whole mob, holding their breaths, and sixteen reporters writing like mad, but they were — oh, as if they were waiting for a bus. But then when I looked at you — honestly, you scared me, Judge!” “Now, now!” “You DID!” “How could I?

Judge Blackstaff might, but I’m just a hometown lawyer.” “You are not a home-town lawyer! Oh, I mean you are, of course, but I mean — you aren’t ANY home-town lawyer!” She sounded proud of him, and eager. “On the bench, you looked as if you knew everything, and maybe you might be kind of sorry for me, for having murdered my Aunt Aggie and stolen the sewing-machine oil-can, but you’d put me away for ten years, for the good of society.

Wouldn’t you?” “No, I’m afraid I’d resign from the bench first, Jinny.” “M!” She sounded gratified, and with some energy he kept himself from seizing her hand. It was fated that he should now take the next step, with “You came by bus, didn’t you? May I drive you home?” He, it seemed, might. He said good night to the Fliegends and Silbersees with a feeling of having enlarged his knowledge of Grand Republic. When Jinny was beside him in his car, the major purposes of his life seemed to have been accomplished, even if he could express the ultimate glory only by a hesitating, “It was a very pleasant evening, didn’t you think?”. Chapter 8 The boarding-house of Miss Tilda Hatter was the hobohemia of Grand Republic. It occupied the two upper floors of a senile brick building near Paul Bunyan Avenue, in a land of railroad sidings and six-man factories.

On the ground floor of the building was the Lilac Lady Lunchroom: T. Hatter, Prop., at whose counter and four tousled tables eternal and poetic Youth could drink coffee and eat blueberry pie a la mode, with ice cream disgustingly but sweetly melting down into the blue-smeared debris, and talk about the high probability of their going to Minneapolis and singing on the radio, or going to Chicago and studying interior decorating. Above the restaurant were a dozen bedrooms, with one bath, and a living-room agreeably littered with skis, skates, unstrung tennis rackets, stenographers’ note-books, manuals on air-conditioning and gas-engine construction, burnt-out portable radio sets, empty powder compacts, empty gin bottles, and the Poetic Works of John Donne, with the covers missing. These upper rooms were reached by a covered wooden outside staircase. The building had once been a dry-goods store and once the offices of a co-operative farmers’ insurance company, and once a butcher-shop with a fancy-house above it, in which two young ladies had murdered the melancholy butcher. But now it was all orderly as a Y.W.C.A., and rather like it in the excessive amount of cigarette-smoking.

As Cass and Jinny drove up to it, she insisted, “You must come up a minute and say hello to Miss Hatter. She’s convinced the jury gave her all that money only because you told them to, and she’s one person that really worships you.” “Meaning that somebody else doesn’t?” His wheedling tone, the distractedness with which he turned his face toward her and so ran the car up on the curb as he was parking, were not to be distinguished from the large idiocies of any other injudicious young lover.

She answered only, “You’d be surprised! Come, it’s one flight up.” He had a daring hope that this girl, so desirable, with her bright face and young breast, did see him as the great man scattering nobility from the high throne of the bench. He knew that he wasn’t anything of the kind, but merely a business umpire in a dusty hall.

Yet if she could have such faith in him, she might lift him to whatever greatness she imagined in him. With solemnity and love he followed her up the flat-sounding steps and into the boarding-house salon. Miss Hatter was mixing a heady beverage of gin, Coca–Cola, creme de rose, and tea, standing at a sloppy pine table, while four young people sat near her on the floor — not because there were no chairs but because they were at the age and intellectual claimancy when one does sit on the floor.

Miss Hatter screamed, “Oh, Judge!” As though he were a bishop or a movie star. “Jinny said she’d try to get you to drop in, but I never dreamed she WOULD!” — So this young woman had planned to have me drive her home. Am I gratified or do I feel let down? Anyway, she looks so charming, in fact, well, so aristocratic in her little black dress and that one silver rose, among these hit-or-a-miss yearners here.

Miss Hatter was going on: “Folks, this is Judge Timberlane. My, this is an honor. I’ll say it is!” Jinny introduced her four companions of the arts as they sulkily rose and dusted their knees.

They were not too young — twenty-four to thirty — but the placid disregard of them by Grand Republic still kept them youthful and belligerent. They were Lyra Coggs, assistant city librarian, Wilma Gunton, head of the cosmetics department at Tarr’s Emporium, Tracy Oleson, secretary to powerful Webb Wargate and a young man who seemed to Cass interesting enough to be looked at with suspicion, Eino Roskinen, aged twenty-four, butter-maker at the Northward Co-operative Dairy but, as Jinny explained, a born theater director. Eino was a darkly serious young Finn; he looked at Jinny with what Cass nervously saw to be the greatest fondness and at Cass with the greatest dislike, so that Cass felt like an old windbag, though he had as yet said nothing more than, “Well! Good evening.” — So the struggle for her has started already. And I’m not going to give her up even to you, my Byronic young friend. He was certain that Eino was an evil whelp, who meant no good to Jinny.

He sat on a chair, near Miss Hatter, the only other person of his age and uncomfortable dignity, while all five of the young people were on the floor, chattering — especially the Jinny who had been so silent at the Fliegends’: “You know, Judge, we think we have an intellectual center here. Oh, we’re tremendous.

Wilma is going to New York to start a cosmetics company there — green lip-sticks — as soon as she can save enough money to ride there in a box-car. But our star is Eino. He has Theories. He says that the new America isn’t made up of British stock and Irish and Scotch, but of the Italians and Poles and Icelanders and Finns and Hungarians and Slovaks. People like you and me are the Red Indians of the country. We’ll either pass out entirely or get put on reservations, where we can do our Yankee tribal dances and wear our native evening clothes undisturbed. Isn’t that the idea, Eino?” “Not entirely, Jinx.

We may allow full citizenship to some of the Yankee tribesmen, if they learn the principles of cooperation and give up their medicine-men — pastors they call ’em, I believe. But judges, now — I don’t know about them. They’re too corrupted by the native voodoo. I don’t know whether they can learn to speak the American language.” “Don’t you dare to say anything against Judge Timberlane!” screamed Miss Hatter, and wondered why they all laughed at her, though Cass’s contributory laughter was on the pale side. He was deciding, with a thrill of reality, that he hated Eino. — That fatuous young pup!

Daring to call her “Jinx.” Or even “Jinny,” for that matter. “Miss Virginia” is good enough for you, my friend. You and your Hunkies!

Just try bucking us Yankees! By — the — way, my friend, do you happen to know that I’m scarcely Yankee at all, that I’m part Scandinavian and part Sioux? Of course you don’t! And it makes me sick, when I wonder whether this Eino has ever dared to put his arms around Jinny or kiss her lips. All the while he knew that he did not mean any of it, that Eino was probably an excellent fellow. I never was jealous like this about Blanche. Wonder where she is now.

I’ll bet she’s keeping that poor English husband of hers busy digging out viscounts for her! Miss Hatter, addressing him constantly as “Your Honor,” was explaining the wonderful things she was going to do with her litigious $200, including false teeth for an aged cousin resident in Beloochistan, Minnesota. Tracy Oleson talked about canoe trips in the Crane Lake country.

Jinny alleged that Dr. Silbersee had once absently tried to remove tonsils from his ‘cello. But Eino was scornful and still.

Cass was a friendly villager, and accustomed to friendliness from others. Even the forger whom he condemned to the state Penitentiary seemed to feel that it was all very reasonable, and Cass was dismayed now to feel hostility in the Eino to whom he was entirely hostile! Suddenly Cass wanted to run off to the security of slippers and Cleo and a chess-problem. In a wondrously nervous state, between humble haughtiness and haughty humbleness before a dramaturgic butter-maker, he tacked successfully for an hour, and he was rewarded, when he said that it was time to go, by Jinny’s coming down the outside staircase with him.

The step at the foot of the stairs was no romantic site; it was a scuffed and scabby plank which creaked. In the small yard outside, an old hen of a maple tree perched amid patchy short grass, and the rusty old iron fence smelled of rusty old iron. Across the street, a man in a lighted upper window stood scratching himself. But she was in the half-darkness with him; he saw her throat above the soft black dress, he caught the scent of her hair, surely a different scent from any other in the world. She was herself different from anyone else, a complete individual, courageous and joyful and yet so fragile that she must be protected.

He held her hand, and quaked with the feeling of it. There was no doubt now, he decided, that he was utterly in love with her, that her small dim presence was a vast blazing temple. She was not something that he had imagined in his loneliness. She was life. He stumbled, “Look, Jinny. Have you ever been to the Unstable for dinner?” “Just once.” “Like it?” “It’s fun.” “Will you dine with me there, next Tuesday or Wednesday?” “I’d be glad to — say Tuesday.” The fact that she had chosen the earlier day was enough to send him home singing “Mandalay,” with much feeling and no tune.

After one in the morning, he sat in his leather chair and Cleo sat on the hearth. He was posing for himself a legal question: Was he trying to seduce Jinny? That would be extremely agreeable, if it could be accomplished, and not much more criminal than setting fire to a children’s hospital. Reputable men did do it. It was obvious, he thought, that she was a little too young and too spirited to marry him, and even if she would accept him, would it not be a wickedness to introduce her in that dullest of all sets in Grand Republic, to which, by habit, he belonged? He had seen girls, lively and defiant, marry householders on Ottawa Heights, and within ten years become faintly wrinkled at the neck, and given to stating as rigidly as their own horrid grandmothers that all servants are thankless brutes.

And how well did Jinny understand him? Would she be able to endure it if he took off the grave judicial manner which he wore for protection, and betrayed himself as a Midwestern Don Quixote, one-sixteenth Sioux and one-sixteenth poet: a bridge-player who thought that bridge was dull, a Careful Investor who sympathized with hoboes, a calm and settled householder who envied Thoreau his cabin and Villon his wild girls? “I ought to marry some woman who likes what I’m trying to do. Though I suppose I ought to find out first just what I am trying to do!” He ended his brooding with a cry that made Cleo leap protesting into the air: “I do love that girl so!”. Chapter 9 The Unstable had been a stable and it had been a speakeasy and now it was the local Pre–Catelan, nine miles out of town, on the bank of the Big Eagle River, facing the rugged bluffs. The interior was in bright green, with chairs of polished steel and crimson composition tables decorated with aluminum blossoms, in semi-circular booths, and it had an orchestra of piano, saxophone, violin, and drum. By day, piano was a dry-goods clerk, saxophone was a Wargate warehouse-hand, violin was a lady hair-dresser, and drum was asleep.

Its food was the standard Steak & Chicken, but its whisky was excellent. Its most pious contribution to living was that in this land where autumn too often trips on the heels of spring and, except on picnics, people dine inside, it did have outdoor tables, not of composition but of honest, old-fashioned, beer-stained pine. At such a table, in a grape-arbor, Cass and Jinny had dined slowly, looking at each other oftener than at the crisp chicken, the fresh radishes. They had talked of their childhoods, and they seemed united by fate when they found that he had, as a boy, hunted prairie chickens in the vast round of wheat stubble just beyond her native village of Pioneer Falls. He urged, “You know what I’d like most to do, besides learning a little law and maybe having a farm way up in the hills above the Sorshay Valley?

I’d like to paddle a canoe, or at least my half of the canoe, from New York City to Hudson’s Bay, by way of the Hudson and the Great Lakes and the old fur-trappers’ trail at Grand Portage, up here on Lake Superior. It would take maybe six months, camping out all that time. Wouldn’t that be exciting?” “Ye-es.” “Do you think you’d like to go along?” “I don’t know — I’m afraid I’ve never planned anything like that.” “You can come in imagination, can’t you?” “Oh — maybe. Provided we could go to New Orleans — in imagination! — to rest up afterward, and live in the French Quarter in a flat with an iron balcony, and eat gumbo. Could we do that?” “Why not!” They saw that they need not all their lives stick to courts and factories and city streets, but actually do such pleasant, extravagant things... If they shaped life together.

He cried, “Approval from the higher court! Look!” The moon had come out from a black-hearted, brazen-edged cloud, to illuminate the wide barley-fields on the uplands across the river, with one small yellow light in a farmhouse, and the fantastically carved and poplar-robed bluffs of the Big Eagle. Wild roses gave their dusty scent, and inside the rackety roadhouse, the jukebox softly played Jerome Kern. It was everything that was most Christmas-calendar and banal: June, moon, roses, song, a man and a girl; banal as birth and death and war, banal and eternal; the Perfect Moment which a man knows but a score of times in his whole life. All respectable-citizen thoughts about whether they should be married, and should they keep the maple bedstead in the gray room, were burned out of him, and he loved the maid as simply and fiercely as any warrior. He ceased to be just Cass Timberlane; he was a flame-winged seraph guarding the gentle angel.

