Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/456

 no doubt less human—he saw ahead of him innumerous inquiries into chemotherapy and immunity; enough adventures to keep him busy for decades.

It seemed to him that this was the first spring he had ever seen and tasted. He learned to dive into the lake, though the first plunge was an agony of fiery cold. They fished before breakfast, they supped at a table under the oaks, they tramped twenty miles on end, they had bluejays and squirrels for interested neighbors; and when they had worked all night, they came out to find serene dawn lifting across the sleeping lake.

Martin felt sun-soaked and deep of chest, and always he hummed.

And one day he peeped out, beneath his new horn-rimmed almost-middle-aged glasses, to see a gigantic motor crawling up their woods road. From the car, jolly and competent in tweeds, stepped Joyce.

He wanted to flee through the back door of the laboratory shanty. Reluctantly he edged out to meet her.

"It's a sweet place, really!" she said, and amiably kissed him. "Let's walk down by the lake."

In a stilly place of ripples and birch boughs, he was moved to grip her shoulders.

She cried, "Darling, I have missed you! You're wrong about lots of things, but you're right about this—you must work, and not be disturbed by a lot of silly people. Do you like my tweeds? Don't they look wildernessy? You see, I've come to stay! I'll build a house near here; perhaps right across the lake. Yes. That will make a sweet place, over there on that sort of little plateau, if I can get the land—probably some horrid tight-fisted old farmer owns it. Can't you just see it: a wide low house, with enormous verandas and red awnings—"

"And visitors coming?"

"I suppose so. Sometimes. Why?"

Desperately, "Joyce, I do love you. I want awfully, just now, to kiss you properly. But I will not have you bringing a lot of people—and there'd probably be a rotten noisy motor launch. Make our lab a joke. Roadhouse. New sensation. Why, Terry would go crazy! You are lovely! But you want a playmate, and I want to work. I'm afraid you can't stay. No."

"And our son is to be left without your care?"