prompt:
Chapter: CHAPTER XXXIV

THEY journeyed for three and a half months. They saw the Grand Canyon,
the adobe walls of Sante Fe and, in a drive from El Paso into Mexico,
their first foreign land. They jogged from San Diego and La Jolla to Los
Angeles, Pasadena, Riverside, through towns with bell-towered missions
and orange-groves; they viewed Monterey and San Francisco and a forest
of sequoias. They bathed in the surf and climbed foothills and danced,
they saw a polo game and the making of motion-pictures, they sent one
hundred and seventeen souvenir post-cards to Gopher Prairie, and once,
on a dune by a foggy sea when she was walking alone, Carol found an
artist, and he looked up at her and said, "Too damned wet to paint; sit
down and talk," and so for ten minutes she lived in a romantic novel.

Her only struggle was in coaxing Kennicott not to spend all his time
with the tourists from the ten thousand other Gopher Prairies. In
winter, California is full of people from Iowa and Nebraska, Ohio and
Oklahoma, who, having traveled thousands of miles from their familiar
villages, hasten to secure an illusion of not having left them. They
hunt for people from their own states to stand between them and the
shame of naked mountains; they talk steadily, in Pullmans, on hotel
porches, at cafeterias and motion-picture shows, about the motors and
crops and county politics back home. Kennicott discussed land-prices
with them, he went into the merits of the several sorts of motor cars
with them, he was intimate with train porters, and he insisted on seeing
the Luke Dawsons at their flimsy bungalow in Pasadena, where Luke sat
and yearned to go back and make some more money. But Kennicott gave
promise of learning to play. He shouted in the pool at the Coronado, and
he spoke of (though he did nothing more radical than speak of) buying
evening-clothes. Carol was touched by his efforts to enjoy picture
galleries, and the dogged way in which he accumulated dates and
dimensions when they followed monkish guides through missions.

She felt strong. Whenever she was restless she dodged her thoughts by
the familiar vagabond fallacy of running away from them, of moving on
to a new place, and thus she persuaded herself that she was tranquil. In
March she willingly agreed with Kennicott that it was time to go home.
She was longing for Hugh.

They left Monterey on April first, on a day of high blue skies and
poppies and a summer sea.

As the train struck in among the hills she resolved, "I'm going to love
the fine Will Kennicott quality that there is in Gopher Prairie. The
nobility of good sense. It will be sweet to see Vida and Guy and the
Clarks. And I'm going to see my baby! All the words he'll be able to say
now! It's a new start. Everything will be different!"

Thus on April first, among dappled hills and the bronze of scrub oaks,
while Kennicott seesawed on his toes and chuckled, "Wonder what Hugh'll
say when he sees us?"

Three days later they reached Gopher Prairie in a sleet storm.

II

No one knew that they were coming; no one met them; and because of the
icy roads, the only conveyance at the station was the hotel 'bus, which
they missed while Kennicott was giving his trunk-check to the station
agent--the only person to welcome them. Carol waited for him in the
station, among huddled German women with shawls and umbrellas, and
ragged-bearded farmers in corduroy coats; peasants mute as oxen, in a
room thick with the steam of wet coats, the reek of the red-hot stove,
the stench of sawdust boxes which served as cuspidors. The afternoon
light was as reluctant as a winter dawn.

"This is a useful market-center, an interesting pioneer post, but it is
not a home for me," meditated the stranger Carol.

Kennicott suggested, "I'd 'phone for a flivver but it'd take quite a
while for it to get here. Let's walk."

They stepped uncomfortably from the safety of the plank platform and,
balancing on their toes, taking cautious strides, ventured along the
road. The sleety rain was turning to snow. The air was stealthily cold.
Beneath an inch of water was a layer of ice, so that as they wavered
with their suit-cases they slid and almost fell. The wet snow drenched
their gloves; the water underfoot splashed their itching ankles. They
scuffled inch by inch for three blocks. In front of Harry Haydock's
Kennicott sighed:

"We better stop in here and 'phone for a machine."

She followed him like a wet kitten.

The Haydocks saw them laboring up the slippery concrete walk, up the
perilous front steps, and came to the door chanting:

"Well, well, well, back again, eh? Say, this is fine! Have a fine trip?
My, you look like a rose, Carol. How did you like the coast, doc? Well,
well, well! Where-all did you go?"

But as Kennicott began to proclaim the list of places achieved, Harry
interrupted with an account of how much he himself had seen, two years
ago. When Kennicott boasted, "We went through the mission at Santa
Barbara," Harry broke in, "Yeh, that's an interesting old mission. Say,
I'll never forget that hotel there, doc. It was swell. Why, the rooms
were made just like these old monasteries. Juanita and I went from Santa
Barbara to San Luis Obispo. You folks go to San Luis Obispo?"

"No, but----"

"Well you ought to gone to San Luis Obispo. And then we went from there
to a ranch, least they called it a ranch----"

Kennicott got in only one considerable narrative, which began:

"Say, I never knew--did you, Harry?--that in the Chicago district the
Kutz Kar sells as well as the Overland? I never thought much of the
Kutz. But I met a gentleman on the train--it was when we were pulling
out of Albuquerque, and I was sitting on the back platform of the
observation car, and this man was next to me and he asked me for a
light, and we got to talking, and come to find out, he came from Aurora,
and when he found out I came from Minnesota he asked me if I knew Dr.
Clemworth of Red Wing, and of course, while I've never met him, I've
heard of Clemworth lots of times, and seems he's this man's brother!
Quite a coincidence! Well, we got to talking, and we called the
porter--that was a pretty good porter on that car--and we had a couple
bottles of ginger ale, and I happened to mention the Kutz Kar, and this
man--seems he's driven a lot of different kinds of cars--he's got
a Franklin now--and he said that he'd tried the Kutz and liked it
first-rate. Well, when we got into a station--I don't remember the name
of it--Carrie, what the deuce was the name of that first stop we made
the other side of Albuquerque?--well, anyway, I guess we must have
stopped there to take on water, and this man and I got out to stretch
our legs, and darned if there wasn't a Kutz drawn right up at the depot
platform, and he pointed out something I'd never noticed, and I was
glad to learn about it: seems that the gear lever in the Kutz is an inch
longer----"

Even this chronicle of voyages Harry interrupted, with remarks on the
advantages of the ball-gear-shift.

Kennicott gave up hope of adequate credit for being a traveled man, and
telephoned to a garage for a Ford taxicab, while Juanita kissed Carol
and made sure of being the first to tell the latest, which included
seven distinct and proven scandals about Mrs. Swiftwaite, and one
considerable doubt as to the chastity of Cy Bogart.

They saw the Ford sedan making its way over the water-lined ice, through
the snow-storm, like a tug-boat in a fog. The driver stopped at a
corner. The car skidded, it turned about with comic reluctance, crashed
into a tree, and stood tilted on a broken wheel.

The Kennicotts refused Harry Haydock's not too urgent offer to take them
home in his car "if I can manage to get it out of the garage--terrible
day--stayed home from the store--but if you say so, I'll take a shot at
it." Carol gurgled, "No, I think we'd better walk; probably make better
time, and I'm just crazy to see my baby." With their suit-cases they
waddled on. Their coats were soaked through.

Carol had forgotten her facile hopes. She looked about with impersonal
eyes. But Kennicott, through rain-blurred lashes, caught the glory that
was Back Home.

She noted bare tree-trunks, black branches, the spongy brown earth
between patches of decayed snow on the lawns. The vacant lots were
full of tall dead weeds. Stripped of summer leaves the houses were
hopeless--temporary shelters.

