They dined together twice in two weeks, and only twice in that time, though she telephoned to him, did Martin see his honest affianced, Madeline.
He came to know all of Leora’s background. Her bedridden grand-aunt in Zenith, who was her excuse for coming so far to take hospital training. The hamlet of Wheatsylvania, North Dakota; one street of shanties with the red grain-elevators at the end. Her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer, sometimes known as Jackass Tozer; owner of the bank, of the creamery, and an elevator, therefore the chief person in town; pious at Wednesday evening prayer-meeting, fussing over every penny he gave to Leora or her mother. Bert Tozer, her brother; squirrel teeth, a gold eye-glass chain over his ear, cashier and all the rest of the staff in the one-room bank owned by his father. The chicken salad and coffee suppers at the United Brethren Church; German Lutheran farmers singing ancient Teutonic hymns; the Hollanders, the Bohemians and Poles. And round about the village, the living wheat, arched above by tremendous clouds. He saw Leora, always an “odd child,” doing obediently enough the flat household tasks but keeping snug the belief that some day she would find a youngster with whom, in whatever danger or poverty, she would behold all the colored world.
It was at the end of her hesitating effort to make him see her childhood that he cried, “Darling, you don’t have to tell me about you. I’ve always known you. I’m not going to let you go, no matter what. You’re going to marry me—”
They said it with clasping hands, confessing eyes, in that blatant restaurant. Her first words were:
“I want to call you ‘Sandy.’ Why do I? I don’t know why. You’re as unsandy as can be, but somehow ‘Sandy’ means you to me and— Oh, my dear, I do like you!”
Martin went home engaged to two girls at once.
IV
He had promised to see Madeline the next morning.
By any canon of respectable behavior he should have felt like a low dog; he assured himself that he must feel like a low dog; but he could not bring it off. He thought of Madeline’s pathetic enthusiasms: her “Provençal pleasaunce” and the limp-leather volumes of poetry which she patted with fond finger-tips; of the tie she had bought for him, and her pride in his hair when he brushed it like the patent-leather heroes in magazine illustrations. He mourned that he had sinned against loyalty. But his agitation broke against the solidity of his union with Leora. Her companionship released his soul. Even when, as advocate for Madeline, he pleaded that Leora was a trivial young woman who probably chewed gum in private and certainly was careless about her nails in public, her commonness was dear to the commonness that was in himself, valid as ambition or reverence, an earthy base to her gaiety as it was to his nervous scientific curiosity.
He was absent-minded in the laboratory, that fatal next day. Gottlieb had twice to ask him whether he had prepared the new batch of medium, and Gottlieb was an autocrat, sterner with his favorites than with the ruck of students. He snarled, “Arrowsmith, you are a moon-calf! My God, am I to spend my life with Dummköpfe? I cannot be always alone, Martin! Are you going to fail me? Two, three days now you haf not been keen about work.”