They floated together in beauty. They were not doing anything so common as to hold hands; it was their spirits that reached and clung, made glorious by the moment that would die. When the moon was gone under a marbled cloud and the music ceased and there was only silence and lingering awe, she whispered, so low that he was not quite sure that she had said it, “That frightened me! It was too beautiful. ‘On such a night —’ Oh, Cass!” She was chatty and audible enough afterward, and she carefully called him “Judge,” but he knew that they were intimates. As they drove home she prattled, “Judge, I have an important message.

Tilda Hatter wants to give a party for you at the boarding-house — all of us do, of course.” “Except Eino, who objects?” She giggled. “But don’t you think his objection is flattering? I’ve only heard him object before to Henry James and Germany and stamp-collecting.... You will come? You’ll love Lyra Coggs.” “I’m sure I will. She’s a great girl....

What are you snickering at?” “You do try so hard not to be the judge, tolerating us noisy brats!” “I swear that’s not so. Surely you’re onto me by now. More than anything else, I’m still the earnest schoolboy that wants to learn everything. And there’s so much you can teach me.

I certainly don’t regard myself as aged, at only forty-one, but still YOU— you were born the year of the Russian revolution, you’ve always known airplanes and the radio. I want to understand them as you do.” “And the things I want to learn! Biology and hockey and Swedish!” “How about anthropology and crop-rotation?” “Okay. And fencing and flower-arrangement and gin-rummy and Buddhism.” “Do most of the kids at Miss Hatter’s want to learn anything?

They sound smug to me.” “They are not! If you knew how we talk when we’re alone! Oh, maybe too much slang and cursing and talk about sex.” He winced.

He did not care for the picture of Eino Roskinen “talking about sex” with a helpless Jinny... If she was helpless. “But that’s because we’re sick of the pompous way that all you older people go on, over and over, about politics and affairs in Europe and how you think we drink too much.” “Well, don’t you?” “Maybe. But WE know how to handle OUR liquor.” “I doubt it.” “So do I!” She laughed, and he was in love with her again, after a measureless five seconds during which he had detested her for the egotism of youth. She piped on, “But I do think we’re a terribly honest lot.” “You don’t think I’m the kind of politician that hates honesty?” She said her “Oh, you’re different,” and the good man found the wisdom to stop talking and to feel the magic of having her there cozily beside him: her smooth arms, her hands folded in her lap, her thin corn-yellow dress and the small waist belted with glittering jet whose coolness his hand wanted to follow. She was there with him, this girl who was different from any female since Eve, and he was thus sanctified....

And did it really matter when she unfolded the fairy hands and smoked her seventh cigarette that evening? Didn’t the vestal Chris smoke too much? The intrusion of Chris worried him. She had no hold on him but — well — if Chris saw him driving with this girl, there would be trouble.

— Why should there be trouble? I’m independent of her and of everybody else — well, maybe not of Jinny. He said aloud, “What about your drafting at Fliegends’? I suppose you want to go study in Paris, and become a famous artist.” “No, I have no real ideas.

I’m just a fair workman, at best. I’ll never have what they call a ‘career.’” He was so little Feminist as to be pleased. As they drove up to Miss Hatter’s he wound up all the tinsel of his thoughts in one bright ball and tossed it to her: “I certainly have enjoyed this evening!” She answered with equal poesy, “So have I!” He tentatively kissed her hand. She could not have noticed it, for she said only, “You’ll come to our party, week from Thursday, then?” “Yes, sweet. Good night.”. Chapter 10 The surprising objects that you see when you leave your own Grand Republic and go traveling — pink snakes and polar bears — are nothing beside what you find when you stay at home and have a new girl and meet her friends, whose resentment of you is only less than your amazement that there are such people and that she likes them. At Tilda Hatter’s party, Cass was first uncomfortable because he was the only Elder Statesman present and the young people showed their independence by unduly ignoring him.

Then the gods presiding over that form of torture called social gatherings switched to the opposite ordeal, and he found himself the rival of another celebrity, of whom, just to be difficult, the bright young people did make much. Besides the boarders, Jinny, Eino, Tracy Oleson, and the efficient Miss Gunton and Miss Coggs, there were present a couple of schoolteachers, the leftist county agricultural agent, and a young Norwegian–American grain expert who had once run for the Legislature.

They sat tremendously upon the floor and talked, and all of them, including Jinny, to Cass’s delicate distress, had Bourbon highballs. Their talk was tempestuous. They said that America should join Great Britain in its war against Germany, but that many of the Rich Guys on Ottawa Heights were Isolationists. They said that it was okay — that was how they put it — for a man and a woman to live together without clerical license.

Cass was shocked when he heard the pure young novice, Jinny, chirping, “Old people today are just as afraid of Sex as their grandfathers were.” They all looked at Cass, but forbiddingly did not ask him what he thought. Eino Roskinen, squatted beside Jinny, drew her toward him, and she leaned with her back against his shoulder, and Cass violently did not notice. He did not understand their family words and jokes. One of them had only to say “Hail the Hippopotamus!” for the whole tribe to guffaw. He was not too old for them — he was perhaps eight years older than Wilma or Tracy — but he felt too bookish, too responsible, too closely shaved, too alone.

He had become used to his de facto banishment when Lucius and Erica Fliegend and Sweeney Fishberg came in. Sweeney Fishberg was perhaps the most remarkable man in the cosmos of Grand Republic and surrounding terrain. He was an attorney, of liberal tastes, equally likely to take a labor-union case for nothing or to take the most fraudulent of damage suits for a contingent fee which, to the fury of his Yankee wife, he was likely to give to a fund for strikers — any strikers on any strike. He was a saint and a shyster; part Jewish and part Irish and part German; he had once acted in a summer stock company, and once taught Greek in a West Virginia college; he was a Roman Catholic, and a mystic who bothered his priest with metaphysical questions; he was in open sympathy with the Communist Party. For twenty years, ever since he had come to Grand Republic from his natal Massachusetts at the age of thirty, he had been fighting all that was rich and proud and puffy in the town, and he had never won a single fight nor lost his joy in any of them, and he was red-headed and looked like a Cockney comedian.

He was nine years older than Cass, and no lawyer in the district ever brought such doubtful suits into court, yet no lawyer was more decorous, more co-operative with the judge, and Cass believed that Sweeney had thrown to him all the votes he could influence in Cass’s elections as congressman, judge, and member of the Aurora Borealis Bock Beer and Literary Association. It was Sweeney Fishberg who was Cass’s rival as celebrity of the evening and who led the hazing. Pretending not to know that Cass had even heard of them, Sweeney and the Fliegends and Tracy Oleson and the county agent agreed that Dr.

Roy Drover was a butcher, that Bradd Criley was a Fascist, and that the Reverend Dr. Lloyd Garrison Gadd, Cass’s distant cousin and his pastor, was a “phony liberal” who loved the wage-workers but underpaid his cook. It was clear to Cass that he was being drawn, but whenever he wanted to be angry, he remembered that this was the malice with which Roy and Bradd talked of Sweeney Fishberg and would have talked of Mr. Fliegend had they ever considered him important enough to mention. With prayer and resolution, Cass got through his hazing, and all of them began to look at him in a fond and neighborly way — all but Eino. Not Eino, ever. On the ground of helping mix the highballs, Cass followed Jinny to the kitchen, a coop shocking with dirty dishes.

He spoke savagely. “Did you plan to have all those Robespierres gang up on me?” “Not really. And they’ve often ganged up on me, for what they think is my innocence.” “Are you in love with that Roskinen?

Now, please, I don’t mean to sound rude, but I must know. Are you engaged to him or anything?” “Not anything.” “Are you engaged to anybody?” His arm circled her shoulder. “Not just now.

You’re choking me.” “I almost could choke you when you let that Roskinen — Oh, I suppose he’s a decent-enough boy, but I’m furious when you let him maul you, put his hand on your breast.” She flared, as if she hated him, “You have a vile mind!” But when he jerked back like a slapped five-year-old, she softened. “Honestly, darling, it doesn’t mean a thing, with a colt like Eino, but if you want me to act like a lady, I’ll try, and how I dread it!” He kissed her, long and seriously, surprised by the soft fleshiness of her lips. She squeezed away from him with an embarrassed “Well!” and fled from him, carrying back into the living-room the still-unwashed glasses she had brought with her.

As Cass leaned against the untidy sink, overwhelmed, feeling guilty but assuring himself that she had responded to his kiss, Eino Roskinen came in, glaring. “Now this is going to be melodrama,” Cass thought protestingly. Eino was in his uniform as a young radical: dark jacket, soft shirt, small black bow tie; and he was militant. “I want to ask you something, sir.” “Need you call me ‘sir’?” “Maybe. I’m very fond of Virginia. I’m kind of her brother.

I notice you hanging around her, and you don’t belong down here in the slums.” “Slums?” “I guess they’re that to you. You belong on the Heights. I want to know what the idea is.

I guess, aside from your being a judge, that you could break me in two — you’re a sporting gent, I suppose. But if I found out that you were just having a little fun trying to make her, I’d take a chance on killing you.” “Eino, that’s funny.” “How?” “Because that’s the way I’ve been thinking about you! I’m in love with Jinny. I want to marry her, if I can.

You’re in love with her, too?” “And how! Except when she gets frivolous when I talk about the principles of co-operative distribution.” Eino sighed.

“But I can’t marry anybody, for years.” “So —” “Oh, you probably win. You would!” “Eino!” The boy was astonished by Cass’s fervor. “There’s nobody else to whom I can say this. I worship that girl, and I hope you’ll be my friend as you are hers.” “Okay,” said Eino, tragically. Cass said good-bye to her at one-thirty, in the presence of the entire underground.

Before going to bed, he spent half an hour in stroking Cleo and wanting to telephone to Jinny. But he held off till next evening and then demanded, Would she take a walk with him tomorrow evening? Without reservations. He hoped the Bunch hadn’t been too hard on him after he had crawled away — “Judge, you never crawled!” “CASS!” “Cass.” “Tomorrow at eight? And a movie afterwards?” “AND a movie.

And a caramel sundae.” With that telephone conversation, touching on the deeper issues of life and passion, he felt satisfied. He was irritated but too canny to say anything about it when Mrs.

Higbee (with the aid of Cleo) brought him an evening toddy and looked ribald and knowing. “I can’t run this big house all by myself,” inwardly complained Cass, who never yet had run it. Chapter 11 Bergheim, Cass’s house, the old Eisenherz country place, looked out over the bluffs. It had neither a city nor a suburban aspect, but suggested a comfortable village. At the back, where the grass was more like an ancient pasture than a prim lawn, there was a green-painted wooden well, and the white-painted stable, with its pert cupola, suggested a print of the 1880’s and long gentlemen with whiskers and driving-gloves, lace ladies with parasols, and spotted coach-dogs with their tails aloft in that fresher breeze. But what to Cass had always been, still was, a last touch of European elegance in Bergheim was that it had Walnut-colored Venetian blinds.

Across the street from Cass was the abode of Scott and Juliet Zago, who had for years been notorious as being happily married. They called their house, which displayed fake half-timbering, and wavy shingles imitating thatch, sometimes “The Playhouse” and sometimes “The Doll’s House,” Juliet, you see, being the doll. She was thirty-five to Scott’s fifty, but she let people think that the gap was ten years greater. She was the chronic child-wife; she talked baby-talk and wriggled and beamed and poked her forefinger at things; and she often pretended to be the big sister of her two small daughters. Scott dealt in insurance, and he made jokes and made puns. Juliet read all the books about China and Tibet and gave you her condensed version of them — not much condensed, at that — with her own system of pronunciation of Chinese proper names.

Yet Cass, who disliked puns and was readily sickened by baby-talk, did not detest the Zagos, and theirs was the only house in the neighborhood to which Cleo ever wandered. For they were the kindest of neighbors, as affectionate as parakeets. On one side of Cass’s place lived the Perfect Prutts. John William Prutt, the father, was a banker; the most first-rate second-rate banker in the entire state. He was president of the Second National Bank.

It could just as well have been called the First National Bank, since the institution once so named had perished, but Mr. Prutt’s bank would have to be a second, never a first nor yet a last. He was fifty years old and always had been. He was perfect; in everything that was second-class he was perfect. He was a vestryman, but not the leading vestryman, of St. Anselm’s Church; he had been a vice-president but never the president of the Federal Club.

