So he was clueless. He must make his own clues and then follow. Nor could there be any dallying, since he could not hope to succeed in his profession as a young unmarried physician: thus pressure from without equalled pressure from within. Moreover, he was pleasantly conscious of a general commotion of part of the population toward him with reference to life's romance. The girls of that race and land were much too healthy and normally imaginative not to feel the impact of the arrival of a young doctor--who was going to ask one of them to marry him. As to those seven years of his in New York and Europe, he could discover only one mind in them: they deplored his absence not because they had missed _him_, but because he had missed _them_: it was no gain to have been in New York and Berlin and Vienna if you lost Kentucky! He gradually acquired the feeling that if in addition to the misfortune of having been absent for several years, the calamity had been his of having been born abroad, it would not have been permitted him to plough corn. But while they could not abet him in the error of thinking that he had returned a cosmopolitan, bringing high prestige, instantly they showed general excitement that he--one of themselves--was at home again in search of a wife. He had arrived like a starving bee released in a ripe vineyard; and for a while he could only whirl about, distracted by indecision as to what cluster of grapes he should settle on: not that the grapes did not have something to say as to the privilege of alighting. After the bee had selected the bunch, the bunch selected the bee. A vineyard ripe to be gathered--and being gathered! Every month or so a vine disappeared--claimed for Love's vintage--stored away in Love's cellar. They were everywhere! As he drove widely about the country, the two most abundant characteristics seemed to be unequalled grass and marriageable girls. He met them on turnpikes and lanes--in leafy woods at picnics--at moonlight dances--on velvet lawns--amid the roses of old gardens--and he began humorously to count those who looked available. One passed him on the road one day, and, lifting a corner of the buggy curtain, she peeped back at him: "She will do!" he said. Another swept past him on horseback and looked in the opposite direction. "She will do!" he said. He met two on a shady street of a quiet town under their peach-blow parasols: "They will do!" he said. He saw four on a lawn playing tennis, and watched their vital abandon and tasted their cup: "They will do!" he said. He swept his eyes over a ball-room one night: "They will all do!" he said, and made an end of counting.