Kennicott chuckled, "By golly, look down there! Jack Elder must have
painted his garage. And look! Martin Mahoney has put up a new fence
around his chicken yard. Say, that's a good fence, eh? Chicken-tight
and dog-tight. That's certainly a dandy fence. Wonder how much it cost a
yard? Yes, sir, they been building right along, even in winter. Got more
enterprise than these Californians. Pretty good to be home, eh?"

She noted that all winter long the citizens had been throwing garbage
into their back yards, to be cleaned up in spring. The recent thaw had
disclosed heaps of ashes, dog-bones, torn bedding, clotted paint-cans,
all half covered by the icy pools which filled the hollows of the yards.
The refuse had stained the water to vile colors of waste: thin red, sour
yellow, streaky brown.

Kennicott chuckled, "Look over there on Main Street! They got the
feed store all fixed up, and a new sign on it, black and gold. That'll
improve the appearance of the block a lot."

She noted that the few people whom they passed wore their raggedest
coats for the evil day. They were scarecrows in a shanty town. . . . "To
think," she marveled, "of coming two thousand miles, past mountains
and cities, to get off here, and to plan to stay here! What conceivable
reason for choosing this particular place?"

She noted a figure in a rusty coat and a cloth cap.

Kennicott chuckled, "Look who's coming! It's Sam Clark! Gosh, all rigged
out for the weather."

The two men shook hands a dozen times and, in the Western fashion,
bumbled, "Well, well, well, well, you old hell-hound, you old devil,
how are you, anyway? You old horse-thief, maybe it ain't good to see
you again!" While Sam nodded at her over Kennicott's shoulder, she was
embarrassed.

"Perhaps I should never have gone away. I'm out of practise in lying. I
wish they would get it over! Just a block more and--my baby!"

They were home. She brushed past the welcoming Aunt Bessie and knelt
by Hugh. As he stammered, "O mummy, mummy, don't go away! Stay with me,
mummy!" she cried, "No, I'll never leave you again!"

He volunteered, "That's daddy."

"By golly, he knows us just as if we'd never been away!" said Kennicott.
"You don't find any of these California kids as bright as he is, at his
age!"

When the trunk came they piled about Hugh the bewhiskered little wooden
men fitting one inside another, the miniature junk, and the Oriental
drum, from San Francisco Chinatown; the blocks carved by the old
Frenchman in San Diego; the lariat from San Antonio.

"Will you forgive mummy for going away? Will you?" she whispered.

Absorbed in Hugh, asking a hundred questions about him--had he had any
colds? did he still dawdle over his oatmeal? what about unfortunate
morning incidents? she viewed Aunt Bessie only as a source of
information, and was able to ignore her hint, pointed by a coyly shaken
finger, "Now that you've had such a fine long trip and spent so much
money and all, I hope you're going to settle down and be satisfied and
not----"

"Does he like carrots yet?" replied Carol.

She was cheerful as the snow began to conceal the slatternly yards. She
assured herself that the streets of New York and Chicago were as ugly as
Gopher Prairie in such weather; she dismissed the thought, "But they
do have charming interiors for refuge." She sang as she energetically
looked over Hugh's clothes.

The afternoon grew old and dark. Aunt Bessie went home. Carol took the
baby into her own room. The maid came in complaining, "I can't get no
extra milk to make chipped beef for supper." Hugh was sleepy, and he had
been spoiled by Aunt Bessie. Even to a returned mother, his whining and
his trick of seven times snatching her silver brush were fatiguing. As a
background, behind the noises of Hugh and the kitchen, the house reeked
with a colorless stillness.

From the window she heard Kennicott greeting the Widow Bogart as he had
always done, always, every snowy evening: "Guess this 'll keep up all
night." She waited. There they were, the furnace sounds, unalterable,
eternal: removing ashes, shoveling coal.

Yes. She was back home! Nothing had changed. She had never been away.
California? Had she seen it? Had she for one minute left this scraping
sound of the small shovel in the ash-pit of the furnace? But Kennicott
preposterously supposed that she had. Never had she been quite so far
from going away as now when he believed she had just come back. She
felt oozing through the walls the spirit of small houses and righteous
people. At that instant she knew that in running away she had merely
hidden her doubts behind the officious stir of travel.

"Dear God, don't let me begin agonizing again!" she sobbed. Hugh wept
with her.

"Wait for mummy a second!" She hastened down to the cellar, to
Kennicott.

He was standing before the furnace. However inadequate the rest of the
house, he had seen to it that the fundamental cellar should be large
and clean, the square pillars whitewashed, and the bins for coal and
potatoes and trunks convenient. A glow from the drafts fell on the
smooth gray cement floor at his feet. He was whistling tenderly, staring
at the furnace with eyes which saw the black-domed monster as a symbol
of home and of the beloved routine to which he had returned--his
gipsying decently accomplished, his duty of viewing "sights" and
"curios" performed with thoroughness. Unconscious of her, he stooped
and peered in at the blue flames among the coals. He closed the door
briskly, and made a whirling gesture with his right hand, out of pure
bliss.

He saw her. "Why, hello, old lady! Pretty darn good to be back, eh?"

"Yes," she lied, while she quaked, "Not now. I can't face the job of
explaining now. He's been so good. He trusts me. And I'm going to break
his heart!"

She smiled at him. She tidied his sacred cellar by throwing an empty
bluing bottle into the trash bin. She mourned, "It's only the baby that
holds me. If Hugh died----" She fled upstairs in panic and made sure
that nothing had happened to Hugh in these four minutes.

She saw a pencil-mark on a window-sill. She had made it on a September
day when she had been planning a picnic for Fern Mullins and Erik. Fern
and she had been hysterical with nonsense, had invented mad parties for
all the coming winter. She glanced across the alley at the room which
Fern had occupied. A rag of a gray curtain masked the still window.

She tried to think of some one to whom she wanted to telephone. There
was no one.

The Sam Clarks called that evening and encouraged her to describe the
missions. A dozen times they told her how glad they were to have her
back.

"It is good to be wanted," she thought. "It will drug me. But----Oh, is
all life, always, an unresolved But?"

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The Kennicotts travel for three and a half months and visit the Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, Pasadena and many other places. They meet the Dawsons who have settled in a bungalow at Pasadena. They return to Gopher Prairie in the first week of April. Since they had not informed anyone of their arrival and it is icy, nobody meets them at the station. Having missed the bus they decide to walk. They find it difficult to walk on the cold icy road with their suitcases. They stop at Haydock's house and talk about their vacation. Kennicott phones for a taxicab but before reaching them it skids and crashes into a tree. The Haydocks reluctantly offer to take out their car but the Kennicotts firmly refuse and start for home. Kennicott is delighted to be back home but Carol is not very enthusiastic. They meet Sam Clarke and he greets them very enthusiastically. Carol feels that she has lost the habit of lying. She can't display as much affection as Sam Clarke does. In her love for Hugh she forgets everything else. She is even able to ignore Aunt Bessie's comments. She promises Hugh that she would never go away from him. She finds him spoilt by Aunt Bessie. She listens to the familiar conversation between Kennicott and Mrs. Bogart about the weather and the other familiar noises of the house. She cannot remember that she had ever been away from home. She finds it unbearable to live in the house. When she seeks Kennicott to tell him she finds him examining the furnace. He appears to be happy to be back. She finds it difficult to break his heart. She looks at the pencil mark she made while planning picnics with Fern. She feels very lonely. When the Clarks call on them and tell them how happy they are to see them, she feels nice to be needed.


prompt:
Chapter: CHAPTER XXXV

SHE tried to be content, which was a contradiction in terms. She
fanatically cleaned house all April. She knitted a sweater for Hugh.
She was diligent at Red Cross work. She was silent when Vida raved that
though America hated war as much as ever, we must invade Germany and
wipe out every man, because it was now proven that there was no soldier
in the German army who was not crucifying prisoners and cutting off
babies' hands.