He was tall and solemnly handsome, and he never split an infinitive or a bottle. His wife, Henrietta Prutt, his son, Jack Prutt, his daughter, Margaret Prutt, his dog, Dick Prutt, and even his Buick car, the Buick of the Prutts, were as full of perfection and Pruttery as John William Prutt himself.

The Prutts lived in a supposedly little white Colonial cottage that had somehow grown into a huge white Colonial army-barracks, yet still breathed the purity of Jonathan Edwards, and just beyond it, in a hulk of grim dark native stone, lived another banker, Norton Trock, who collected china and sounded like a lady. On the other side of Cass’s house was the blindingly white, somewhat Spanish and somewhat packing-box, stucco residence of Gregory Marl, owner of the presumably liberal and Independent Republican newspapers, the Banner and the Evening Frontier, with the Sunday Frontier–Banner, the only English-language newspapers in Grand Republic. He was a large, quiet, secretly industrious man of thirty-five; he had inherited the paper but had raised their circulations; he was a rose-grower and a Bermuda yachtsman. The star of his household, and a bright and menacing November star, was his wife Diantha, who was on every committee in town, and who knew something and talked a great deal about painting and the drama and a mystery called Foreign Affairs. But her major art was as hostess, and as the Marls had no children, Diantha could spend weeks in planning a party. She was the rival of Madge Dedrick as the general utility duchess and Mrs.

Astor of the city. Madge Dedrick, relict of Sylvanus Dedrick, the lumber baron, lived a little beyond the Prutts, in a handsome, high-pillared Georgian house that had exactly the same lines (condensed) as Boone Havock’s and did not in the least look like it. Madge’s half-dozen small flower-gardens looked like gardens of flowers, while Mr. Havock’s looked like paper posies, the larger size, bought last night and pinned on crooked in the darkness.

At seventy, Mrs. Dedrick was small and soft-voiced, powdery of cheek, with tiny plump hands and great powers, held shrewdly under control, of derision and obscenity.

Now living with her was her tall, doe-eyed, aloof, divorced daughter, Eve Dedrick Champeris, who had been reared in Grand Republic, Farmington, New York, Cannes, and Santa Barbara, and who had divorced the charming Mr. Raymond Champeris on the good, old-fashioned grounds of drinking like a sot and passing out at costly parties.

It seemed like such a waste of champagne, Eve explained. Diantha Marl tempted society with high intellectual conversation plus string quartets and dynamite cocktails; Madge and Eve Dedrick with cool Rhine wines in a low-lit, satin-paneled room filled with silver and crystal and cushions and exquisite legs and lively spitefulness, so that the Wargates, who had ten times as much money, politely accepted the invitations of both Diantha and the Dedricks. On all these rulers of Grand Republic Cass meditated, while he fretted the question of whether Jinny would really like being lifted from her boarding-house to the stuffy elegance of Ottawa Heights.

He wanted to persuade himself that she would like Boone Havock and Eve Champeris better than Eino Roskinen and Sweeney Fishberg. It was hard to play Prince to the Cinderella when he suspected that all the windows in Castle Charming were glued shut. He conducted extensive imaginary conversations with her, trying to give both sides, which is likely to be confusing. “Scott and Juliet — jolly people — wonderful at an outdoor barbecue,” he heard himself informing Jinny, who snapped back, “Silly pair of clowns!” “Gregory and Diantha Marl — leaders in public thought.” “Scared conservatives throwing calico babies to the union wolves!” “Bradd Criley and Jay Laverick and Frank Brightwing — very amusing fellows.” “That’s something LIKE it. Just let me meet them, and you keep the others.” — Now what kind of a mind have I got, to give a nonexistent antagonist the best of an argument? As I’m making the whole thing up anyway, why don’t I have Jinny vanquished and humble and adoring?

If he ever married Jinny, he would have to lure in new dinner-guests without offending the old ones, and then, probably, Jinny would not like the novelties. He thought of a party at which he introduced the Rev. Evan Brewster, Negro pastor of an unpainted Baptist church in the North End, and Ph.D. Of Columbia, to Dr. Drover and Eve Champeris, and how bored Dr. Brewster would be by their patter and how much danger there would be that Jinny would too openly agree.

Then, “Oh dry up!” said Cass to his imagination. When the spring term of court was over, he was free for all summer, except for special sessions and a few days in the outlying towns of the district.

They wound up with a solemn meeting of Judges Blackstaff, Flaaten, and Timberlane in re the portentous question: should the judges of this district, when on the bench, wear silk robes, as in Minneapolis? The three dignitaries sat about the long oak table in Judge Blackstaff’s chambers, smoking unaccustomed cigars, the gift of their host, and grew red-faced with the ardor of their debate. “It’s a matter of dignity,” maintained Judge Blackstaff, looking more than usual like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. “I don’t hold with these English wigs and heavy robes, but I do think we have to show the public, which is so irreverent and flippant today, all jazz and comic strips, that we represent the sanctity of Justice.” “Dignity, hell!” Judge Flaaten protested. “Every time some Norske or Svenske saw me in a black-silk nightshirt, it would cost me ten votes.

Besides, robes are hot.” Judge Timberlane put in, “Not very, Conrad. They can be quite light. Besides, Grand Republic is the coolest city in the state south of Duluth.

Besides, do you want to have the boys on the bench in Minneapolis go on laughing at us as a bunch of farmer j.p.‘s?” “I don’t care a damn what they laugh at as long as the voting Lut’erans like us,” insisted Judge Flaaten. He glared at Judge Blackstaff. “Steve, this is a serious matter. Are we going to yield up the high principles of common democracy to the bawds — uh — the gauds of the outworn Old World?” “Hurray!” breathed Judge Timberlane. “Cass, can’t you be serious?” worried Judge Blackstaff. “This is a special court of protocol, which may go far to determine the standing of the judiciary in Grand Republic for all time to come.

Write your votes on the yellow pads, boys, and fold ’em — and give me back those pencils when you get done with ’em. It’s a caution the way my pencils get stolen!” Silk robes for district judges won by two to one, and when autumn came, none of them more proudly showed his robe to his relatives than Judge Flaaten.

Judge Timberlane did not care so much. There was only one person for whom he wanted to wear his robe, and by prodigious chicanery he lured her into the court to see it. But — such is life — she only laughed. Chapter 12 The select golf-and-tennis association of Grand Republic was the Heather Club, three miles from the business center, on a peninsula reaching out from the south shore of Dead Squaw Lake. Surrounding it was the smart new real-estate development called the Country Club District, habitat of such gilded young married couples as the Harley Bozards, the Don Pennlosses, the Beecher Filligans, and the playground of Jay Laverick, the town’s principal professional Gay Bachelor, who happened to be a widower.

The houses were Spanish, like Hollywood, or French, like Great Neck, and the Heather club-house was a memory of Venice, with balconies, iron railings, and a canal thirty-six feet long. To the Heather Club in late June Cass came for one of the famous Saturday Evening Keno Games. Keno (a sport beloved by the more aged and pious Irishwomen also) consists in placing a bean upon a number called out by some swindler unknown, through an unseen loud-speaker, and after you have breathlessly placed enough beans upon enough numbers, you fail to get the prize. It is not so intellectual as chess or skipping the rope, but it is a favorite among Grand Republic’s leading citizens, who gather at the Heather Club on every Saturday evening in summer, to drink cocktails and play keno and then drink a lot more. With only one cocktail in him, Cass was deaf to the joys of keno this evening, and he wished that he were deaf to the crackling voices about him at the dozen long tables, as he somberly put down his beans. Roy Drover’s shouts of “Send us a thirty-two, baby, send us a thirty-two, come on, baby, come on, hand us a thirty-two” merely rivaled Queenie Havock’s parrot shrieks and Norton Trock’s high giggling, while Eve Champeris had a flushed mild imbecility about her lily face.

Delia Lent, a purposeful lady though rich, sat beside Cass, babbling about trout-fishing, but presently he could hear nothing that she said. All the hundred voices were woven into a blanket of sound that covered Cass and choked him. Abruptly, while Mrs. Lent stared at his lack of manners, Cass bolted from the table, charged toward the bar.

He would have to have a quantity of drinks, if he was going to survive these pleasures. He passed an alcove in which two grim women, too purposeful about gambling to waste time on keno, were hour after hour yanking the handles of twenty-five-cent slot machines. He passed a deep chair in which sat two married people — not married to each other. He looked into the card room where Boone Havock, Mayor Stopple, Judge Flaaten, Counselor Oliver Beehouse, and Alfred Limbaugh, the hardware king, were playing tough poker in a refined way. Jinny’s spirit walked with him derisively. He had almost reached the forgetfulness to be found at the bar when beyond it, in the Ladies’ Lounge, he saw Chris Grau, having a liqueur with Lillian Drover.

He stopped, in cold guiltiness, and the imaginary Jinny fled. He had not seen Chris for ten days, and as she looked at him, all her kindness in her good brown eyes, he shivered.

But he obediently chain-ganged into the lounge. Lillian Drover rose, tittering, in washed-out imitation of her husband’s humor, “I guess I better leave you two young lovers alone, if I know what’s good for me.” Chris’s smile indicated that that would be fine. The Ladies’ Lounge, which had been named that by Diantha Marl, after having been christened the Rubens Room by the Milwaukee architect-decorator who had done the club in the finest Moorish style known in his city, was a harem, with grilled windows, a turquoise-blue tiled floor, and a resigned fountain. It was suitable to the harem feeling that Chris should be wearing a loose-throated lilac dress. Cass sat facing her, with an entirely mechanical “Can I get you another drink?” “Not for me.

There’s too much drinking here. I’m glad you’re so sober. But then, you always are. Chapter 13 Judge Timberlane had heard of middle-aged satyrs who worked their will upon frail maidens by promising them riches and magenta-colored cars but never introduced them to the respectable families of their circles.

But the Judge himself wanted his entire world to know his fleet Jinny. He stopped in at Miss Hatter’s, he discussed with Tracy Oleson the import of wood pulp, then got Jinny aside to whisper, “I’d like to have a buffet supper for you and have you meet my friends — you needn’t like ’em if you don’t want to. And maybe you’d like to invite Tracy? He’s quite a bright fellow.” Perhaps he sounded condescending, without meaning to, for she answered irritably, “I don’t want to meet a lot of rich people looking for somebody to snub!” “But very few of them are rich and none of them are snobbish. I meant people like Abbott Hubbs, managing editor of the Banner.

I’ll bet the owner, Greg Marl, doesn’t pay him enough to afford breakfast. And my sister, Rose Pennloss, and my old chum, Bradd Criley — good lawyer and the best dancer in town. People that you’d love, if you knew ’em.” “I don’t want to be shown off, Cass. I’m perfectly happy right here where I am, and if I do ever get anywhere else, I want to do it by myself.” It took him five minutes to persuade Cinderella that the glass slipper was pretty and then, just to keep him entirely confused, she said that she would love a party, and if she had sounded grudging, it had been only because she was surprised. The buffet-supper for her was to be at the Heather Club, which was crowded only on Saturday evenings.

When he picked her up in his car, she did not expect him to take Tracy Oleson, that muffler, along with them; and she was not prudish when he suggested that, as they were early, they could stop at his house on the way. (It was not on the way.) At Bergheim she stepped out wonderingly under the wedding-cake carriage-porch and pronounced, “Oh, I love it! Like Walter Scott!” She was wearing again the little black net dress in which she was so pathetically grown-up, and the one silver rose.

Silent, head turning quickly to one side and the other, she preceded him into the dolorous hall, into the drawing-room, which was too long, too narrow, and too high, and in one corner surprisingly darted off, under a varnished pine grill, into a semicircular alcove which was the lowest story of the tower. It was an ill-lighted room, with wallpaper of Chinese pagodas and bridges, with overcarved and unwieldy furniture upholstered in plum-colored plush and ornamented with a Michigan version of Chinese dragons; a room profuse in Chinese vases, Aztec pottery, embossed brass coffee tables, Venetian glass lamps, and colored photographs of Lake Louise; a room that was unutterably all wrong, and yet was stately and a home. Jinny stood in the middle and looked about, neither awed nor ridiculing it, belonging to it as (Cass fondly believed) she would belong to any setting she might encounter. Then Cleo came bossily into the room on delicately haughty feet, wanting to know who the deuce this was in her house.

