{ { img float|file=P 33 Redbook vol37--Ladies' Ways--I doe' care whether she's dead or isn't.png| width=250px| align=right|caption={ { sm|“I doe' care 'nything about it,” she said coldly. “I doe' care whether she's dead or whether she isn't.”'}}}} WO young people, just out of college and pleasing to the eye, ought to appreciate the advantage of living across the street from each other; but Miss Muriel Eliot's mood, that summer, was so advanced and intellectual that she found all round about her only a cultural desert, utterly savorless. This was her own definition of her surroundings, and when she expressed herself thus impressively to Mr. Renfrew Mears, the young gentleman who lived directly opposite her, he was granted little choice but to suppose himself included among the unspiced vacancies she mentioned. “The whole deadly environment crushes me,” she told him, as they paused at her gate on returning from a walk. “This town is really a base thing.”
“Do you think so, Muriel?” he said. “Well, I don't know; around here it's a right pleasant place to live—nice big yards and trees and all. And you know the population is increasing by fifteen to twenty thousand every year. The papers say—”
“Listen, Renfrew,” she interrupted, and then said deliberately: “It is a cultural desert, utterly savorless!”
When she had spoken in this way, the first feeling of young Mr. Mears appeared to be one of admiration, and perhaps she understood, or even expected, that some such sensation on his part would be inevitable, for she allowed her eyes to remain uplifted gloomily toward the summer sky above them, so that he might look at her a little while without her seeming to know it. Then she repeated slowly, with a slight shake of the head: “Yes—a cultural desert, utterly savorless!”
But Renfrew now became uneasy. “You mean the looks of he place and the—”
“I mean the whole environment,” she said. “These Victorian houses with their Victorian interiors and the Victorian thoughts of the people that live in 'em. It's all, all Victorian!”
“'Victorian?'” said Renfrew doubtfully, for he was far from certain of her meaning. His vague impression was that the word might in some remote way bear upon an issue of bonds with which he had some recent familiarity through an inheritance from his grandfather. “You think it's—Victorian—do you, Muriel?” he thought best to inquire.
“Absolutely!” she said. “Culturally it's a Victorian desert and utterly savorless.”
“But you don't mean all of it?” he ventured, being now. certain that “Victorian” meant something unfavorable. “That is, not the people?”
“It's the people I'm talking about,” explained Muriel coldly.
“Well—but not all of 'em?”
“Yes, everybody!”
“You don't mean every last one of 'em, though, do you, Muriel?” he asked plaintively.
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, but look here,” he said. “You couldn't mean that. It would include your own family, and all your old family neighbors. Why, it might include some of your very best friends!”
She sighed. “Since I've come home, I've felt that really I had nothing in common with a single soul in the place. I don't live on the same plane. I don't think the same thoughts. I don't speak the same language.”
He appeared to swallow a little air and to find some difficulty in doing so. “I know,” he said, “you do talk a lot more intellectually than the rest of us dubs around here. It's because you've got a more intellectual nature, and everything like that; and that's one of the reasons I look up to you the way I do. I always used to think that a girl that usually had an intellectual nature had to wear horn spectacles and have her dress higher on one side than it was on the other, and wear these sensible-looking shoes, and everything like that. But you've showed me I was mistaken, Muriel. You made me see that a girl could have an intellectual nature and be prettier and dress than all the brainless ones put together. But what worries me is—” He paused uncomfortably, and repeated, “What worries me is—” then paused again, and, with his head on one side, moved his forefinger to and fro between his collar and his neck as if he felt a serious tightness there.
“Well?” Muriel said, after waiting for some time. “Do you wish me to understand it's your neckwear that worries you, Renfrew?”
“No,” he said absently, and frowning in his pained earnestness, again repeated: “What worries me is—” Once more he stopped.
“Well, well!”
“It's simply this,” he said. “What worries me is simply this. It's like this. For instance, do you think it's absolutely necessary for them both to have an intellectual nature?”
“Both?'” she inquired. “What do you mean—'both?'”