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The other three looked at him with mild, fond wonder.

Stuyv said meekly, “Why, what a low idea! Listen, Whit, we’re tickled to death you’ve had a chance to do something besides keep the pot boiling. Must have been swell to have a chance at the real Europe and art. We’ve all done pretty well, but I guess any one of us would give his left leg to be able to sit down on the Champs lyses and take time to figure out what it’s all about. ”

Then Whit knew that these were his own people. He blurted, “Honestly, Stuyv, you mean to say you’ve envied me? Well, it’s a grand town, Paris. And some great eggs there. And even some guys that can paint. But me, I’m no good!”

“Nonsense! Look, Whit, you have no idea what this money-grubbing is. Boy, you’re lucky! And don’t stay he
re! Don’t let the dollars get you! Don’t let all these babies with their promises of millions catch you! Beat it back to Paris. Culture, that’s the new note!”

“Urghhg!” observed Whit.

“You bet,” said Tim Clark.

Tim Clark had a sister, and the name of that sister was Betty.

Whit Dibble remembered her as a sub-flapper, always going off to be “finished” somewhere in the East. She was a Young Lady of twenty-odd now, and even to Whit’s professionally artistic eye it seemed that her hair, sleek as a new-polished range, was interesting. They danced together, and looked at each other with a fury of traditional dislike.

Midmost of that dance Whit observed, “Betty, Darlingest!”

“Yeah?”

“Let’s go out and sit on the lawn. ”

“Why?”

“I want to find out why you hate me. ”

“Hm. The lawn. I imagine it takes a training in Yale athletics and Paris artisticking to be so frank. Usually the kits start out with a suggestion of the club porch and the handsome modernist reed chairs and thenthey suggest the lawn and ‘Oh, Greta, so charm to meet you’ afterwards!”

But during these intolerabilities Betty had swayed with him to the long high-pillared veranda, where they crouched together on a chintz-covered glider.

Whit tried to throw himself into what he conceived, largely from novels, to be Betty’s youthful era. He murmured: “Kiddo, where have you been all my life?”

From Betty’s end of the glider, a coolness like the long wet stretches of the golf course; a silence; then a very little voice:

“Whit, my child, you have been away too long! It’s a year now, at least, since anyone—I mean anyone you could know—has said ‘Where have you been all my life?’ Listen, dear! The worst thing about anybody’s going artistic, like you, is that they’re always so ashamed of it. Jiminy! Your revered father and the Onward and Upward Bookshop have grabbed off Culture for keeps in this town. And yet—

“Dear, I think that somewhere there must be people who do all these darn’ arts without either being ashamed of ’em—like you, you poor fish!—or thinking they make the nice gilded cornice on the skyscraper, like your dad. Dear, let’s us be US. Cultured or hoboes, or both. G’night!”

She had fled before he could spring up and be wise in the manner of Isadora and Miles O’Sullivan, or the more portentous manner of T. Jefferson Dibble.

Yet, irritably longing all the while for Betty Clark, he had a tremendous time that night at the country club, on the land where his grandfather had once grown corn.

What did they know, there in Paris? What did either Isadora or Miles O’Sullivan know of those deep provincialisms, smelling always of the cornfields, which were in him? For the first time since he had left Paris, Whit felt that in himself might be some greatness.