Jinny gave a passionate little moan, a sound not so unlike a cat’s, soft and imploring, and knelt before Cleo, smoothing the side of her jaw. The kitten recognized her as one of the tribe, and spoke to her in their language. Jinny sat crosslegged then and Cleo perched on her knee like a small brave statue. Acrobatically, not to disturb the kitten, Jinny reached out far for the evening purse that she had dropped, looked up at Cass apologetically, and brought out a tiny crystal model of a cat-goddess of the Nile. “It’s my talisman.

Dad gave it to me years ago, as a toy, but I almost let myself believe that it was alive and now — I know it’s childish, but I always take it everywhere — you know, so it can see the world and get educated, poor thing.” “What’s its name?” “Different names at different epochs. All of them silly. Just now it hasn’t one.” “Why not call it — The kitten is also an Egyptian national, and named Cleopatra. Why not call your statuette Isis?” “Isis. ‘Slim, undulant deity Isis, mistress of life.’ Okay. Let’s see if Cleo will have sense enough to recognize a high-class goddess and worship it.” She placed the crystal Isis on a mat made of her handkerchief, on the cabbage-rose carpet, and Cleo before the shrine.

They watched gravely, Cass’s hand on Jinny’s shoulder, while Cleo walked three times around the goddess, sniffing, then, with a careful paw, pushed it over and glanced up at them, much pleased with herself. “They’re friends, anyway,” said Jinny.

“Like us.” “Uh-huh.” He kissed her, without prejudice. He herded her into the kitchen, and announced, “Mrs. Higbee, this is my friend Miss Marshland.

The house is hers.” Well, Jinny smiled, Mrs. Higbee smiled, Cleo, sticking around and quietly running everything from behind the scenes as usual, made a sound that corresponded to smiling, and the augury was bright. Then Cass remembered that Mrs. Higbee liked Chris Grau, also, and that Chris would formidably be at the buffet-supper tonight.

They drove up to the Heather Country Club, which resembled the Home of a Famous Movie Star, and Jinny was apparently delighted by its yellow tile roof and its grilled windows and blue plaques set in white plaster walls. They crossed the clattering stone-floored lobby to the outdoor terrace on which, this fine June night, the supper was handsomely set out: a baked ham, with cloves stuck all over its sugary bulk, lobster salad and chicken salad and cold salmon, and an exuberant ice-cream mold decked with spun sugar. These treasures were assembled, like a jovial combination of Christmas and Fourth of July, on a long table at one end of the thatch-roofed outdoor bar. At the other end of the bar was the real business: a case of Bourbon, half a case of Scotch, and a cocktail-shaker of the size and menace of a trench-mortar, all guarded by the club bartender, who knew all the amorous and financial secrets of the members. As to wine, most prominent citizens of Grand Republic, including Cass, were unaware of it except as something you nervously ordered on a liner.

There were to be twenty-six at the supper, and six tables, lacy and silver-laid, were on the terrace, with Dead Squaw Lake swaying beyond them, and the pine-darkened hills and the red-roofed yacht club visible on the farther shore. But none of this luxury did Cass behold. What he saw was Chris Grau, happily arranging the flowers, and her happiness chilled him. He had not told Chris nor any one else that this supper was to be the introduction of a Miss Virginia Marshland to his friends, and it was assumed that this was another of the duty dinners which unmarried favorites like Cass and Bradd Criley and Jay Laverick give — the technical word is “throw”— now and then when their social obligations have reached the saturation point. Chris had insisted that he let her order the supper, be the hostess.

She was busy now, in her fresh cream-colored linen dress, her gaudiest costume jewelry, arranging the huge bunches of peonies. At Cass’s footstep, she looked up with a smile that went cold when she saw him with an unknown wench who was too airy and much too pretty. The oratorical pride of the Bar Association could do no better than: “Chris — Miss Grau!

Miss Marshland — uh — Jinny Marshland.” Both women said “Jdoo” with good healthy feminine hatred, and Cass was rather surprised. In making up his list of guests, he had not been able to avoid having Roy and Lillian Drover, though he did not expect Jinny to like them. He thought she might like his sister Rose and the Gadds and Greg Marls and the Abbott Hubbses and the Avondene girls and even the giggling Scott Zagos. He was sure that she would like Bradd Criley and once, a few days ago, before he had lost his innocence, he had hoped that Jinny and Chris might “hit it off nicely,” having no sounder reason for that hope than that it would be considerably more convenient for him if they did. And Eve Champeris, of Paris, California, and Grand Republic, the most exquisite and linguistic woman in town — he himself had never been comfortable with Eve, and he had invited her entirely to impress Jinny. He had been more daring than anyone can know who does not live permanently in Grand Republic in leaving out Boone and Queenie Havock — daring and sensible, since at one macaw scream from Queenie, Jinny might very well have started walking home.

But the Havock scion, Curtiss, he had invited. Curtiss was a bulky, cheerful, unmarried, somewhat oafish young man who was supposed to work in the Blue Ox National Bank but who was more earnest about fast driving and who was supposed, for reasons incomprehensible to Cass, to be attractive to young women. Especially for Jinny, he had asked Tracy Oleson, Fred Nimbus, announcer at Station KICH, Lucius and Erica Fliegend, and to keep the Fliegends from feeling chilled at the Heather Club, in which they had not been present five times in ten years, he had invited that intelligent young couple, Richard and Francia Wolke (the Chippewa Avenue jewelers) who had NEVER been in the club.

Chris had not seen his list and now, as she looked over the party, she tenderly thought that she had never known her Cass to show so superbly the trusting social ineptitude for which she loved him and wanted to mother him. Curtiss Havock would insult the glibly handsome Fred Nimbus who would annoy Eve Champeris who would be insolent to the Wolkes who would bite the Zagos who would nauseate Dr.

Drover who would be rude to the Hubbses who hated their bosses, Gregory and Diantha Marl, while Chris herself would have been just as glad if he had not invited Stella Avondene Wrenchard, that impoverished and aristocratic young widow who was so resolutely after Cass for herself that she went around saying, “I adore Chris — poor dear.” And when Chris found that he had added this unknown young fly-by-night called Miss Virginia Mushland or something, then she was almost as irritated as she was tender. So far as Chris could see, he had done everything to insure his social ruin in Grand Republic except to invite the local labor-organizers. Chapter 14 When the party had meandered to its quiet ending, when the older pleasure-maddened citizens had gone home to bed and the stoutly drinking remnant had moved indoors to escape the chill, Chris gave up her impersonal rule as mistress of the revels and settled down at a table with Cass, Jinny, Tracy Oleson, the inebriated Hubbses and the soused Curtiss Havoc, and began to pay loving though discouraged attention to Cass. He was alarmed. No more than any other man did he want to face the unwed lioness robbed of her wish-dream cubs, the chronic wife who resents the straying of her husband just as much when he is not yet her husband. He had hoped to slip away with Jinny, and perhaps be invited in for an incautious moment.

Curtiss belched. Hubbs said, “I agree.” “Then I’ll take you home,” said Mrs. “Judge, I can save you a trip. I’ll drive Jinny back — I have my little bus here.” Treacherous as all sweethearts, Jinny babbled, “Oh, thank you, Tracy.

Judge, I did have such a good time. Thank you for inviting me.... Good night, Miss — uh — Miss Grau.” Cass was alone with Chris. “I think they all enjoyed it, don’t you, Chris?” “Yes?” “Due mostly to you, though.

You were the perfect hostess. I was amused the way you kept steering Curtiss away from the bar.” “Yes?” “And I don’t know how you ever managed to coax such a beautiful supper out of the steward, and when you think —” “Cass!” “What is it, dear?” “‘Dear’! Cass, have you fallen for that young female grasshopper, that Marshland girl, at your age?” “What d’ you mean, ‘At my age’?” “I mean at your age!” “I’m the second youngest district judge in Minnesota!” “And probably you’re THE youngest octogenarian.

I know you can still play baseball and dance the tango, only you don’t. You like the fireside and your books and chess.” “So I’m that picturesque figure, the venerable judge. Why don’t you put in slippers, along with the fireside and the books — you mean OLD books, that smell of leather!” “Well, your books mostly do, don’t they? I just can’t see you with a gilt-and-satin copy of ‘Mademoiselle Fifi,’ or whatever it is your Virginia reads.” “I’ll tell you what she reads!

She reads Santayana and Willa Cather and, uh, and Proust! That’s what she reads!” “Does she? I didn’t suppose she could read.

She certainly doesn’t show any stains from it.” “Just because she doesn’t go around showing off like a young highbrow —” “Oh, Cassy — Cass, I mean — I’m sorry. The last thing in the world I meant to do was to start scrapping with you.” They were on a couch in the club lounge.

A bartender and four late bridge-players and the two female slot-machine addicts were still present, and he felt that otherwise Chris would crown her humility by kneeling before him, as she went on: “It’s just that we started twenty years ago, when you were a veteran of twenty and I was a worshiping brat of ten, no, eleven, that could hide her reverence for you only by being saucy, and so I got the miserable habit of jabbing at you and — Cass! Do you take this little Marshland girl seriously? An exquisite little thing she is, too, I must say, and probably fairly intelligent and even virtuous, curse her! I mean, damn her! Do you think you’re a little in love with her?” “I think I’m a good deal in love with her. I agree with you in saying ‘damn her’!

I didn’t want to be in an earthquake. You’re dead right, my dear; I do prefer quiet. But I’m simply God-smitten.” She sighed then, sighed and was silent, and at last she talked to herself aloud: “If I had been more brazen, if I hadn’t been so scrupulous, I could have married you several years ago, my friend. Right after Blanche. I’m the only person you’ve ever really talked to about Blanche. Isn’t that true?” “I suppose it is.” “And how she made fun of you and hurt you? Maybe you like to get hurt.

You’re going about getting hurt again in just the right way. Now don’t tell me that your Virginia wouldn’t want to hurt anybody! I’m sure she wouldn’t — intentionally. It’s just that all you overimaginative men, who try to combine fancifulness with being clock-watching executives, are fated to be hurt, unless you love some kind-hearted, sloppy, adoring woman like me — the born mistress! Well, as Dad always said, ‘Nun, so geht’s.’ Good night.” He would not run after her, and before he had stalked out to the automobile entrance, she had driven away, in her fast, canary-colored coupe. He stood frozen, realizing that he was free of his past. An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives DROVERS AND HAVOCKS Roy Drover was born on a farm just at the edge of Grand Republic, and his father was at once a farmer and a veterinarian.

When Roy was a medical student at the University of Minnesota, a beer-drinker and a roarer by night but by day a promising dissecter, he met the tall and swaying Lillian Smith, daughter of a stationer who was refined, tubercular, and poor. He saw that here was the finest flower he was likely ever to acquire for the decoration of a successful doctor’s drawing-room. Also, it tickled his broad fancy to think of seducing (even if he could do it only legally) anything so frail and sweet as Lillian.

She was overwhelmed by him, though she did break off the engagement once when he used a certain four-letter word. He reasonably pointed out, however, that either she did not know what the word meant, in which case she could not be shocked, or else she did know, in which case she must have got over being shocked some time ago. She was conquered, though for years afterward she worried about that logic. By the time they had been married for five years and Roy had practised for seven, Lillian’s father was bankrupt, and Roy had the daily pleasure of telling her that, though her “old man might be so cultured and polite, he was mighty glad to get eighty bucks a month from his roughneck son-inlaw.” That pleasure continued for years after her father had died. At medical conventions or among strangers in a West Coast Florida hotel, Roy would jovially shout, “My ancestors were Vermont hill-billies, but my ball-and-chain comes from the best stock in Massachusetts — such a good stock that it’s got pernicious anemia, and I’ve always had to give it a few injections of gold.” He continued to feel physical passion for Lillian — as well as for every gum-chewing hoyden that he picked up on his trips to Chicago, and for a number of his chattier women patients. Perhaps his continued zest came from the fact that it amused him to watch his wife shiver and reluctantly be conquered. To her, the whole business of sex had become a horror related to dark bedrooms and loud breathing.

Sometimes in the afternoon, when Lillian was giving coffee to quiet women like the Avondene girls or the Methodist minister’s wife, Roy would come rampaging in, glare at her possessively, growl “H’are yuh” at the guests in a way which said he wished they would get out of this, and as soon as they had twittered away, he would rip down the zipper of her dress. She often thought about suicide, but she was too blank of mind. She was always reading the pink-bound books of New Thought leaders, those thick-haired and bass-voiced prophets who produce theatrical church-services in New York theaters, and tell their trembling female parishioners that they can accomplish anything they wish if they Develop the Divine Will Power and Inner Gifts....

