to decent normal people. . . . Failure. Disloyalty. In medical school, in private practise, in his bullying health administration. Now again?
He urged, "This pep and heartiness stuff of Pickerbaugh's is exactly the thing to get across to the majority of people the scientific discoveries of the Max Gottliebs. What do I care how much Pickerbaugh gases before conventions of Sunday School superintendents and other morons, as long as he lets me alone and lets me do my work in the lab and dairy inspection?"
He pumped up enthusiasm and came quite cheerfully and confidently into the shabby, high-ceilinged hotel bedroom where Leora sat in a rocker by the window.
"Well?" she said.
"It's fine—gave me fine welcome. And they want us to come to dinner, to-morrow evening."
"What's he like?"
"Oh, he's awfully optimistic—he puts things over—he—Oh, Leora, am I going to be a sour, cranky, unpopular, rotten failure again?"
His head was buried in her lap and he clung to her affection, the one reality in a world of chattering ghosts.
When the maples fluttered beneath their window in the breeze that sprang up with the beginning of twilight, when the amiable citizens of Nautilus had driven home to supper in their shaky Fords, Leora had persuaded him that Pickerbaugh's flamboyance would not interfere with his own work, that in any case they would not remain in Nautilus forever, that he was impatient, and that she loved him dearly. So they descended to supper, an old-fashioned Iowa supper with corn fritters and many little dishes which were of interest after the loving but misinformed cooking of Leora, and they went to the movies and held hands and were not ill content.
The next day Dr. Pickerbaugh was busier and less buoyant. He gave Martin a notion of the details of his work.
Martin had thought of himself, freed from tinkering over cut fingers and ear-aches, as spending ecstatic days in the laboratory, emerging only to battle with factory-owners who defied sanitation. But he found that it was impossible to de-
