Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/88

 and promised to bring with her a probationer-nurse named Nelly Byers, that Martin began to brood:

"Wonder if he did have a headache last night?

"Wonder if somebody gave him the tickets?

"Why didn't he ask Dad Silva's daughter to go with us? Does he think Leora is some tart I've picked up?

"Sure, he never really quarrels with anybody—wants to keep us all friendly, so we'll send him surgical patients some day when we're hick G. P.'s and he's a Great and Only.

"Why did I crawl down so meekly?

"I don't care! If Leora enjoys it— Me personally, I don't care two hoots for all this trotting around— Though of course it isn't so bad to see pretty women in fine clothes, and be dressed as good as anybody— Oh, I don't know!"

In the slightly Midwestern city of Zenith, the appearance of a play "with the original New York cast" was an event. (What play it was did not much matter.) The Dodsworth Theatre was splendid with the aristocracy from the big houses on Royal Ridge. Leora and Nelly Byers admired the bloods —graduates of Yale and Harvard and Princeton, lawyers and bankers, motor-manufacturers and inheritors of real estate, virtuosi of golf, familiars of New York—who with their shrill and glistening women occupied the front rows. Miss Byers pointed out the Dodsworths, who were often mentioned in Town Topics.

Leora and Miss Byers bounced with admiration of the hero when he refused the governorship; Martin worried because the heroine was prettier than Leora; and Angus Duer (who gave an appearance of knowing all about plays without having seen more than half a dozen in his life) admitted that the set depicting "Jack Vanduzen's Camp in the Adirondacks: Sunset, the Next Day" was really very nice.

Martin was in a mood of determined hospitality. He was going to give them supper and that was all there was to it. Miss Byers explained that they had to be in the hospital by a quarter after eleven, but Leora said lazily, "Oh, I don't care. I'll slip in through a window. If you're there in the morning, the Old Cat can't prove you got in late." Shaking her head at this lying wickedness, Miss Byers fled to a trolley car, while