Sometimes Roy threw these books into the furnace. Lillian never contradicted him.

She was mute even when he teased her about her dislike for having dead mallards or pheasants drip blood on her dress when she went hunting with him. At the beginning of our history, the Drovers had been married for thirteen years. They had two sons, William Mayo and John Erdmann Drover, aged eleven and nine. Lillian was devoted to them, often looked at them sadly, as though they were doomed. She begged them to listen while she read aloud from Kenneth Grahame and her own girlhood copy of “The Birds’ Christmas Carol,” but the boys protested, “Aw, can that old-fashioned junk, Mum. Pop says it’s panty-waist.

Read us the funnies in the paper, Mum.” Like their father, the boys enjoyed killing things — killing snakes, frogs, ducks, rats, sparrows, feeble old neighborhood cats. When Roy and the boys were away, she stayed alone in a shuttered room, in a house that rustled with hate, in a silence that screamed, alone with a sullen cook and a defiant maid. She did not read much, but she did read that all women are “emancipated” and can readily become “economically independent.” She was glad to learn that. Roy and Lillian were often cited by Diantha Marl as “one of the happiest couples, the most successful marriages, in Grand Republic; just as affectionate as the Zagos, but not so showy about it.” The same authority, Diantha, publicly wondered whether Boone and Queenie Havock, though by 1941 they had been married for thirty-five years, would not “bust up,” as the technical phrase was. When, at their rich parties, Queenie got high and screamed that Boone was a “chippie-chasing, widow-robbing old buzzard,” he frequently slapped her. She was almost as large as he and even louder, and she retorted spiritedly by spitting at him, and sometimes when he was entertaining Eastern Financiers or other visiting royalty, she yelled at him, “Oh, shutzen Sie die mouth,” which she believed to be German. But in private, with their great arms about each other, these shaggy gods sat up all night making fun of their neat neighbors, drinking and shouting and cackling like pirates.

When Boone was almost indicted for stealing one hundred thousand acres of Eastern Montana prairie, Queenie joyfully announced, “I’ll come cook for you in jail, you cutthroat!” He answered admiringly, “You probably will, too, you catamaran, but if you get any more finger-marks on my Cesar Franck symphony records, I’ll bust your ole head open.” Dr. Roy Drover often said, “My experience is that it’s all nonsense to say that marriage is difficult just because of complicated modern life on top of the fundamental clashes between the sexes. It’s all perfectly easy, if the husband just understands women and knows how to be patient with their crazy foibles.

Chapter 15 Cass had become embarrassed over calling up her boarding-house and having Tracy or Wilma answer, “Who do you want? Who wants her? Oh!” followed by a shadow of a giggle, and a half-heard: “It’s the Judge again. Can you beat it!” So in early July, to invite her to the Svithiod Summer Festival, at which he would be the guest-speaker and say a lot of enthusiastic things about Swedish–Americans, which might impress a girl with a fancy for high words, he wrote a note to her.

She answered, and for the first time he saw her writing. Now to an expert, her script may have looked like that of any trained stenographer, correct and round, but to Cass this was a secret message from the captive princess in her tower.

On the envelope, he was “The Hon. Cass Timberlane.” His name had never looked so stately. Could he really be that monumental object to HER?

Or, sudden jagged thought, did she consider the title pompous? Her T was bold, like a knight riding, and the o was precise yet sweet, not too unlike a kiss. (That sentimentality he strongly thrust from him, and shamefacedly took back again.) The square envelope and the letter-sheet were of good linen, with a small square “VM” which, his thumb told him, was printed. Engraving would have been extravagant for her.) Of the letter itself, of her first letter to him, he still had not read a word. He was shy about it. He might know now whether she loved him or considered him a bumbler. Then, breathing deep, he plunged: “Dear Cass.” — That’s good.

Not “Dear Judge.” She thinks of me as a friend, anyway. Of course “Darling Cass” would have been better. “Darn it, I have a date for your evening with the Vikings —” — Hard luck. Certainly is hard luck.

She won’t hear me make my speech. I’d hoped she would. Still, her letter is cordial — oh, it’s more than cordial, it’s really affectionate. And some originality to the writing. The letter continued: “So I shall not be able to hear you. But I know you will be wonderful. Call me up soon.

Sincerely yours, Jinny.” — She really wants me to go on telephoning her! And she signs it “Jinny,” not “Virginia” or “Virginia Marshland.” She does like me! During his first five readings of the masterpiece, he twice decided that she liked him, once that she loved him furiously, once that this was merely a routine answer with all the romantic flavor of payment of a gas-bill, and once that she was bored by him and intended, on his evening of oratory, to go off dancing with some treacherous swine like Eino Roskinen.

He did nothing so puerile as to keep the letter in whatever pocket was nearest to his heart; he merely thought about it. He contented himself with locking it up in the steel box that contained his will, his passport, a picture of his mother, a certificate for a hundred shares of the late Overture Silver Mining Company, and a photograph of his former wife, in a 1929 hat, which he did not remember owning. Funny-looking hat. I wonder if the present-day hats would look just as — Lord, I’d forgotten Blanche was so beautiful. But she looks so calculating and possessive, where Jinny is like a living brook. Poor Blanche. I’ll bet her new English inlaws snub her.

He had many walks with Jinny, on Sunday afternoons, and he discovered that he did not know the city of which he was supposed to be a leader. They found a lath-and-mud slum, with starved widows and children living like war-victims upon property belonging to his friend Henry Grannick, second richest man in town.

On Jinny’s initiative, he went for the first time in two years into the museum at the Wargate Memorial, which was three and three-quarters minutes’ walking-time from his chambers, and they saw the Indian war-bonnets, the models of fur-trader’s canoes, and were swollen and proud with their own history. They chattered all the while. The buffet-supper had given them more of a common background, and they talked of “Chris” and “Roy” as well as of “Tracy,” for they were true Midwesterners in referring to everybody up to the age of ninety-eight by his given name. They were as garrulous as two old friends at the Poor House, and all through it he was unceasingly on the point of proposing to her, yet never quite daring to.

In her bright young ruthlessness, she might dismiss him forever. He was constantly stirred up by her iconoclastic though slightly second-hand political creeds.

As a mild and benevolent Republican, who had to be a politician once every six years, however little he liked cigars and the histories of Coolidge and Harding, he collided with the fact that, early conditioned by her father’s sympathy with the Farmer–Labor Party, encouraged later by Eino’s internationalism, Jinny was Young Revolution at the inquiring age. As they explored the city’s unrecognized slums, she wondered aloud about the competence of the Prutts and Grannicks to control a city, while she denounced the local “isolationists” and insisted that America must join in the war against Germany, which had just invaded Russia. She was probably disappointed at the readiness with which Cass agreed with all her challenges; she was probably unable to understand that the Judge Timberlane who seemed to her so conservative was considered by his neighbors, by his colleague Judge Blackstaff, as a riskily radical young man. He agreed that America is only at the beginning of democracy; that the super-salesman, with the stigmata of his early toughness or rusticity blandished away by barber and manicure girl, stands with the workman whose face is pitted with soot and grease only at the saloon, the polling-booth, and the grave. If he was distinctly more leftwing than Jinny thought, he was distinctly less so than he thought.

He innocently considered himself, even after election-day, democratically one with the farmer, the section-hand, the pants-presser, yet he had always been so occupied with members of the Federal Club and the dwellers on Ottawa Heights that he was as detached from his constituents as any country squire. A kind man, a just judge, an honest citizen who believed that there must be plenty of public schools and no graft in the water supply, he had not yet gone many years beyond the Good Old Massa dynasty. And golf at the country club is a sweet odor in the nostrils and a dependable anesthetic.

In the fresh air that Jinny always bore about her, he wanted to defy his own ancestral cautions. She did not know, possibly he did not know, how much he enjoyed cutting loose and being more of an outlaw than he was. Later he was to believe that he might really have become the rebel whom in these honied months he enjoyed impersonating, if Jinny had really been the bold economic Amazon she considered herself. It has always been the masculine version: “She did not tempt me enough, so I did not eat.” Meantime, more innocent than ever, he made love not apropos of swords and roses, but of the poll tax, the school system, and German bombers. In July she went home to Pioneer Falls for her two-weeks’ vacation, and he begged for an invitation to come up for three days.

Her mother wrote to him, welcomingly. He had always liked his assignments to hold court at Pioneer Falls, county-seat of Mattson County, because from the windows of the court room he could see the re-echoed heavens of Lake Bruin. Here there were none of the wild river valleys of the Grand Republic country. The falls of the Sorshay River were only three feet high, a sporting ground for minnows. A wedge of the old hardwood country had been thrust northward from the base of the state to Pioneer Falls, and the trees were not pine and poplar but oak and maple and ironwood and basswood.

Most of them had been cleared away by the fine, high, destructive industry of the frontiersmen, and the country was now an upland wheat prairie, and Pioneer Falls a characteristic grain-belt village. The streets were flat but sheltered by spacious elms and maples that had been planted by the Yankee and German settlers.

The Marshland house was white and comfortable and simple, except for an upstairs balcony with a triangular window behind it, and Jinny’s father, Lester the druggist, was simple and comfortable, and Mrs. Marshland a darling. They wore baggy clothes and loved their friends and they thought that Judge Timberlane was a tremendous man and that their “little daughter” was a “mighty lucky girl to have him take an interest in her and her art career.” That he could ever marry her or be her lover seemingly did not occur to them. He was embarrassed by their friendly desire to have him hold forth like a pedagogue upon her talents — and her unpunctuality, to have him give her measured advice about how to become a real big-city cartoonist or a dress designer. He was even more embarrassed by the fact that Mr. Marshland were only fifty-three or -four, somewhat nearer to his own age than was Jinny. He kept hinting that he belonged to her generation, not theirs, but Jinny bedeviled him by mocking, at family dinner (fried chicken and asparagus and peas from our own garden), “I wish you three would now straighten me out about the Polish question and the use of lipstick.” “Don’t play with your food, Jinx,” said Mrs.

Marshland fondly, at every meal. Cass and Jinny picnicked on a bluff overlooking Lake Bruin, in an old pasture of short worn grass and scattered oaks. Their table was a slab of rock, splashed orange with lichens; their divan the springy moss. They were idle and relaxed and in love, and they did play with their food, with the hard-boiled eggs, the finger rolls, the lemon-meringue pie eaten with fingers which were vulgarly wiped on the flower-starred moss.

He looked like a woodsman, in laced boots and breeches and mackinaw shirt of black and red and yellow. She wore moccasin shoes, with slacks, but she made up for it by wearing a tight sweater.

Reclining on the moss, replete and exquisitely sleepy, he argued, “Put your head on my shoulder.” She looked mute and sulky; then she rubbed her cheek against his shoulder and lay still. His arm was about her and it may have been by accident that his hand touched the unbelievable smoothness of her naked waist under the sweater. He snatched his hand away, but his finger-tips kept the memory of that living satin, the tender warmth of her soft side. In some panic he knew that he was afraid of her and shocked by himself, but he protested, “Don’t be such a prude.

Of course you love touching her. That’s what it’s all about.” But any ideas he might have had about trying to betray her seemed wondrously absurd. He slipped his hand again about her unbodiced waist, and she let it lie there warmly a moment before she detached it, gentle and unoffended. And that was all that happened of fleshly love-making. Yet now, with her head against his shoulder, they had been converted, united, sanctified. “Darling!” he said only, and kissed her lightly, and her head settled back in contentment.

It was a poet, not a very skillful one, who began talking: “Dear Jinny, do you know how lovely you are to me? I love your eyes and your hair — it’s very reckless today and it smells so newly washed — and I love your childish fingers — do you suppose that indelible-ink spot will ever come off? — and I love your riotous and pretty undependable humor and your curiosity, like Cleo’s about everything, and your honesty and your disinterest in money-making and your talisman, your crystal Isis — did you bring her back to Pioneer Falls?” “Certainly.

Wrapped in a lovely nightgown. She insisted on coming. She’s as fascinated by men and their line as I am.” “You don’t think I’m merely following a ‘line’ in what I say, do you?” “No!

I think you’re dear and good, and I think you really like me.” They said nothing about being engaged, but like children they made plans. “Know what I’d like us to do, soon as the war between Great Britain and Germany is over?” he urged. “Sail for Norway and Sweden, which are the source of so much of the life around here, and then go through Finland and dip down into Central Europe and up to Moscow and then China and especially India. I’ve always been crazy to see India, since I read Kipling as a boy.” “Wond’ful.” “And then we’ll come back here and get settled down. We’ll live in Grand Republic in the summer and fall — most beautiful Indian Summers in the world — and have our winters in Beverly Hills and Havana and Rio de Janeiro.” “So we’re just going to be hoboes and wasters, are we?” “Sure — in our dreams. Look here, comrade, have we got to have social significance even in our DREAMS?” “I think I’ll have to get a ruling on that.

