"
He dropped into the shrieking desk-chair. He looked squarely at her; she
was conscious of the pupils of his eyes; of the fact that he was a man,
and lonely. They were embarrassed. They elaborately glanced away, and
were relieved as he went on:
"The diagnosis of my Village Virus is simple enough. I was born in an
Ohio town about the same size as Gopher Prairie, and much less
friendly. It'd had more generations in which to form an oligarchy of
respectability. Here, a stranger is taken in if he is correct, if he
likes hunting and motoring and God and our Senator. There, we didn't
take in even our own till we had contemptuously got used to them. It
was a red-brick Ohio town, and the trees made it damp, and it smelled of
rotten apples. The country wasn't like our lakes and prairie. There were
small stuffy corn-fields and brick-yards and greasy oil-wells.
"I went to a denominational college and learned that since dictating
the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has
never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.
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