Surely, he had a volume of verse hidden under the old clothes in his trunk. She could have wished that he was even an inventor. She shuddered at the thought of another attempt to set up a shaft to American letters. The jovial doctor had shaken his fat sides at her. Suddenly she was inspired with forethought. She asked him if he had ever written any verse. He said that once he had been tempted to toss a firebrand into an enemy's wheat-rick, but had never ruined a sheet with measured lines. She saw that he had caught the spirit of the paragrapher's fling. So this fear was put aside; still, he must be a genius of some sort—an inventor, perhaps. She asked if he had ever invented anything, and he answered, "Yes, a lie." This stimulated her interest in him. He was so frank, so refreshing. She had heard that a laborer could be quaintly entertaining. She contrasted him with the numerous men of her acquaintance, men whose sentences were as dried herbs, the sap and the fragrance gone. She was weary of the doctor's shop-talk, the impoverished blood of conversation, the dislocated joint of utterance. She would have welcomed track talk with a race-horse starter. And the bluntness of this man from the hillside was invigorating. His words were not dry herbs, but fresh pennyroyal, sharp with scent. Milford smiled at her, wishing that she were locked among her husband's jars of pickled atrocities. He wanted to talk silliness with the girl.
The other boarders came out, George and his wife among them. George handed Milford a cigar, telling him to light it,—that the ladies did not object to smoking.
"You haven't asked them," said his wife.
"Well, I know they don't."
"There, don't you see? Mrs. Dorch is moving off."
George grinned. "Her husband is a great smoker, and she don't want to be reminded of home," he said.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," she replied.
"I can't afford it. I'm too much loser."
Mrs. Goodwin asked Gunhild to walk with her. She looked at Milford, but he lost his nerve and did not offer to go with them.
"That was a bid," said George. His wife reprimanded him. "It is a wonder you didn't offer to go," she declared. "But let us take a walk," she added.