Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/367

 was not only a young lady of delicate reservations but also a singer; in fact, she was going to the West Indies to preserve the wonders of primitive art for reverent posterity in the native ballads she would collect and sing to a delighted public—if only she learned how to sing.

She studied Gustaf Sondelius. He was a silly person, not in the least like the gentlemanly insurance-agents and office-managers she was accustomed to meet at the country club, and what was worse, he did not ask her opinions on art and good form. His stories about generals and that sort of people could be discounted as lies, for did he not associate with grimy engineers? He needed some of her gentle but merry chiding.

When they stood together at the rail and he chanted in his ludicrous up-and-down Swedish sing-song that it was a fine evening, she remarked, "Well, Mr. Roughneck, have you been up to something smart again to-day? Or have you been giving somebody else a chance to talk, for once?"

She was placidly astonished when he clumped away with none of the obedient reverence which any example of cultured American womanhood has a right to expect from all males, even foreigners.

Sondelius came to Martin lamenting, "Slim—if I may call you so, like Terry—I think you and your Gottlieb are right. There is no use saving fools. It's a great mistake to be natural. One should always be a stuffed shirt, like old Tubbs. Then one would have respect even from artistic New Jersey spinsters How strange is conceit! That I who have been cursed and beaten by so many Great Ones, who was once led out to be shot in a Turkish prison, should never have been annoyed by them as by this smug wench. Ah, smugness! That is the enemy!"

Apparently he recovered from Miss Gwilliam. He was seen arguing with the ship's doctor about sutures in negro skulls, and he invented a game of deck cricket. But one evening when he sat reading in the "social hall," stooped over, wearing betraying spectacles and his mouth puckered, Martin walked past the window and incredulously saw that Sondelius was growing old.

As he sat by Leora in a deck-chair, Martin studied her, really looked at her pale profile, after years when she had