Carol was volunteer nurse when Mrs. Champ Perry suddenly died of
pneumonia.

In her funeral procession were the eleven people left out of the Grand
Army and the Territorial Pioneers, old men and women, very old and weak,
who a few decades ago had been boys and girls of the frontier, riding
broncos through the rank windy grass of this prairie. They hobbled
behind a band made up of business men and high-school boys, who
straggled along without uniforms or ranks or leader, trying to play
Chopin's Funeral March--a shabby group of neighbors with grave eyes,
stumbling through the slush under a solemnity of faltering music.

Champ was broken. His rheumatism was worse. The rooms over the store
were silent. He could not do his work as buyer at the elevator. Farmers
coming in with sled-loads of wheat complained that Champ could not read
the scale, that he seemed always to be watching some one back in the
darkness of the bins. He was seen slipping through alleys, talking to
himself, trying to avoid observation, creeping at last to the cemetery.
Once Carol followed him and found the coarse, tobacco-stained,
unimaginative old man lying on the snow of the grave, his thick arms
spread out across the raw mound as if to protect her from the cold, her
whom he had carefully covered up every night for sixty years, who was
alone there now, uncared for.

The elevator company, Ezra Stowbody president, let him go. The company,
Ezra explained to Carol, had no funds for giving pensions.

She tried to have him appointed to the postmastership, which, since all
the work was done by assistants, was the one sinecure in town, the one
reward for political purity. But it proved that Mr. Bert Tybee, the
former bartender, desired the postmastership.

At her solicitation Lyman Cass gave Champ a warm berth as night
watchman. Small boys played a good many tricks on Champ when he fell
asleep at the mill.

II

She had vicarious happiness in the return of Major Raymond Wutherspoon.
He was well, but still weak from having been gassed; he had been
discharged and he came home as the first of the war veterans. It was
rumored that he surprised Vida by coming unannounced, that Vida fainted
when she saw him, and for a night and day would not share him with the
town. When Carol saw them Vida was hazy about everything except Raymie,
and never went so far from him that she could not slip her hand under
his. Without understanding why Carol was troubled by this intensity. And
Raymie--surely this was not Raymie, but a sterner brother of his, this
man with the tight blouse, the shoulder emblems, the trim legs in boots.
His face seemed different, his lips more tight. He was not Raymie; he
was Major Wutherspoon; and Kennicott and Carol were grateful when he
divulged that Paris wasn't half as pretty as Minneapolis, that all of
the American soldiers had been distinguished by their morality when on
leave. Kennicott was respectful as he inquired whether the Germans had
good aeroplanes, and what a salient was, and a cootie, and Going West.

In a week Major Wutherspoon was made full manager of the Bon Ton. Harry
Haydock was going to devote himself to the half-dozen branch stores
which he was establishing at crossroads hamlets. Harry would be the
town's rich man in the coming generation, and Major Wutherspoon would
rise with him, and Vida was jubilant, though she was regretful at having
to give up most of her Red Cross work. Ray still needed nursing, she
explained.

When Carol saw him with his uniform off, in a pepper-and salt suit and
a new gray felt hat, she was disappointed. He was not Major Wutherspoon;
he was Raymie.

For a month small boys followed him down the street, and everybody
called him Major, but that was presently shortened to Maje, and the
small boys did not look up from their marbles as he went by.

III

The town was booming, as a result of the war price of wheat.

The wheat money did not remain in the pockets of the farmers; the towns
existed to take care of all that. Iowa farmers were selling their land
at four hundred dollars an acre and coming into Minnesota. But whoever
bought or sold or mortgaged, the townsmen invited themselves to the
feast--millers, real-estate men, lawyers, merchants, and Dr. Will
Kennicott. They bought land at a hundred and fifty, sold it next day at
a hundred and seventy, and bought again. In three months Kennicott made
seven thousand dollars, which was rather more than four times as much as
society paid him for healing the sick.

In early summer began a "campaign of boosting." The Commercial Club
decided that Gopher Prairie was not only a wheat-center but also the
perfect site for factories, summer cottages, and state institutions. In
charge of the campaign was Mr. James Blausser, who had recently come to
town to speculate in land. Mr. Blausser was known as a Hustler. He liked
to be called Honest Jim. He was a bulky, gauche, noisy, humorous man,
with narrow eyes, a rustic complexion, large red hands, and brilliant
clothes. He was attentive to all women. He was the first man in town who
had not been sensitive enough to feel Carol's aloofness. He put his arm
about her shoulder while he condescended to Kennicott, "Nice lil wifey,
I'll say, doc," and when she answered, not warmly, "Thank you very much
for the imprimatur," he blew on her neck, and did not know that he had
been insulted.

He was a layer-on of hands. He never came to the house without trying to
paw her. He touched her arm, let his fist brush her side. She hated the
man, and she was afraid of him. She wondered if he had heard of Erik,
and was taking advantage. She spoke ill of him at home and in public
places, but Kennicott and the other powers insisted, "Maybe he is
kind of a roughneck, but you got to hand it to him; he's got more
git-up-and-git than any fellow that ever hit this burg. And he's pretty
cute, too. Hear what he said to old Ezra? Chucked him in the ribs and
said, 'Say, boy, what do you want to go to Denver for? Wait 'll I get
time and I'll move the mountains here. Any mountain will be tickled to
death to locate here once we get the White Way in!'"

The town welcomed Mr. Blausser as fully as Carol snubbed him. He was the
guest of honor at the Commercial Club Banquet at the Minniemashie House,
an occasion for menus printed in gold (but injudiciously proof-read),
for free cigars, soft damp slabs of Lake Superior whitefish served as
fillet of sole, drenched cigar-ashes gradually filling the saucers
of coffee cups, and oratorical references to Pep, Punch, Go, Vigor,
Enterprise, Red Blood, He-Men, Fair Women, God's Country, James J.
Hill, the Blue Sky, the Green Fields, the Bountiful Harvest, Increasing
Population, Fair Return on Investments, Alien Agitators Who Threaten
the Security of Our Institutions, the Hearthstone the Foundation of
the State, Senator Knute Nelson, One Hundred Per Cent. Americanism, and
Pointing with Pride.

Harry Haydock, as chairman, introduced Honest Jim Blausser. "And I
am proud to say, my fellow citizens, that in his brief stay here
Mr. Blausser has become my warm personal friend as well as my fellow
booster, and I advise you all to very carefully attend to the hints of a
man who knows how to achieve."

Mr. Blausser reared up like an elephant with a camel's neck--red faced,
red eyed, heavy fisted, slightly belching--a born leader, divinely
intended to be a congressman but deflected to the more lucrative honors
of real-estate. He smiled on his warm personal friends and fellow
boosters, and boomed:

"I certainly was astonished in the streets of our lovely little
city, the other day. I met the meanest kind of critter that God ever
made--meaner than the horned toad or the Texas lallapaluza! (Laughter.)
And do you know what the animile was? He was a knocker! (Laughter and
applause.)

"I want to tell you good people, and it's just as sure as God made
little apples, the thing that distinguishes our American commonwealth
from the pikers and tin-horns in other countries is our Punch. You take
a genuwine, honest-to-God homo Americanibus and there ain't anything
he's afraid to tackle. Snap and speed are his middle name! He'll put
her across if he has to ride from hell to breakfast, and believe me, I'm
mighty good and sorry for the boob that's so unlucky as to get in his
way, because that poor slob is going to wonder where he was at when Old
Mr. Cyclone hit town! (Laughter.)