Meanwhile, what are we doing all this ON?” “Can’t I just as well dream myself two million dollars and a year’s leave from the bench, while I’m about it?” “You’re so heroic — in our dreams.” “Plans okay then?” “Approved. Cass, maybe we really COULD do some of those things, even without being rich.” “Certainly.” “But why is it that nobody ever does do any of the things that he’s free to do?” In that counsel of doom he was suddenly frightened out of his spurious boyishness, and clutched her hand, as if to protect her. They silently looked out from the shadowing oaks to the summer-enchanted lake. The farther shore was swampy and in the July light was a gold-streaked utter green, with blackbirds bending down the reeds. There was peace over all the land, and their fear melted, and suddenly she was telling him, as she never had, of her childhood in the white house in the prairie village: “I was such a serious kid, always so busy.

I had to keep track of everything. I had note-books and note-books; I put down the temperature of my dolls, every day, like a hospital chart, and all the bright things they said — I made ’em up, only sometimes I stole ’em from the other kids. And I collected birds’ eggs and made the most elaborate notes on just which tree I’d found them in-I drew plans of the trees, with lovely arrows pointing.

I was sure that some day those notes would be terribly important to some ornithologist. I suppose I’m still the greatest living authority on snipe around Peterson’s Slew.

“And then as fast as I learned a hymn in Sunday School — I was a Congregationalist like you — I wrote it down on a card, with my notations about what words to come down hard on, like ‘BRINGing in the SHEAVES’ only, I thought it was SHEETS. “I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, so they let me have the attic all to myself, and up there I was the busiest man of affairs, rushing from one thing to another: arranging my world-collection of fans, two paper ones and one lace, and my gallery of movie stars, and polishing a brass handle to something — I found it by the road, and to this day I don’t know what it was for — and writing down the name of every new language that I heard of. I got up to sixty-seven, and I intended to learn them all, including Swahili and Liukiu. “And then pets — our old cat, Percival, and a lot of other cats and dogs and rabbits and a pet squirrel and a very inappreciative garter snake. I used to have an animal drug store and try to cure all their ailments with sugar-water.

I don’t think I was so successful. “Maybe a lot of the things that I did were to educate the little blue bromo Seltzer bottle, the forerunner of my Isis, that I sneaked out and took everywhere so it could see what was going on. Oh, I must have been almost as silly at ten as I am now. “And I took lessons on the mandolin. I could play ‘Down Mobile’ and the Russian national anthem on it.

I was so busy and so secret. Nobody ever knew; Dad and Mother were swell about not prying.

And sometimes I had the most money that ever was — an entire penny. I would go into Dad’s store and he would pretend he didn’t know me, and he would advise me, very earnestly, and you’d be surprised how many kinds of candy you could get then for a penny: maybe one red and two striped and a licorice lozenge. I’ll never have that much money again, never.” “No, there never are any pennies like that after you are ten,” said Cass. “And now you’re as old as I am.

I used to think of you as eons younger, but now I feel as though we were the same age, except that you aren’t so cautious.” “And I think of you, Cass, as just my age, except that you have more sense.” With an absorbed I-want-to-think expression, she wandered off, along the shore, and he watched her sleepily. She looked mature and thoughtful, till, throwing up her arms, she started violently hop-skipping, all by herself, singing what sounded like a jazz version of Celeste Aida, and then she seemed to be all of ten again, and he reached into his pocket for a penny to give her. Chapter 16 After the buffet-supper for Jinny, his sister Rose and Gregory Marl said, “What a nice girl that was; like to see her again,” but Cass wondered that more people did not comment. He need not have wondered; they did.

Everybody in town — it being understood that everybody-intown includes some three hundred persons out of the 85,000 — discussed Jinny, by telephone, by letter, over the directors’ table, or at the Paul Bunyan Bar. But they did not reveal this to Cass, for he was a man not overfond of being tickled in the ribs. But after he had ventured to Pioneer Falls, before he had yet pressed, in a volume of Supreme Court digests, the buttercup that Jinny had given him, then everybody concluded that they must rush in and rescue him. He was to play bridge at Boone Havock’s, and before the fourth player, Eve Champeris, arrived, Boone and Queenie, with her voice like a flat trolley-wheel, set out to save him with the solicitude of a couple of pigs eating their young.

That they had never yet seen Jinny made them no less authoritative. Boone struck: “Sit down, Cass, and take a load off your feet.

Have a snort? Don’t be a fool; of course you will. Now, Cass, I want you to listen to me and don’t go interrupting and shooting off your mouth just because you think you’re such a high-brow and a judge and all that junk while me, I never got through fifth grade.

You haven’t any better friends in the world than me and Queenie.” “You’re damn tootin’,” confirmed Queenie, then remembered that she was being refined and humanitarian this evening, and caroled, “Are we ever! Oh boy, I’ll say we are! A lot of bums are always yessing you, Cass, because you’re in politics, but me and Boone are good-enough friends to tell you the truth. For your own good.” Cass had really come over to play bridge, not to have things done for his good, and he was not a meek man.

But he was their neighbor, he was used to them, and in a frontier civilization you are not offended by a neighbor if he does nothing worse than throw tomahawks. He listened to Boone with only a slight biliousness. “Cass, what’s all this we hear about your going nuts over some fifth-rate stenographer?” “Some low-grade tart on the make,” added Queenie, virtuously. After all, Queenie had some background for her opinions on lowness.

Her father had kept some of the best saloons in Northern Minnesota. “I don’t know what you two are talking about, unless you mean Miss Marshland, a brilliant young artist in whose career I have become slightly interested.” “‘Slightly’ is good!” jeered Queenie. Boone roared, “I don’t suppose you take her out to that gyp-joint, the Unstable, more than three times a week!” “I do not!” “I don’t suppose her and you were snooping around those tenements on South Greysolon Avenue! You didn’t tell each other they were ‘a disgrace,’ and ‘somebody ought to do something about ’em!’ Well, I OWN those tenements, and if you want ’em I’d be glad to give ’em to you and see what YOU can do with ’em! Lot of Finns and Communists and Poles and Svenskas in there, never pay their rent and use the banisters for firewood!

But let that pass. I’m so used to trying to do something for this community and never get one word of thanks that I don’t even pay any attention to a lot of Red bellyaching, and I don’t care WHAT you said about Havock Haven. But I do care when I see an old friend making a fool of himself over a cute little gold-digger that just hangs around to see what she can get out of him — and then probably goes back to the boy-friend and they laugh their heads off at the old goat!” Cass broke. “I wouldn’t let you talk like this even if what you said were true, but it isn’t. Miss Marshland is decidedly a lady. No, that’s a bloodless word — she’s an angel.” “Sweet little gold angel with blood in her eye!” screamed Queenie. “You sleeping with her?” Boone grunted.

And even if —” “Now don’t go and get gentlemanly on us, son. We’re only trying to help you.

You made a portion of a horse of yourself before, marrying that high-hat Minneapolis snob with her phony Boston accent, and we don’t want you to do it again.” Cass must have said something confused and not impressive, for Boone was unsquelched. “There’d be some excuse for this new girl if you were doing a little advanced necking with her, but if you’re thinking about marrying her — a cutie half your age —” “She is not!” “— that has an idea it would be swell to be Mrs. Judge Timberlane, and expects you to stay up all night and dance with her, or sit around and watch her dance with the younger guys, why, then you’re a worse fool than I thought you were, and I’ve always rated you pretty high in damn foolishness ever since you gave up what might of become a fifty-thousand-dollar law-practice to sit on your dignity on the bench.” Queenie neighed, “Now you listen to me. A woman’s heart knows.

None of these young girls want to be of any help to their husbands. They just get married for the excitement of it and for what they can get out of it, the little tramps, and so immodest — showing their knees! If you GOT to get married, Cass — and I don’t see why; ain’t there any lady clerks that know the answers in your court house?

— then why don’t you pick out some dame of thirty-five that’ll stay home and take care of you, like I would?” He did not, as he longed to then and all through the ordeal of bridge, slap them and walk out. But for a year it broke his habit of the Havocks.

“He’s spoiled — touchy as a pregnant woman,” said Queenie Havock to Eve Champeris, who said it to Chris who said it to Cass who said it to himself. He expected Roy Drover to be even more boisterous than the Havocks, but Roy, when he caught Cass in the quiet reading-room of the Federal Club, sounded like a physician, competent and impersonal: “Son, I hear you’ve fallen for that pretty little monkey you brought to the Country Club.

It’s none of my business, but why don’t you try some ugly woman with a lot of passion, instead of one of these anemic kids? They haven’t any gratitude. I take it for granted you don’t intend to marry this chick — her a rank outsider, that none of us know. You’re not THAT haywire!” Cass tried to believe afterward that his retorts to Boone and Roy and two or three other foul impugners and mongers had been in the manner of a stately “Sir!” followed by a challenge.

It is doubtful. That would not have gone well with Radisson County duck-hunters, especially when they loved him enough to risk his wrath. Stubbs The Zombie Torrent Iso. The one gentle effort at his salvation was that of Stella Avondene Wrenchard. The Avondenes were a Family, fond and unshakable.

They were impoverished aristocracy who were unconcerned about it so long as they could be together in their old whitewashed brick house. The head of the family, Verne Avondene, had been born, in Grand Republic, to a million dollars in timberlands which had been acquired, possibly honestly, by his grandfather, the great Indian agent, who seems in the histories to have had no Christian name other than “Colonel.” Verne went to Yale and the English Cambridge and was just looking into diplomatic careers when the family money blew up. He did not complain; the game had been worth any golden candle, and he had a comforting knowledge of Balzac and Monet and Old English balladry, even if he could not earn more than thirty-five dollars a week. That sum he received in the insurance office of Scott Zago, where he was respectfully entitled “office manager,” meaning clerk and assistant bookkeeper.

His wife, still slim and beautiful at sixty-five, said that Verne was the greatest gentleman, the most gallant lover, and the most amusing companion in Grand Republic, and she was a fair judge. Their two daughters lived with them. Stella had married an engineer, Tom Wrenchard, but had been widowed by an accident within the year, and come home. Her marriage had been so brief that most people forgot it, and she was usually called “Miss Stella Avondene.” She taught domestic science in the Alexander Hamilton High School.

Her spinster older sister, Pandora, gentle and affectionate and given to flowers and sketching and playing the piano, which under her mild fingers sounded like a spinet, was in charge of the children’s department at the public library. Both girls treated their parents as their equals, and the low white brick house was full of fudge, cats, new novels, Delius, water-colors, charades, omelets, and other people’s children. Stella had always thought well of marrying Cass, but had stayed home from hunting in loyalty to Chris Grau.

Now, she invented a lovely theory: Chris had, probably for discreditable reasons, jilted Cass, who in wan loneliness had turned to some pretty girl or other who had no virtues. Except in a state of solitary madness, a steady man like Cass could never marry out of Our Class, that ancient aristocracy of Grand Republic, hoary with tradition, which had been going on now for more than seventy-five years. Stella wanted to save him. The Avondenes had him in for supper. As they had a maid only when Verne had had a lucky bet on the races — the last time had been in 1939 — they did all the housework, and they let Cass help them wash the dishes (which he did unexpectedly well, being a camper) while they all sang “Sweet and Low.” Then Stella mended the lining of his coat, poor girl. As his own housekeeper, Mrs. Higbee, was very inspective and efficient about that sort of thing, he suspected that Stella had made the small rip in the lining herself, and he loved her for it.

He might have married Stella then. Perhaps he should have married Stella, and grown peaceful to the point of Double Solitaire, but it happened that either God or Cass Timberlane had made of Jinny Marshland the eternal image of beauty walking with silver feet the waves of dawn. Dear Stella Avondene, teaching in your Sunday-school class at St. Anselm’s, and smiling, in the white kid gloves you cleaned at home, singing and a little sad and very kind. You will never walk the waves at dawn. He heard something of the town rumors about Jinny.

Apparently Mrs. Webb Wargate had said that, though she honored Judge Timberlane and would probably receive any ragtag of a wife that he might drag in, yet she was regretful that such a man should be planning to marry a girl whose real name was Marshandsky, whose father was a drunken teamster on the Range, who had been a waitress in the Pineland Hotel and an itinerant hired girl, and who was in general a threat to the Best People of Grand Republic, so intimately related to the Best People of Albany and Philadelphia and Hartford.

