IT was a frail¹ and blue and lonely Carol who trotted² to the flat of the Johnson Marburys for Sunday evening supper. Mrs. Marbury was a neighbor and friend of Carol’s sister; Mr. Marbury a traveling representative of an insurance company. They made a specialty³ of sandwich-salad-coffee lap suppers, and they regarded Carol as their literary and artistic⁴ representative. She was the one who could be depended upon to appreciate the Caruso phonograph record, and the Chinese lantern which Mr. Marbury had brought back as his present from San Francisco. Carol found the Marburys admiring and therefore admirable.
This September Sunday evening she wore a net frock with a pale pink lining⁵. A nap had soothed⁶ away the faint lines of tiredness beside her eyes. She was young, naive⁷, stimulated⁸ by the coolness. She flung her coat at the chair in the hall of the flat, and exploded into the green-plush living-room. The familiar group were trying to be conversational⁹. She saw Mr. Marbury, a woman teacher of gymnastics in a high school, a chief clerk from the Great Northern Railway offices, a young lawyer. But there was also a stranger, a thick tall man of thirty-six or — seven, with stolid¹⁰ brown hair, lips used to giving orders, eyes which followed everything good-naturedly, and clothes which you could never quite remember.
Mr. Marbury boomed, “Carol, come over here and meet Doc Kennicott — Dr. Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie. He does all our insurance-examining up in that neck of the woods, and they do say he’s some doctor!”

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