"Now, frien's, there's some folks so yellow and small and so few in the
pod that they go to work and claim that those of us that have the big
vision are off our trolleys. They say we can't make Gopher Prairie, God
bless her! just as big as Minneapolis or St. Paul or Duluth. But lemme
tell you right here and now that there ain't a town under the blue
canopy of heaven that's got a better chance to take a running jump and
go scooting right up into the two-hundred-thousand class than little
old G. P.! And if there's anybody that's got such cold kismets that he's
afraid to tag after Jim Blausser on the Big Going Up, then we don't want
him here! Way I figger it, you folks are just patriotic enough so that
you ain't going to stand for any guy sneering and knocking his own town,
no matter how much of a smart Aleck he is--and just on the side I want
to add that this Farmers' Nonpartisan League and the whole bunch of
socialists are right in the same category, or, as the fellow says,
in the same scategory, meaning This Way Out, Exit, Beat It While the
Going's Good, This Means You, for all knockers of prosperity and the
rights of property!

"Fellow citizens, there's a lot of folks, even right here in this fair
state, fairest and richest of all the glorious union, that stand up on
their hind legs and claim that the East and Europe put it all over
the golden Northwestland. Now let me nail that lie right here and now.
'Ah-ha,' says they, 'so Jim Blausser is claiming that Gopher Prairie is
as good a place to live in as London and Rome and--and all the rest of
the Big Burgs, is he? How does the poor fish know?' says they. Well I'll
tell you how I know! I've seen 'em! I've done Europe from soup to nuts!
They can't spring that stuff on Jim Blausser and get away with it! And
let me tell you that the only live thing in Europe is our boys that are
fighting there now! London--I spent three days, sixteen straight hours a
day, giving London the once-over, and let me tell you that it's nothing
but a bunch of fog and out-of-date buildings that no live American burg
would stand for one minute. You may not believe it, but there ain't one
first-class skyscraper in the whole works. And the same thing goes for
that crowd of crabs and snobs Down East, and next time you hear some zob
from Yahooville-on-the-Hudson chewing the rag and bulling and trying to
get your goat, you tell him that no two-fisted enterprising Westerner
would have New York for a gift!

"Now the point of this is: I'm not only insisting that Gopher Prairie
is going to be Minnesota's pride, the brightest ray in the glory of the
North Star State, but also and furthermore that it is right now, and
still more shall be, as good a place to live in, and love in, and bring
up the Little Ones in, and it's got as much refinement and culture, as
any burg on the whole bloomin' expanse of God's Green Footstool, and
that goes, get me, that goes!"

Half an hour later Chairman Haydock moved a vote of thanks to Mr.
Blausser.

The boosters' campaign was on.

The town sought that efficient and modern variety of fame which is known
as "publicity." The band was reorganized, and provided by the Commercial
Club with uniforms of purple and gold. The amateur baseball-team hired a
semi-professional pitcher from Des Moines, and made a schedule of games
with every town for fifty miles about. The citizens accompanied it as
"rooters," in a special car, with banners lettered "Watch Gopher Prairie
Grow," and with the band playing "Smile, Smile, Smile." Whether the
team won or lost the Dauntless loyally shrieked, "Boost, Boys, and
Boost Together--Put Gopher Prairie on the Map--Brilliant Record of Our
Matchless Team."

Then, glory of glories, the town put in a White Way. White Ways were in
fashion in the Middlewest. They were composed of ornamented posts with
clusters of high-powered electric lights along two or three blocks on
Main Street. The Dauntless confessed: "White Way Is Installed--Town
Lit Up Like Broadway--Speech by Hon. James Blausser--Come On You Twin
Cities--Our Hat Is In the Ring."

The Commercial Club issued a booklet prepared by a great and expensive
literary person from a Minneapolis advertising agency, a red-headed
young man who smoked cigarettes in a long amber holder. Carol read the
booklet with a certain wonder. She learned that Plover and Minniemashie
Lakes were world-famed for their beauteous wooded shores and gamey pike
and bass not to be equalled elsewhere in the entire country; that
the residences of Gopher Prairie were models of dignity, comfort, and
culture, with lawns and gardens known far and wide; that the Gopher
Prairie schools and public library, in its neat and commodious building,
were celebrated throughout the state; that the Gopher Prairie mills
made the best flour in the country; that the surrounding farm lands were
renowned, where'er men ate bread and butter, for their incomparable No. 1
Hard Wheat and Holstein-Friesian cattle; and that the stores in
Gopher Prairie compared favorably with Minneapolis and Chicago in their
abundance of luxuries and necessities and the ever-courteous attention
of the skilled clerks. She learned, in brief, that this was the one
Logical Location for factories and wholesale houses.

"THERE'S where I want to go; to that model town Gopher Prairie," said
Carol.

Kennicott was triumphant when the Commercial Club did capture one small
shy factory which planned to make wooden automobile-wheels, but
when Carol saw the promoter she could not feel that his coming much
mattered--and a year after, when he failed, she could not be very
sorrowful.

Retired farmers were moving into town. The price of lots had increased
a third. But Carol could discover no more pictures nor interesting food
nor gracious voices nor amusing conversation nor questing minds. She
could, she asserted, endure a shabby but modest town; the town shabby
and egomaniac she could not endure. She could nurse Champ Perry,
and warm to the neighborliness of Sam Clark, but she could not sit
applauding Honest Jim Blausser. Kennicott had begged her, in courtship
days, to convert the town to beauty. If it was now as beautiful as Mr.
Blausser and the Dauntless said, then her work was over, and she could
go.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Carol tries to endure Gopher Prairie silently. She devotes herself to the housework, to Hugh, to the Red Cross work and she listens silently to Vida raging against the Germans. She helps as a volunteer nurse, when Mrs. Perry catches pneumonia. Mrs. Perry dies and the eleven remaining pioneers in Gopher Prairie attend her funeral. Champ Perry is heart broken and weak with rheumatism. He is unable to continue his work as the buyer at the Elevator Company. He is retired but does not get a pension. Carol tries to get him the post-mastership but Mr. Bert Tybee wants it. Because of Carol's efforts, Lymn gives Perry the job of the night watchman at his flourmill. Raymie Wutherspoon returns as a major. In his uniform he appears to be very handsome and very stern. Vida is unable to leave his side even for a second. Raymie tells the Kennicotts that Paris is not half as beautiful as Minneapolis and that the American soldiers were models of virtuous behavior. He is made full manager of the Bon Ton stores. When Carol sees him in his civil clothes he appears to be the same old Raymie and Carol feels disappointed. With the increase in the price of wheat, the merchants, milers and those who deal in real estate make a lot of money. Kennicott earns seven thousand dollars in three months. A campaign to make Gopher Prairie a city of industries is started. Mr. Blausser is made to take charge of the campaign. He is a noisy humorous man with narrow eyes and pays more attention to women. He keeps touching Carol's arms and shoulder and she hates him. Kennicott and the others tell her that he is a brilliant man. He boasts that he would move the mountains to Gopher Prairie. Mr. Blausser is the guest of honor at the Commercial Club Banquet at the Minnie Mashie House. Harry Haydock introduces him as a personal friend and as a man who knows how to achieve. Blausser has ambitious schemes to transform Gopher Prairie into a St. Paul or Minneapolis. He claims that Gopher Prairie is as good as London or Paris. According to him, the only live thing in Europe is the American soldier and London is but a city of fog and old buildings. He asserts that Gopher Prairie as it is, is the best place to live in. Gopher Prairie sees progress. The band is reorganized. The baseball team gets a coach. The citizens of Gopher Prairie go loyally wherever the team goes, to cheer the team. The Dauntless, praises them loyally. The town acquires the white way, so called because it is composed of ornamented lampposts with clusters of light bulbs along two or three blocks on Main Street. The commercial club appoints a writer from an advertising agency to write a booklet about Gopher Prairie. Carol is surprised to read the exaggerated account of Gopher Prairie and comments that she would like to see the Gopher Prairie mentioned in the booklet. For all its troubles the Commercial Club gets a small factory to make wooden automobile wheels. She is unable to endure the Gopher Prairie that has become egomaniac. During their courtship days Kennicott had begged her to make Gopher Prairie beautiful. Now that Mr. Blausser and the Dauntless claimed Gopher Prairie to be the most beautiful town, Carol feels that she is free to leave it.


