Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/154



afternoon they drove in the flapping buggy across the long undulations of the prairie. To their wandering there was no barrier, neither lake nor mountain nor factory-bristling city, and the breeze about them was flowing sunshine.

Martin cried to Leora, "I feel as if all the Zenith dust and hospital lint were washed out of my lungs. Dakota. Real man's country. Frontier. Opportunity. America!"

From the thick swale the young prairie chickens rose. As he watched them sweep across the wheat, his sun-drowsed spirit was part of the great land, and he was almost freed of the impatience with which he had started out from Wheatsylvania.

"If you're going driving, don't forget that supper is six o'clock sharp," Mrs. Tozer had said, smiling to sugar-coat it.

On Main Street, Mr. Tozer waved to them and shouted, "Be back by six. Supper at six o'clock sharp."

Bert Tozer ran out from the bank, like a country schoolmaster skipping from a one-room schoolhouse, and cackled, "Say, you folks better not forget to be back at six o'clock for supper or the Old Man'll have a fit. He'll expect you for supper at six o'clock sharp, and when he says six o'clock sharp, he means six o'clock sharp, and not five minutes past six!"

"Now that," observed Leora, "is funny, because in my twenty-two years in Wheatsylvania I remember three different times when supper was as late as seven minutes after six. Let's get out of this, Sandy I wonder were we so wise to live with the family and save money?"

Before they had escaped from the not very extensive limits of Wheatsylvania they passed Ada Quist, the future Mrs. Bert Tozer, and through the lazy air they heard her voice slashing: "Better be home by six."

Martin would be heroic. "We'll by golly get back when we're by golly good and ready!" he said to Leora; but on them both was the cumulative dread of the fussing voices, beyond every breezy prospect was the order, "Be back at six sharp"; and they whipped up to arrive at eleven minutes to six, as Mr. Tozer was 144