Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/56

 "She's the only girl in the graduate school that's got any pep. The others just sit around and talk, and she gets up the best parties—"

"Any kissing parties?"

"Now you look here! I'll be getting sore, first thing you know! You and I are roughnecks, but Madeline Fox—she's like Angus Duer, some ways. I realize all the stuff we're missing: music and literature, yes, and decent clothes, too—no harm to dressing well—"

"That's just what I was tellin' you! She'll have you all dolled up in a Prince Albert and a boiled shirt, diagnosing everything as rich-widowitis. How you can fall for that four-flushing dame— Where's your control?"

Clif's opposition stirred him to consider Madeline not merely with a sly and avaricious interest but with a dramatic conviction that he longed to marry her.

Few women can for long periods keep from trying to Improve their men, and To Improve means to change a person from what he is, whatever that may be, into something else. Girls like Madeline Fox, artistic young women who do not work at it, cannot be restrained from Improving for more than a day at a time. The moment the urgent Martin showed that he was stirred by her graces, she went at his clothes—his corduroys and soft collars and eccentric old gray felt hat—at his vocabulary and his taste in fiction, with new and more patronizing vigor. Her sketchy way of saying, "Why, of course everybody knows that Emerson was the greatest thinker" irritated him the more in contrast to Gottlieb's dark patience.

"Oh, let me alone!" he hurled at her. "You're the nicest thing the Lord ever made, when you stick to things you know about, but when you spring your ideas on politics and chemotherapy— Darn it, quit bullying me! I guess you're right about slang. I'll cut out all this junk about 'feeding your face' and so on. But I will not put on a hard-boiled collar! I won't!"

He might never have proposed to her but for the spring evening on the roof.

She used the flat roof of her apartment-house as a garden. She had set out one box of geraniums and a cast-iron bench