prompt:
Chapter: CHAPTER XXXVI

KENNICOTT was not so inhumanly patient that he could continue to forgive
Carol's heresies, to woo her as he had on the venture to California. She
tried to be inconspicuous, but she was betrayed by her failure to glow
over the boosting. Kennicott believed in it; demanded that she say
patriotic things about the White Way and the new factory. He snorted,
"By golly, I've done all I could, and now I expect you to play the game.
Here you been complaining for years about us being so poky, and now when
Blausser comes along and does stir up excitement and beautify the town
like you've always wanted somebody to, why, you say he's a roughneck,
and you won't jump on the band-wagon."

Once, when Kennicott announced at noon-dinner, "What do you know
about this! They say there's a chance we may get another
factory--cream-separator works!" he added, "You might try to look
interested, even if you ain't!" The baby was frightened by the Jovian
roar; ran wailing to hide his face in Carol's lap; and Kennicott had to
make himself humble and court both mother and child. The dim injustice
of not being understood even by his son left him irritable. He felt
injured.

An event which did not directly touch them brought down his wrath.

In the early autumn, news came from Wakamin that the sheriff had
forbidden an organizer for the National Nonpartisan League to speak
anywhere in the county. The organizer had defied the sheriff, and
announced that in a few days he would address a farmers' political
meeting. That night, the news ran, a mob of a hundred business men
led by the sheriff--the tame village street and the smug village faces
ruddled by the light of bobbing lanterns, the mob flowing between the
squatty rows of shops--had taken the organizer from his hotel, ridden
him on a fence-rail, put him on a freight train, and warned him not to
return.

The story was threshed out in Dave Dyer's drug store, with Sam Clark,
Kennicott, and Carol present.

"That's the way to treat those fellows--only they ought to have lynched
him!" declared Sam, and Kennicott and Dave Dyer joined in a proud "You
bet!"

Carol walked out hastily, Kennicott observing her.

Through supper-time she knew that he was bubbling and would soon boil
over. When the baby was abed, and they sat composedly in canvas chairs
on the porch, he experimented; "I had a hunch you thought Sam was kind
of hard on that fellow they kicked out of Wakamin."

"Wasn't Sam rather needlessly heroic?"

"All these organizers, yes, and a whole lot of the German and
Squarehead farmers themselves, they're seditious as the devil--disloyal,
non-patriotic, pro-German pacifists, that's what they are!"

"Did this organizer say anything pro-German?"

"Not on your life! They didn't give him a chance!" His laugh was stagey.

"So the whole thing was illegal--and led by the sheriff! Precisely how
do you expect these aliens to obey your law if the officer of the law
teaches them to break it? Is it a new kind of logic?"

"Maybe it wasn't exactly regular, but what's the odds? They knew this
fellow would try to stir up trouble. Whenever it comes right down to a
question of defending Americanism and our constitutional rights, it's
justifiable to set aside ordinary procedure."

"What editorial did he get that from?" she wondered, as she protested,
"See here, my beloved, why can't you Tories declare war honestly? You
don't oppose this organizer because you think he's seditious but
because you're afraid that the farmers he is organizing will deprive you
townsmen of the money you make out of mortgages and wheat and shops.
Of course, since we're at war with Germany, anything that any one of us
doesn't like is 'pro-German,' whether it's business competition or
bad music. If we were fighting England, you'd call the radicals
'pro-English.' When this war is over, I suppose you'll be calling them
'red anarchists.' What an eternal art it is--such a glittery delightful
art--finding hard names for our opponents! How we do sanctify our
efforts to keep them from getting the holy dollars we want for
ourselves! The churches have always done it, and the political
orators--and I suppose I do it when I call Mrs. Bogart a 'Puritan' and
Mr. Stowbody a 'capitalist.' But you business men are going to beat all
the rest of us at it, with your simple-hearted, energetic, pompous----"

She got so far only because Kennicott was slow in shaking off respect
for her. Now he bayed:

"That'll be about all from you! I've stood for your sneering at this
town, and saying how ugly and dull it is. I've stood for your refusing
to appreciate good fellows like Sam. I've even stood for your ridiculing
our Watch Gopher Prairie Grow campaign. But one thing I'm not going
to stand: I'm not going to stand my own wife being seditious. You can
camouflage all you want to, but you know darn well that these radicals,
as you call 'em, are opposed to the war, and let me tell you right here
and now, and you and all these long-haired men and short-haired women
can beef all you want to, but we're going to take these fellows, and if
they ain't patriotic, we're going to make them be patriotic. And--Lord
knows I never thought I'd have to say this to my own wife--but if you go
defending these fellows, then the same thing applies to you! Next thing,
I suppose you'll be yapping about free speech. Free speech! There's too
much free speech and free gas and free beer and free love and all the
rest of your damned mouthy freedom, and if I had my way I'd make you
folks live up to the established rules of decency even if I had to take
you----"

"Will!" She was not timorous now. "Am I pro-German if I fail to throb to
Honest Jim Blausser, too? Let's have my whole duty as a wife!"

He was grumbling, "The whole thing's right in line with the criticism
you've always been making. Might have known you'd oppose any decent
constructive work for the town or for----"

"You're right. All I've done has been in line. I don't belong to Gopher
Prairie. That isn't meant as a condemnation of Gopher Prairie, and it
may be a condemnation of me. All right! I don't care! I don't belong
here, and I'm going. I'm not asking permission any more. I'm simply
going."

He grunted. "Do you mind telling me, if it isn't too much trouble, how
long you're going for?"

"I don't know. Perhaps for a year. Perhaps for a lifetime."

"I see. Well, of course, I'll be tickled to death to sell out my
practise and go anywhere you say. Would you like to have me go with you
to Paris and study art, maybe, and wear velveteen pants and a woman's
bonnet, and live on spaghetti?"

"No, I think we can save you that trouble. You don't quite understand.
I am going--I really am--and alone! I've got to find out what my work
is----"

"Work? Work? Sure! That's the whole trouble with you! You haven't got
enough work to do. If you had five kids and no hired girl, and had to
help with the chores and separate the cream, like these farmers' wives,
then you wouldn't be so discontented."

"I know. That's what most men--and women--like you WOULD say. That's how
they would explain all I am and all I want. And I shouldn't argue with
them. These business men, from their crushing labors of sitting in an
office seven hours a day, would calmly recommend that I have a dozen
children. As it happens, I've done that sort of thing. There've been a
good many times when we hadn't a maid, and I did all the housework, and
cared for Hugh, and went to Red Cross, and did it all very efficiently.
I'm a good cook and a good sweeper, and you don't dare say I'm not!"