The early Minnesota had its families with the correct and rigid manners, the Emersonian scholarship, of New England; with an annotated Horace and a frivolous fiddle lying upon the pious parlor organ. It had its Romans like General Sibley and, in Grand Republic, the Avondenes and Grannicks. But lesser and brisker tribes like the Wargates had taken their togas.

Cass considered the Wargate peerage. Old Dexter Wargate had started out in Minnesota in 1881 by conducting a hardware-store and selling nails across the counter to lumberjacks and half-breeds. He had married the daughter of Simon Eisenherz, from Pennsylvania, who had come to Minnesota in 1854, to acquire furs from the Indians in exchange for brass pots and bootleg whisky, with some effect upon the number of murdered white settlers, before he discovered how to steal millions of acres of timberland.

Cass was not pleased when a family founded upon a whisky keg in a log cabin felt superior to a girl crooning over her collection of three fine fans in a village attic, secret and eager and alone — so alone and helpless against the chatter at the cocktail-hour. He had only one moment of treachery to Jinny: when he wondered whether to others she was as clearly divine as she was to him. He remembered that the Juliet Zago who to him was a wiggling nuisance was a fair young thing to her Scott, and that Boone Havock seemingly felt no distress when his wife yelled like a buzz-saw. Were there barbarians who might think that his Jinny had a touch of the Zago whimsy, with her circulatory Isis? To him, she would forever be a flame, but could his friends see her glory? He was aware that Jinny had a temper. She was, he thought, unconscious of what the Havocks and Wargates whispered, but if she learned it, he was certain that she would reject him along with all his clansmen forever.

He had not planned to venture upon any talk of marriage until they should have had a year of building up a common background. But he felt now that he must not risk her discovery of the gossip till she should be bound to him, protected by him, and on an August evening when he was to take her to the movies, he drove irresolutely toward her boarding-house with the nervous intention of proposing to her.

The living-room at Miss Hatter’s was empty. When Jinny appeared, ten minutes late as usual, he sat in the preposterous patent-rocker of 1890, and ventured, “I think we’ve done all the traditional things that lovers do, even moonlight and picnic by a brook, up to a point.” “But we aren’t lovers, Cass.” “We might be.” “M.” “So I want you to come sit on my lap.” “Oh, dear no. That’s very outmoded and reactionary, Judge.” “You sit on my lap!” She did.

He felt the pleasure of her body’s closeness, but he found that he was remarkably uncomfortable. She was heavier than she looked, and there was extreme danger that the rickety chair would fall over sidewise. He wished that he could think of some polite way of telling her that it would be all right now if she went over and sat on the couch. She sighed blissfully and moved closer and his fingers tightened on her knee, and he was at once in ecstasy and conscious that his right leg was cramped. In that mingled state he said quietly, “Darling, you know how I want to marry you.” “M.” “We must be married, and soon.” Silent.

“Will you?” Silent and motionless. Please!” She spoke as quietly as he, with no tint of blushing in her voice. “No, Cass, it’s impossible.” “Why?” “We could never make a go of it. I’m terribly fond of you, maybe I’m a little in love with you, but if we were married it would be too much of a strain.” “Difference in age?” “Oh, you’re not so much older. I’ve almost fallen in love with men much older than you — one antiquated buzzard of fifty, in Pioneer Falls when I was a kid — an evangelist he was, and was he full of It!

You’re really younger than Tracy or Eino or that Curtiss Havock lug; there’s something awfully young and touching about you. But I never could stand your set, not even your sister, though she’s nice, or that caramel sundae, Mr. They’re all a bunch of furnace-regulators and they talk about their Middlewestern Hospitality but none of them invite Mr. Fliegend to their houses.

I couldn’t do it, I honestly couldn’t. But —” She was actually traditional enough to wind up with, “But let’s be the best of friends.” He pushed back her chin with angry fingers and kissed her angrily, and she relaxed to it; a kiss long and confessing. Then, to his shock and to the danger of his flopping over in the patent-rocker, she sprang from his lap and stood smoothing her hair, murmuring, “Somebody —” There were footsteps.

By the time Eino Roskinen came in, Jinny was sedately sitting on the couch and Cass had straightened his summertime blue bow-tie. Jinny twittered, “Oh, Eino, the Judge wants to hear about the new state dairy regulations. He was just asking me.” Eino was distressingly informed and accurate, and he produced a fireworks-display of figures until Cass, to his annoyance, really became interested. But he felt flat and baffled. How could he persuade Jinny of the joys of a life-time of furnace-regulation? He bravely put her out of his mind forever — forever until they sat at the movie and her hand slipped unasked into his.

So the lover started all over again his daily task of being crushed. Chapter 17 He had, for Jinny, dinner at his house, with Rose and Donald Pennloss and Abbott and Hortense Hubbs. Cleo went mad trying to take care of them all. Rose informed Cass, after dinner, “I do like your Marshland girl. She’s the cleverest of all your girls.” “WHAT girls?” “Oh, you know. How would I know? And Cass, she’s so pretty!” Then Cass loved his sister, whom he had not infrequently considered a nuisance.

He had persuaded Jinny to bring in a portfolio of her Fliegend Toy drawings, that his friends might see that Miss Jinny was not only the most beautiful but the most talented young woman living, and he pressed them on Hubbs. Abbott Hubbs was the neurotic, young-old newspaperman who hated newspapers, who drank too much and smoked too many cigarettes and was too snappishly cynical, and in the privacy of his meager home, read poetry aloud to his wife, who loved and slapped and, during hangovers, nursed him. He was always shaky, dropping cigarette ashes on everything: a thin, wizened, black-haired, extraordinarily honest and generous man, a victim of the days of war-bulletins and smug syndicated columns and cameras and high finance in newspapers. Jinny had prepared sketches for a pasteboard political Punch and Judy show. Hubbs looked at her piggish Mussolini, her melancholy Hitler, her bulldog Churchill, her mocking Roosevelt, and he cried, shaking ashes all over the sketches, “These are fine, these are mighty fine.

Jinny, could I take some of ’em and show ’em to Greg Marl, at the paper?” Cass noted, along with his pride in this discovery of Jinny’s genius, that this was the first time that any of his friends had addressed her as “Jinny.” Next day, Gregory Marl, large and soft and diplomatic spoke to him at the Federal Club. “We think well of Miss Marshland’s drawings at the Banner office, Cass, and we’re losing our cartoonist. He’s going to enlist in the Army — thinks America will get into the war, maybe by the middle of 1942.” “YOU don’t believe that, do you, Greg?” “Oh, no, not a chance. We’ll go on furnishing supplies to England, but we’ll never enter the war.” “Maybe we ought to.” “Maybe — but we won’t. But you never can persuade these crazy youngsters like my cartoonist. So I would like to talk to Miss Marshland. Does she understand reproduction processes?” “Must — working at Fliegend’s.” “Confidentially do you know what they’re paying her?” “Uh — thirty-five a week.” “Uh — I guess the Banner could hike that to forty-five.” Cass told himself that he was pleased that she could command all this wealth.

When Jinny went worrying to Lucius Fliegend about the Banner offer, Lucius insisted on her taking this nobler job. On her last afternoon at the factory, in late August, they gave Jinny a riotous party, with speeches by Mr. Ogden Hathawick, the shipping clerk, the society reporter of the Grand Republic Banner, and District Judge Cass Timberlane. Her first cartoon for the Banner depicted an American eagle meditatively though rather acrobatically scratching its beak with a claw, as it gazed at a two-headed eagle with two crowns. Spirited and original, felt Cass, and he made it the occasion for taking her to dinner at the Unstable. Where hitherto she had worked on the Southwest Side, now her office was in the center of town, only three and a half blocks from the court house, and as his fall term opened, Cass was demanding that she lunch with him, at Charley’s or Oscar’s or the Pineland or the Ladies’ Annex of the Federal, at least three days a week.

But she, who a month ago had been a flying-haired working girl with gingerbread and an apple for lunch in a flowery pasteboard box, was now a gray-suited, demurely coiffed young career-woman, and Cass was heavy with worry and a certain jealousy as he found that she had no longer to depend on him to meet the Important Factors in the Commercial and Professional Life of Our City, but was invited to lunch by Abbott Hubbs, Curtiss Havock, Fred Nimbus, the announcer, and Dick Wolke, the jeweler. When he met her now, it was as likely to be she who had the “inside track on the news”— she called it that — news about Norton Trock’s extra-legal speculations or Bernice Claywheel’s lovers or the more secret plans of the Turkish Army. To his tenderness for her Cass added wondering admiration of her knowledge. She knew just how much false hair Madge Dedrick wore, and precisely what plans, in a secluded tent on the African desert, British agents were making....

Hubbs had told her, and Cass mustn’t let it go any further. She reported all her professional triumphs, and Cass was proud but worried, as they walked in the chilly September evenings, with the first of the Northern Lights like a gigantic glass chandelier swaying in the ceiling of the heavens.

He was in a trance of absolute love, and such practicalities as marriage seemed trivial. He wanted nothing except what she might want. His responsibility as a judge, his devotion to his friends, his zest in hunting and swimming, his reverence for learning, these must remain in him, for they were indestructible parts of him, but they were minor and obvious facts, not worth noting, compared with his worship for this slight, swift-walking girl.

But he did not think of her only in terms of divinity, of altars and silver wings. He hoarded a bus-transfer ticket that had been crumpled in her hot hand, a pencil sketch of himself which she had made on a paper napkin.

The Quiet Mind that he had always sought he had found now in Jinny’s cool presence. She was to him not lovely flesh alone, though wholesomely and urgently she was that as well, but peace and reality. With her, he might never accomplish strange adventures, but with her the commonplace life of a Grand Republic lawyer might become as beautiful as sunrise on a prairie slew. The rumor that “Judge Timberlane has fallen for some skirt or other and is going to get hitched” had spread from Ottawa Heights to the distant wilderness fully five minutes’ drive away, where dwelt nobody at all except the clerks and factory workers and repairmen and women and children who made up nine-tenths of the population of Grand Republic.

Into the mind of everyone who wanted everyone else to do something beneficial for all the rest of the people and do it right away came the same inspiration. If Judge Timberlane was going to be married again, and apparently this time to a tempting little piece who would keep him absorbed, then he would be less affable about giving contributions, making speeches, sitting on committees, signing broadsides, and listening to the local Adam Smiths read aloud, from mimeographed sheets, their plans to bring about international peace by having the Lenin Institute of Moscow, the University of Berlin, and the University of Indiana combine. They must get to him at once, and if George Hame had not been agile at the corridor door of the Judge’s chambers, they probably would have done so. They had to be content with writing to him, though they would have preferred to bolt in and shout, “I know you’re a busy man and I just want three minutes of your time,” and then stay for three eloquent hours. Daily Cass had letters from organizations to keep us out of the war, to get us into the war, to support the labor unions, the manufacturers’ unions, the farmers’ unions, and the Dickens Fellowship, and crusades to glorify the American mother or to persuade her to stop talking. He felt guilty about all of them but instead of answering them, now, he went out to lunch with Jinny. He had little of her fantastic imagination, whereby, in her Banner cartoons, Rumania became a sinister cat like her own Isis, but he nourished that imagination in her, along with every happiness and tranquility.

He looked at her cartoons even before the European war headlines or the court notices, and when she had failed, as unfortunately she frequently did, he winced, and prayed for her success. Oh, yes, he did sometimes pray, to a Liberal Congregational God who was interested in world peace and the welfare of share-croppers. He walked with Jinny, they played poker at Miss Hatter’s — Tracy Oleson had the astuteness about straights to be expected from a Wargate Corporation man — and once, when a carnival came to town, Cass and Jinny attended it and shot rifles at clay ducks and had their weights guessed and their photograph taken, arm in arm. In the belief that she had enjoyed somewhat rowdy sports like bowling with Eino and Tracy, Cass conceived it to be his duty to show himself boisterous, and he rode the merry-go-round with her, boldly reaching for the brass ring, while the electors of Radisson County stood in a circle yelling, “Ride ’em, Judge” and “Good boy, Judge; you got it.” He looked triumphantly at Jinny, on a gold and aquamarine unicorn beside him, but her face was compressed and disapproving.

