Of all the men she met she preferred Roger Patton, who was a frequent visitor at the house. He never again alluded to the Ibsenesque tendency of the populace, but when he came in one day and found her curled upon the sofa bent over "Peer Gynt" he laughed and told her to forget what he'd said--that it was all rot. They had been walking homeward between mounds of high-piled snow and under a sun which Sally Carrol scarcely recognized. They passed a little girl done up in gray wool until she resembled a small Teddy bear, and Sally Carrol could not resist a gasp of maternal appreciation. "Look! Harry!" "What?" "That little girl--did you see her face?" "Yes, why?" "It was red as a little strawberry. Oh, she was cute!" "Why, your own face is almost as red as that already! Everybody's healthy here. We're out in the cold as soon as we're old enough to walk. Wonderful climate!" She looked at him and had to agree. He was mighty healthy-looking; so was his brother. And she had noticed the new red in her own cheeks that very morning. Suddenly their glances were caught and held, and they stared for a moment at the street-corner ahead of them. A man was standing there, his knees bent, his eyes gazing upward with a tense expression as though he were about to make a leap toward the chilly sky. And then they both exploded into a shout of laughter, for coming closer they discovered it had been a ludicrous momentary illusion produced by the extreme bagginess of the man's trousers. "Reckon that's one on us," she laughed. "He must be Southerner, judging by those trousers," suggested Harry mischievously. "Why, Harry!" Her surprised look must have irritated him. "Those damn Southerners!" Sally Carrol's eyes flashed. "Don't call 'em that." "I'm sorry, dear," said Harry, malignantly apologetic, "but you know what I think of them. They're sort of--sort of degenerates--not at all like the old Southerners. They've lived so long down there with all the colored people that they've gotten lazy and shiftless." "Hush your mouth, Harry!" she cried angrily. "They're not! They may be lazy--anybody would be in that climate--but they're my best friends, an' I don't want to hear 'em criticised in any such sweepin' way. Some of 'em are the finest men in the world." "Oh, I know. They're all right when they come North to college, but of all the hangdog, ill-dressed, slovenly lot I ever saw, a bunch of small-town Southerners are the worst!" Sally Carrol was clinching her gloved hands and biting her lip furiously. "Why," continued Harry, "if there was one in my class at New Haven, and we all thought that at last we'd found the true type of Southern aristocrat, but it turned out that he wasn't an aristocrat at all--just the son of a Northern carpetbagger, who owned about all the cotton round Mobile." "A Southerner wouldn't talk the way you're talking now," she said evenly. "They haven't the energy!" "Or the somethin' else."