"N-no, you're----"

"But was I more happy when I was drudging? I was not. I was just
bedraggled and unhappy. It's work--but not my work. I could run
an office or a library, or nurse and teach children. But solitary
dish-washing isn't enough to satisfy me--or many other women. We're
going to chuck it. We're going to wash 'em by machinery, and come out
and play with you men in the offices and clubs and politics you've
cleverly kept for yourselves! Oh, we're hopeless, we dissatisfied women!
Then why do you want to have us about the place, to fret you? So it's
for your sake that I'm going!"

"Of course a little thing like Hugh makes no difference!"

"Yes, all the difference. That's why I'm going to take him with me."

"Suppose I refuse?"

"You won't!"

Forlornly, "Uh----Carrie, what the devil is it you want, anyway?"

"Oh, conversation! No, it's much more than that. I think it's a
greatness of life--a refusal to be content with even the healthiest
mud."

"Don't you know that nobody ever solved a problem by running away from
it?"

"Perhaps. Only I choose to make my own definition of 'running away' I
don't call----Do you realize how big a world there is beyond this Gopher
Prairie where you'd keep me all my life? It may be that some day I'll
come back, but not till I can bring something more than I have now. And
even if I am cowardly and run away--all right, call it cowardly, call me
anything you want to! I've been ruled too long by fear of being called
things. I'm going away to be quiet and think. I'm--I'm going! I have a
right to my own life."

"So have I to mine!"

"Well?"

"I have a right to my life--and you're it, you're my life! You've made
yourself so. I'm damned if I'll agree to all your freak notions, but I
will say I've got to depend on you. Never thought of that complication,
did you, in this 'off to Bohemia, and express yourself, and free love,
and live your own life' stuff!"

"You have a right to me if you can keep me. Can you?"

He moved uneasily.

II

For a month they discussed it. They hurt each other very much, and
sometimes they were close to weeping, and invariably he used banal
phrases about her duties and she used phrases quite as banal about
freedom, and through it all, her discovery that she really could get
away from Main Street was as sweet as the discovery of love. Kennicott
never consented definitely. At most he agreed to a public theory that
she was "going to take a short trip and see what the East was like in
wartime."

She set out for Washington in October--just before the war ended.

She had determined on Washington because it was less intimidating than
the obvious New York, because she hoped to find streets in which Hugh
could play, and because in the stress of war-work, with its demand for
thousands of temporary clerks, she could be initiated into the world of
offices.

Hugh was to go with her, despite the wails and rather extensive comments
of Aunt Bessie.

She wondered if she might not encounter Erik in the East but it was a
chance thought, soon forgotten.

III

The last thing she saw on the station platform was Kennicott, faithfully
waving his hand, his face so full of uncomprehending loneliness that he
could not smile but only twitch up his lips. She waved to him as long
as she could, and when he was lost she wanted to leap from the vestibule
and run back to him. She thought of a hundred tendernesses she had
neglected.

She had her freedom, and it was empty. The moment was not the highest
of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, which was altogether
excellent, for instead of slipping downward she began to climb.

She sighed, "I couldn't do this if it weren't for Will's kindness, his
giving me money." But a second after: "I wonder how many women would
always stay home if they had the money?"

Hugh complained, "Notice me, mummy!" He was beside her on the red plush
seat of the day-coach; a boy of three and a half. "I'm tired of playing
train. Let's play something else. Let's go see Auntie Bogart."

"Oh, NO! Do you really like Mrs. Bogart?"

"Yes. She gives me cookies and she tells me about the Dear Lord. You
never tell me about the Dear Lord. Why don't you tell me about the
Dear Lord? Auntie Bogart says I'm going to be a preacher. Can I be a
preacher? Can I preach about the Dear Lord?"

"Oh, please wait till my generation has stopped rebelling before yours
starts in!"

"What's a generation?"

"It's a ray in the illumination of the spirit."

"That's foolish." He was a serious and literal person, and rather
humorless. She kissed his frown, and marveled:

"I am running away from my husband, after liking a Swedish ne'er-do-well
and expressing immoral opinions, just as in a romantic story. And my own
son reproves me because I haven't given him religious instruction. But
the story doesn't go right. I'm neither groaning nor being dramatically
saved. I keep on running away, and I enjoy it. I'm mad with joy over it.
Gopher Prairie is lost back there in the dust and stubble, and I look
forward----"

She continued it to Hugh: "Darling, do you know what mother and you are
going to find beyond the blue horizon rim?"

"What?" flatly.

"We're going to find elephants with golden howdahs from which peep young
maharanees with necklaces of rubies, and a dawn sea colored like the
breast of a dove, and a white and green house filled with books and
silver tea-sets."

"And cookies?"

"Cookies? Oh, most decidedly cookies. We've had enough of bread and
porridge. We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on
no cookies at all."

"That's foolish."

"It is, O male Kennicott!"

"Huh!" said Kennicott II, and went to sleep on her shoulder.

IV

The theory of the Dauntless regarding Carol's absence:

Mrs. Will Kennicott and son Hugh left on No. 24 on Saturday last for
a stay of some months in Minneapolis, Chicago, New York and Washington.
Mrs. Kennicott confided to _Ye Scribe_ that she will be connected with one
of the multifarious war activities now centering in the Nation's
Capital for a brief period before returning. Her countless friends who
appreciate her splendid labors with the local Red Cross realize how
valuable she will be to any war board with which she chooses to become
connected. Gopher Prairie thus adds another shining star to its service
flag and without wishing to knock any neighboring communities, we would
like to know any town of anywheres near our size in the state that has
such a sterling war record. Another reason why you'd better Watch Gopher
Prairie Grow.

* * *

Mr. and Mrs. David Dyer, Mrs. Dyer's sister, Mrs. Jennie Dayborn of
Jackrabbit, and Dr. Will Kennicott drove to Minniemashie on Tuesday for
a delightful picnic.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Kennicott feels hurt that Carol does not show any interest in the town boosting campaign and that she did not appreciate Mr. Blausser. They have an argument over an organizer for the National Non Partisan League who had announced that he would address a farmer's meeting in spite of the ban on such meetings. He was caught by a mob of a hundred businessmen and the sheriff and put in a freight train, with the warning never to return. When Kennicott, Sam Clark and Dave Dyer are happy that the organizer was thus got rid of, Carol does not show any happiness. Kennicott accuses Carol of not being capable of appreciating good people. He declares that he will not tolerate his wife making seditious remarks. He condemns all radicals and declares that the people of Gopher Prairie will make them all become patriotic. Carol wants to know if she is considered to be pro-German because she does not applaud Mr. Blausser. She tells Kennicott that she did not belong to Gopher Prairie and so she was going to leave it. Kennicott sarcastically asks her if she expected him to settle down in Paris and study arts. Carol tells him that she will leave Kennicott and take Hugh with her. She says that she wants to find out her work. He tells her that if she had five children and had to work like a farmer's wife she would not feel discontent. She points out that she had done a lot of housework, cared for Hugh and did the Red Cross work too. She says that she cannot be satisfied with mechanical work. She would like to teach children or run an office or a library. Kennicott asks her what would she do if he refused to let her take Hugh with her. She says that he will not refuse. He points out that she was running away from problems. She retorts that she is not afraid of being called such names and that she had a right to her own life. They discuss it for a month, hurting each other in the process. Finally he agrees to let her go. They inform their friends that she wants to go and see what the east was like in the wartime. She decides to go to Washington because she feels that it is less intimidating than New York and also because she will be able to find work there. When the train leaves Gopher Prairie, she sees Kennicott looking forlorn at the station. Hugh wants to see Aunt Bogart. He tells her that she gives him cookies and tells him about the Dear Lord. He asks Carol why she never tells him anything about the Dear Lord? He asks her if he can become a preacher when he grew up? She tells him that where they go they will find elephants and maharanis with necklaces of rubies. He wants to know if they will have cookies. She tells him that they will have cookies till they get sick of it. Hugh believes that it would be foolish. Carol realizes that Hugh is just like Kennicott. Dauntless of Gopher Prairie informs its readers that Carol Kennicott went to Washington to work in the war office and calls her another shining star in the service of the nation. The Dyers, Mrs. Dyer's sister and Kennicott go for a picnic to the lake.


prompt:
Chapter: CHAPTER XXXVII

I

SHE found employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. Though the
armistice with Germany was signed a few weeks after her coming to
Washington, the work of the bureau continued. She filed correspondence
all day; then she dictated answers to letters of inquiry. It was an
endurance of monotonous details, yet she asserted that she had found
"real work."

