“Why not? You'd be proud to shake hands with a great surgeon, just after he'd been carving up people's bellies.”
She sought to regain her afternoon's calm of maturity. “Yes. You're right. I want—oh, my dear, do you know how much I want to like the people you like? I want to see people as they are.”
“Well, don't forget to see people as other folks see them as they are! They have the stuff. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here? Born and brought up here!”
“Bresnahan?”
“Yes—you know—president of the Velvet Motor Company of Boston, Mass.—make the Velvet Twelve—biggest automobile factory in New England.”
“I think I've heard of him.”
“Sure you have. Why, he's a millionaire several times over! Well, Perce comes back here for the black-bass fishing almost every summer, and he says if he could get away from business, he'd rather live here than in Boston or New York or any of those places. HE doesn't mind Chet's undertaking.”
“Please! I'll—I'll like everybody! I'll be the community sunbeam!”
He led her to the Dawsons.
Luke Dawson, lender of money on mortgages, owner of Northern cut-over land, was a hesitant man in unpressed soft gray clothes, with bulging eyes in a milky face. His wife had bleached cheeks, bleached hair, bleached voice, and a bleached manner. She wore her expensive green frock, with its passementeried bosom, bead tassels, and gaps between the buttons down the back, as though she had bought it second-hand and was afraid of meeting the former owner. They were shy. It was “Professor” George Edwin Mott, superintendent of schools, a Chinese mandarin turned brown, who held Carol's hand and made her welcome.