from one liaison to the next? Mr. Lewis does not appear to think so. Dr. Kennicott had, before his marriage, been around "with the boys," and perhaps he never became utterly incapable of a slip; but I doubt whether Mr. Lewis has been guilty of any important suppression of the truth in declaring that the doctor's mind was absorbed in his five hobbies: medicine, land-investment, Carol, motoring, and hunting. As for Carol—that well-turned, dynamic, rather intensely feminine, too taut young woman, whom I meet with greater frequency each year, flinging her coat into chairs and "exploding" into other living rooms than those of Gopher Prairie, to the disgust of the stodgy and to the delight and the refreshment of the others—she might be more simply happy or more simply miserable if the sex instincts were stronger in her; if she could content herself with being either mother, wife or mistress; if she could repeat ex animo that sweet and wistfully cadenced lime of Byron's which, alas, I have forgotten, to the effect that love is only an incident in a man's life—"'tis a woman's whole existence"—something like that.
When I found that I had forgotten the exact words of this phrase, which in my youth I have heard a hundred times on plaintive lips, I went to some friends one generation older than mine, and confidently asked them to recall it. I wanted it, as you see, to conclude the preceding paragraph. But they too, had forgotten it, or they remember it, rather, as I remember it—as something that people