Disillusions she did have. She discovered that in the afternoon, office
routine stretches to the grave. She discovered that an office is as full
of cliques and scandals as a Gopher Prairie. She discovered that most
of the women in the government bureaus lived unhealthfully, dining
on snatches in their crammed apartments. But she also discovered that
business women may have friendships and enmities as frankly as men and
may revel in a bliss which no housewife attains--a free Sunday. It did
not appear that the Great World needed her inspiration, but she felt
that her letters, her contact with the anxieties of men and women all
over the country, were a part of vast affairs, not confined to Main
Street and a kitchen but linked with Paris, Bangkok, Madrid.

She perceived that she could do office work without losing any of the
putative feminine virtue of domesticity; that cooking and cleaning, when
divested of the fussing of an Aunt Bessie, take but a tenth of the time
which, in a Gopher Prairie, it is but decent to devote to them.

Not to have to apologize for her thoughts to the Jolly Seventeen, not to
have to report to Kennicott at the end of the day all that she had done
or might do, was a relief which made up for the office weariness. She
felt that she was no longer one-half of a marriage but the whole of a
human being.

II

Washington gave her all the graciousness in which she had had faith:
white columns seen across leafy parks, spacious avenues, twisty alleys.
Daily she passed a dark square house with a hint of magnolias and a
courtyard behind it, and a tall curtained second-story window through
which a woman was always peering. The woman was mystery, romance, a
story which told itself differently every day; now she was a murderess,
now the neglected wife of an ambassador. It was mystery which Carol had
most lacked in Gopher Prairie, where every house was open to view, where
every person was but too easy to meet, where there were no secret gates
opening upon moors over which one might walk by moss-deadened paths to
strange high adventures in an ancient garden.

As she flitted up Sixteenth Street after a Kreisler recital, given late
in the afternoon for the government clerks, as the lamps kindled in
spheres of soft fire, as the breeze flowed into the street, fresh
as prairie winds and kindlier, as she glanced up the elm alley of
Massachusetts Avenue, as she was rested by the integrity of the Scottish
Rite Temple, she loved the city as she loved no one save Hugh. She
encountered negro shanties turned into studios, with orange curtains and
pots of mignonette; marble houses on New Hampshire Avenue, with
butlers and limousines; and men who looked like fictional explorers and
aviators. Her days were swift, and she knew that in her folly of running
away she had found the courage to be wise.

She had a dispiriting first month of hunting lodgings in the crowded
city. She had to roost in a hall-room in a moldy mansion conducted by an
indignant decayed gentlewoman, and leave Hugh to the care of a doubtful
nurse. But later she made a home.

III

Her first acquaintances were the members of the Tincomb Methodist
Church, a vast red-brick tabernacle. Vida Sherwin had given her a letter
to an earnest woman with eye-glasses, plaid silk waist, and a belief in
Bible Classes, who introduced her to the Pastor and the Nicer Members
of Tincomb. Carol recognized in Washington as she had in California a
transplanted and guarded Main Street. Two-thirds of the church-members
had come from Gopher Prairies. The church was their society and
their standard; they went to Sunday service, Sunday School, Christian
Endeavor, missionary lectures, church suppers, precisely as they had at
home; they agreed that ambassadors and flippant newspapermen and infidel
scientists of the bureaus were equally wicked and to be avoided; and
by cleaving to Tincomb Church they kept their ideals from all
contamination.

They welcomed Carol, asked about her husband, gave her advice regarding
colic in babies, passed her the gingerbread and scalloped potatoes at
church suppers, and in general made her very unhappy and lonely, so
that she wondered if she might not enlist in the militant suffrage
organization and be allowed to go to jail.

Always she was to perceive in Washington (as doubtless she would have
perceived in New York or London) a thick streak of Main Street. The
cautious dullness of a Gopher Prairie appeared in boarding-houses where
ladylike bureau-clerks gossiped to polite young army officers about
the movies; a thousand Sam Clarks and a few Widow Bogarts were to be
identified in the Sunday motor procession, in theater parties, and
at the dinners of State Societies, to which the emigres from Texas or
Michigan surged that they might confirm themselves in the faith that
their several Gopher Prairies were notoriously "a whole lot peppier and
chummier than this stuck-up East."

But she found a Washington which did not cleave to Main Street.

Guy Pollock wrote to a cousin, a temporary army captain, a confiding and
buoyant lad who took Carol to tea-dances, and laughed, as she had always
wanted some one to laugh, about nothing in particular. The captain
introduced her to the secretary of a congressman, a cynical young widow
with many acquaintances in the navy. Through her Carol met commanders
and majors, newspapermen, chemists and geographers and fiscal experts
from the bureaus, and a teacher who was a familiar of the militant
suffrage headquarters. The teacher took her to headquarters. Carol never
became a prominent suffragist. Indeed her only recognized position was
as an able addresser of envelopes. But she was casually adopted by
this family of friendly women who, when they were not being mobbed or
arrested, took dancing lessons or went picnicking up the Chesapeake
Canal or talked about the politics of the American Federation of Labor.

With the congressman's secretary and the teacher Carol leased a small
flat. Here she found home, her own place and her own people. She had,
though it absorbed most of her salary, an excellent nurse for Hugh. She
herself put him to bed and played with him on holidays. There were
walks with him, there were motionless evenings of reading, but chiefly
Washington was associated with people, scores of them, sitting about the
flat, talking, talking, talking, not always wisely but always excitedly.
It was not at all the "artist's studio" of which, because of its
persistence in fiction, she had dreamed. Most of them were in offices
all day, and thought more in card-catalogues or statistics than in mass
and color. But they played, very simply, and they saw no reason why
anything which exists cannot also be acknowledged.

She was sometimes shocked quite as she had shocked Gopher Prairie by
these girls with their cigarettes and elfish knowledge. When they were
most eager about soviets or canoeing, she listened, longed to have
some special learning which would distinguish her, and sighed that her
adventure had come so late. Kennicott and Main Street had drained
her self-reliance; the presence of Hugh made her feel temporary. Some
day--oh, she'd have to take him back to open fields and the right to
climb about hay-lofts.

But the fact that she could never be eminent among these scoffing
enthusiasts did not keep her from being proud of them, from defending
them in imaginary conversations with Kennicott, who grunted (she could
hear his voice), "They're simply a bunch of wild impractical theorists
sittin' round chewing the rag," and "I haven't got the time to chase
after a lot of these fool fads; I'm too busy putting aside a stake for
our old age."