He got off the merry-go-round as soon as possible. “I thought you’d enjoy roughhousing with me,” he puzzled. “It isn’t dignified. Nor for a judge.” “But I thought you didn’t like it when I was too dignified.” “I don’t, but still — People recognizing you and staring at you cutting up monkeyshines! Your own constituents!” “Why, Jinny, I gained five votes for my next election every time they saw me go round!” “Yes — maybe — but still —” He had thought that in Blanche he had encountered all the feminine unreasonableness there was to know.

The student of precedents sighed, “Overruled again.” The first occasion on which they were invited out together was a dinner given by Rose Pennloss, with the playful Zagos, that glittering semi-bachelor Jay Laverick and, to Cass’s quaking, Chris Grau. The Pennloss house was as neat as a shop-window and as comfortable as a hotel and no more affectionate than either. The living-room, scientifically the right size for a family of three, was filled with maple reproductions of Colonial furniture, on a machine-made handmade rug, with a New Art wallpaper depicting, with liberties, the environs of Boston, all highly clean and shining, with one relieving vulgarity in a rubbed red-leather couch on which Don took his naps.

The excellent dinner, cooked by the excellent Swedish maid and served on excellent china that, in a fainting gray, showed the major churches of New England, tasted as the fine maple furniture looked. To Cass, social dinners were likely to be either hellish or dull. This was hellish. But Chris Grau, now first coming on Jinny and him as a recognized couple, was cordial, was easily generous. She asked Cass about the health of Cleo, and she said to Jinny, “I look at your cartoons every day, Miss Marshland. I think they are extremely clever.” As he heard this, Cass suddenly knew that they were not particularly clever, and he felt bleak.

He kept babbling, and Rose had a sorry tale of how little the Reverend Dr. Gadd appreciated her spiritual yearnings, and the Zagos bounced about and waved the stalks of vegetables in the air, but Jinny was as strong as Chris. She was wordless but merry-eyed, and she listened to everybody exactly as though she were listening.

She even kept on smiling when Juliet Zago yelled, “Oh, oopsums, we dot Baked Alaska for dessertums!” Rose had thought not badly of Jinny, and looked at her now with politeness, but she wanted to know quite a few fundamental things about her religious beliefs, her virtue, her opinion of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and how cheaply she could buy clothes. What, fretted Cass, could any man do against the secret hates and grudging acceptances of women? Not cowards in the windy forests of night can find such jumpy fears as any lover. When dinner was over, Rose’s daughter, Valerie, fifteen and fresh and excited, came in from a movie which she and the current boy had been professionally viewing and judging. She clamped on Jinny as the only bright thing in this mildewed company. The two girls, twenty-four and fifteen, slipped away and could be heard laughing in the sun-room.

When Jinny was dragged back, to make up the second table of bridge, she looked at Cass sulkily, and he felt like a wicked old pasha. He was unreasonably irritated that they expected him to be grateful to them for accepting as possibly worthy of them the young Diana clothed in light. An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives ROSE AND DON PENNLOSS Cass Timberlane never at any time expected the marriage of his sister and Don Pennloss to last for three months more. He was sorry; he liked them both, and in their informal and impersonal house he was comfortable.

But Rose had ambitions for what she called “a richer life,” which meant, to her, music and travel and new clothes and being the hostess to visiting lecturers, like Diantha Marl, or living in a New York duplex, like Astra Wargate, sister-inlaw of Webb. Her husband liked making love to her, liked having her around to play rummy and hear his stories. The trouble, or so Rose thought, was that he was common in taste and dull in talk and a small dreariness to look.

She could not endure the heavy monotone of his voice; he quarreled or made love or said the bacon was good or denounced the unions in exactly the same basso, without inflections. Don was, at forty, a grain-dealer, president of the Aldpen Elevator System, and he made nine thousand dollars a year and liked carpentry, and when you asked him if he didn’t think it was a hot afternoon, he told you. Always, invariably though Rose threatened to scream, he had a nap on the red leather couch when he came home from the office, and invariably he announced his purpose by saying, “I think I’ll take a little nap now.” Never a large nap. Never a medium-sized nap. Always a little one. And he snored. On evenings when they were at home alone, he turned on the radio and let it blast away through music, weather reports, lumber-market reports, addresses about South American tariffs, and humorous sketches in which celebrated radio artists said that their rivals — really lovely friends of theirs — were no good at all.

Don rarely heard any of it, as he read his newspaper and The Grain Gazette, but if she wanted to turn it off he was angry. He mourned, “Can’t a man do what he wants to even in his own house? I don’t stay out nights chasing around with a bunch of chippies, and I think I might have some consideration.” Rose frequently told Cass that her liveliest desire was to have Don “stay out nights and chase his head off and let me have one quiet evening to think in.” When Rose had married him sixteen years ago — he was twenty-four and she was only twenty — she had reported to Cass, “Don’s really the most appealing boy, under his apparent solidity. I’m the only one who understands him. He tugs at my heartstrings.” She complained about Don now rather too much; usually to Cass but not rarely to an intimate lunch of women at the Heather Club. But she never complained to her daughter, Valerie, for whom she planned vicarious careers as an actress or a newspaperwoman. She said to Cass, in effect, “I want to live in New York and get to know all the intellectuals.

Chapter 18 This October week, Cass had a wriggling heap of divorces in his court, along with a good clean burglary and one lively carnal-knowledge case. He worked late in his chambers or at home, and all week he did not once see Jinny. Saturday, he went reluctantly off on what was supposed to be a joyful duck-hunting stag, at Dr. Drover’s log hunting lodge near Lake Vermilion. “Roy’s Retreat” had cost a good many appendectomies for its varnished logs, its fieldstone fireplace, and many a humble tonsil had gladly sacrificed itself for the Navajo blankets, the Mexican pottery, the rack of English shotguns, and the hotel-size refrigerator. The six hunters in the party were out on the duck-pass at four in the morning on the day after their arrival.

They set out the decoys and humped over, shivering, in the rain, watching the bleary water, the thin tamaracks, as a wet dawn crawled over the swamp of faded reeds. Drover had two bottles of brandy with him, and when they drove back to the lodge for breakfast, at nine, they had only five mallards, but they had six beautiful jags. Thereafter, though Roy would occasionally go out and repel some savage duck that seemed to menace them, they drank and played poker and talked about women, and not about women in the kitchen or the polling-booth. The others were gentler men than Roy; they did not roar and they liked novels and the theater, yet all of them, except Cass and Gerald Lent, who had once lived in Europe and who was now the kept husband and social secretary of Della Wargate Lent, belonged to the Big Boys, the solid and hearty fellows, contemptuous of tenderness toward any women except their mothers and their daughters, and their talk about women, as about taxation, marched with the tread of infantry on parade. Though the biggest and by far the strongest among them, Cass often had an exasperating feeling of inferiority to these virile captains. Like a small boy among scornful elder brothers, he babbled things he did not especially want to say, he interrupted them with uneasy questions that he did not particularly want answered. He told wavering anecdotes about the court room, and even during them he thought, “This is a very dull story!” He chattered about Russia, about Judge Blackstaff, about the way to cook cabbage, about every small subject that was sacred to him just now because he had been discussing it with Jinny.

Roy belched, “Oh, shut up, Cass, you’re just gossiping. You get me down.

How the hell a pansy like you, that plays the flute and reads poetry and is nuts about every sixteen-year-old gal that hits town and even gets chummy with these Farmer–Labor agitators that want to overthrow the Government — how come you can still be the best shot in town is clean beyond me. By God, THAT’S injustice!” That was Roy’s way of showing his affection — and of showing what he really thought.

In their talk of women, Roy and Greg Marl said nothing about their own wives, and Bradd Criley had none, but Harley Bozard jeered that his spouse, Karen, was completely frigid, and Marl let them know how successfully, on a Pullman sleeper, he had seduced the wife of a college president. Gerald Lent ruefully reported, “If any of you boys think it’s a cinch to be idle and live on a rich wife like Della, that expects you to yes her relatives and to get hot at two A.M., I wish you’d try it. I ever tell you about the time I had a row with her before I went off to the Arrowhead?

When I came home, she’d put all my pictures and clothes and the chest that I bought in Florence out on the lawn, in the rain. The meanest job I know of is to be the little husband in the home, waiting for the big manly wife to come from work. No ditch-digger earns his keep as hard as I do. I wonder when I’ll walk out on dear Della.

She’ll be so surprised! Hey, don’t be so tightwad with that hootch.” Through it all the monkish Cass wanted only to repeat the awfully bright things his Jinny had said.

He dared not even question her employer, Greg Marl, about her progress as a cartoonist, lest the independent young woman hear of it and think that he was interfering. He was certain that these were his good friends and that he was madly enjoying the drinking and the poker, but when they were all out on the lake, one day earlier than he had intended to go, he left a highly perjured note for them and drove back, on a red-gold Minnesota October afternoon, to Grand Republic — to Jinny.

On the way, from a booth in a country store, he telephoned to her, “Starting home — dine with me tonight?” She was at the Banner office, where ordinarily she was forbiddingly businesslike, but now she squealed, “Darling! I didn’t expect you till tomorrow. I’m so glad!” “I had a fine time hunting with the boys.” “The boys! Grrrr!” “I thought maybe I never would come home.” “So did I. I was scared.” “Would you really care if I didn’t come back?” “I think I’d just die. No, no, I wouldn’t!

But —” “Darling, I’m so — We dine, then?” “Of course. Why not?” “Well — you know — I was afraid you might have a date with Eino or Tracy or Abbott Hubbs.” “Those brats! And if I did — so what!” “You’d break it for me?” By now, the ardor that in her surprise Jinny had betrayed had grown more cautious, but she was still friendly as she answered, “I might think about it, anyway.” “I’ll be at Miss Hatter’s at seven, then.” “I’ll be all ready. Seven sharp.” Which, in Jinny’s time-schedule, meant ten minutes past seven, not very sharp. But for once, when he drove up she was out on a flimsy sort of balcony, apparently ready, and she waved to him with a thrilling “Be right down!” He then waited, in his car, for seven minutes. Four of them he devoted to regretfully watching his fervor cool off, and three to wondering whether she had, upstairs there, some rat of a suitor whom she did not wish him to see. As she came out of the covered outside stairway, his rapture sprang up again, but now it was Jinny who was reasonlessly cool.

She said “Hello” civilly, and nothing more, and slipped around the car and into it before he could give her his hand. The fatuous lover fretted, as he drove, “I did miss you so, Jinny. No fun with the ducks.

You miss me?” “I guess I did. But I’ve been awful busy.” He had the sense to be still, on their way to the Unstable, or to mutter about ducks, a subject devoid (in their case) of emotional strain, and to tell her that Greg Marl had said, “Good little draftsman, Jinny, and a good sport in the office.” Jinny glowed with “Oh, did he?” Yet she was morose again when they faced the excellent whitefish and fried apples at the Unstable, and our poor friend was no longer wise. He protested, “What’s the trouble, lamb?” “Trouble? I don’t know what you mean by ‘trouble’!” “Well, you’re so silent —” “Good heavens, can’t I ever be quiet a moment without being accused of being deliberately unpleasant?” “I didn’t say you were unpleasant! I never even thought such a —” “Well, you certainly looked as if you did.” “Oh, Jinny, dear Jinny, what are you quarreling about?” “I? Oh, this is too much!

I get so irritated when you watch me and spy on me and try to find fault with every little thing that I do or don’t do and try and show how superior and — I DO!” He could only look at her like a mournful hound surprised by the spitting of his friend the household kitten. Jinny ran down. She laughed, she cried for a second — a tear absurdly dribbled down her immaculate nose — and she whimpered: “It’s my old trick. You’ll have to beat me.” “M.” “When I was a kid, whenever I wanted something terribly and then got it, so I was all excited and grateful — like Christmas or a birthday or finally Mother got a dress for me that I was crazy about — then I was scared to let on how happy I was, or maybe I was afraid it would vanish if I believed in it too hard and showed how much I wanted it.

So I’d fly off into a horrible little tantrum, and the gladder I’d been, the worse I’d behave. Believe me, it didn’t last long, it never did, and if Dad and Mother could just get themselves to ignore it, I’d be all right. But it did used to surprise them and hurt them. And now — I’m not so violent, but I’m doing something like that to you, and you’re so sweet!

I’ve been vixenish tonight just because I WAS glad you’d come back early! Do you think you can put up with it? I know I’ll do it again. Can you endure such a horrible, childish frenzy?” Why, of course he could. Meant nothing at all.

Just nerves and tiredness, from all her energy — Get right over it. Fact, he’d enjoy her tantrums, if she was.