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 farmhouses and farm people Fording to and from little crossroads towns which looked idyllic, rather, whatever the facts may be.

"Has Sinclair Lewis spoiled this sort of landscape for you?" Doris asked me suddenly, as though reading my mind.

"I'm damned if he has for me!" I said sincerely.

She brought her small hands together. "Good! Nor has he for me. Poor fellow, if he really feels as he writes, what a world he lives in! I imagine him riding through lovely country like this with shades drawn or else emitting low, melancholy moans as each habitation heaves in sight. Now I like to think of Willa Cather's people when we're whistling through tank towns."

"So do I," I said, agreeing again. "They're there; they're hearing the whistle. You meet 'em. You ever been in a tank town?"

"When I was a child, I lived in one," she told me; "when father was serving his second term in the 'long house' at Leavenworth."

She might have said his second term in the House of Congress, from the way she spoke. No shame in it at all. Yet it brought me back to business. For a minute she had been just