Most of the men who came to the flat, whether they were army officers or
radicals who hated the army, had the easy gentleness, the acceptance
of women without embarrassed banter, for which she had longed in Gopher
Prairie. Yet they seemed to be as efficient as the Sam Clarks. She
concluded that it was because they were of secure reputation, not hemmed
in by the fire of provincial jealousies. Kennicott had asserted that the
villager's lack of courtesy is due to his poverty. "We're no millionaire
dudes," he boasted. Yet these army and navy men, these bureau experts,
and organizers of multitudinous leagues, were cheerful on three or four
thousand a year, while Kennicott had, outside of his land speculations,
six thousand or more, and Sam had eight.

Nor could she upon inquiry learn that many of this reckless race died in
the poorhouse. That institution is reserved for men like Kennicott who,
after devoting fifty years to "putting aside a stake," incontinently
invest the stake in spurious oil-stocks.

IV

She was encouraged to believe that she had not been abnormal in viewing
Gopher Prairie as unduly tedious and slatternly. She found the same
faith not only in girls escaped from domesticity but also in demure
old ladies who, tragically deprived of esteemed husbands and huge old
houses, yet managed to make a very comfortable thing of it by living in
small flats and having time to read.

But she also learned that by comparison Gopher Prairie was a model of
daring color, clever planning, and frenzied intellectuality. From her
teacher-housemate she had a sardonic description of a Middlewestern
railroad-division town, of the same size as Gopher Prairie but devoid
of lawns and trees, a town where the tracks sprawled along the
cinder-scabbed Main Street, and the railroad shops, dripping soot from
eaves and doorway, rolled out smoke in greasy coils.

Other towns she came to know by anecdote: a prairie village where the
wind blew all day long, and the mud was two feet thick in spring, and in
summer the flying sand scarred new-painted houses and dust covered
the few flowers set out in pots. New England mill-towns with the hands
living in rows of cottages like blocks of lava. A rich farming-center
in New Jersey, off the railroad, furiously pious, ruled by old men,
unbelievably ignorant old men, sitting about the grocery talking of
James G. Blaine. A Southern town, full of the magnolias and white
columns which Carol had accepted as proof of romance, but hating the
negroes, obsequious to the Old Families. A Western mining-settlement
like a tumor. A booming semi-city with parks and clever architects,
visited by famous pianists and unctuous lecturers, but irritable from a
struggle between union labor and the manufacturers' association, so
that in even the gayest of the new houses there was a ceaseless and
intimidating heresy-hunt.

V

The chart which plots Carol's progress is not easy to read. The lines
are broken and uncertain of direction; often instead of rising they sink
in wavering scrawls; and the colors are watery blue and pink and the dim
gray of rubbed pencil marks. A few lines are traceable.

Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical
gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by
a fog of vagueness. Carol had hidden in none of these refuges from
reality, but she, who was tender and merry, had been made timorous by
Gopher Prairie. Even her flight had been but the temporary courage of
panic. The thing she gained in Washington was not information about
office-systems and labor unions but renewed courage, that amiable
contempt called poise. Her glimpse of tasks involving millions of people
and a score of nations reduced Main Street from bloated importance to
its actual pettiness. She could never again be quite so awed by the
power with which she herself had endowed the Vidas and Blaussers and
Bogarts.

From her work and from her association with women who had organized
suffrage associations in hostile cities, or had defended political
prisoners, she caught something of an impersonal attitude; saw that she
had been as touchily personal as Maud Dyer.

And why, she began to ask, did she rage at individuals? Not individuals
but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples
who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under
a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family,
the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White
Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, is unembittered
laughter.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Carol finds employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance in Washington. It is not very elevating work but she feels that her contact with the anxieties of men and women all over the country was a part of vast affairs. She realizes that she can do the office work and her housework as well. She also feels that without interference housework, took very little time. She enjoys looking at the buildings in Washington. Vida's letter helps her to make the acquaintance of the Tincomb Methodist Church members. She finds the church to be another Main Street with the Sunday school, Sunday service and the church suppers of scalloped potatoes and gingerbread. They give advice just as the matrons did back home. Carol considers joining the militant suffrage organization and going to jail. Guy Pollock's cousin who is a temporary Army Captain takes Carol to tea dances. He introduces her to the secretary of a congressman. Through her Carol gets to meet commanders, newspapermen, fiscal experts and a teacher who knows the people in the suffrage movement headquarters. Through her, Carol gets the task of addressing envelopes of the suffrage movement and the friendly women include her in their group. They sometimes get mobbed and arrested. They also take dancing lessons and go for picnics and discuss politics when they are free. Through her friends Carol finds a house and a good nurse for Hugh. She takes him for walks, plays with him and reads to him. She is able to mix with people who talk a lot. She finds the young girls in Washington more fashionable and more knowledgeable than she was at their age. She admires the men who are very easy going and confidant. They accept the company of women naturally, without the embarrassed banter as the men did in Gopher Prairie. She finds a group of ladies who think and feel like her. They too consider towns like Gopher Prairie to be boring and make a comfortable living in Washington. They even find time to read. Through them she learns about many prairie towns and realizes that in comparison Gopher Prairie appeared to be more colorful and intellectual. She also gets the perception that Gopher Prairie is not as important as it thought itself to be and that it was she who gave the Vidas and the Bogarts the power, of which she was so afraid. She realizes that she had been as personal as Maud Dyer was. She understands that her war was with the institutions like the church and the country and that she could defend herself by laughing at them without any contempt for them.


prompt:
Chapter: CHAPTER XXXVIII

SHE had lived in Washington for a year. She was tired of the office.
It was tolerable, far more tolerable than housework, but it was not
adventurous.

She was having tea and cinnamon toast, alone at a small round table on
the balcony of Rauscher's Confiserie. Four debutantes clattered in. She
had felt young and dissipated, had thought rather well of her black and
leaf-green suit, but as she watched them, thin of ankle, soft under the
chin, seventeen or eighteen at most, smoking cigarettes with the correct
ennui and talking of "bedroom farces" and their desire to "run up to New
York and see something racy," she became old and rustic and plain, and
desirous of retreating from these hard brilliant children to a life
easier and more sympathetic. When they flickered out and one child gave
orders to a chauffeur, Carol was not a defiant philosopher but a faded
government clerk from Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.

She started dejectedly up Connecticut Avenue. She stopped, her heart
stopped. Coming toward her were Harry and Juanita Haydock. She ran to
them, she kissed Juanita, while Harry confided, "Hadn't expected to come
to Washington--had to go to New York for some buying--didn't have your
address along--just got in this morning--wondered how in the world we
could get hold of you."

She was definitely sorry to hear that they were to leave at nine that
evening, and she clung to them as long as she could. She took them to
St. Mark's for dinner. Stooped, her elbows on the table, she heard
with excitement that "Cy Bogart had the 'flu, but of course he was too
gol-darn mean to die of it."

"Will wrote me that Mr. Blausser has gone away. How did he get on?"

"Fine! Fine! Great loss to the town. There was a real public-spirited
fellow, all right!"

She discovered that she now had no opinions whatever about Mr. Blausser,
and she said sympathetically, "Will you keep up the town-boosting
campaign?"

Harry fumbled, "Well, we've dropped it just temporarily, but--sure you
bet! Say, did the doc write you about the luck B. J. Gougerling had
hunting ducks down in Texas?"

When the news had been told and their enthusiasm had slackened she
looked about and was proud to be able to point out a senator, to explain
the cleverness of the canopied garden. She fancied that a man with
dinner-coat and waxed mustache glanced superciliously at Harry's highly
form-fitting bright-brown suit and Juanita's tan silk frock, which was
doubtful at the seams. She glared back, defending her own, daring the
world not to appreciate them.

Then, waving to them, she lost them down the long train shed. She stood
reading the list of stations: Harrisburg, Pittsburg, Chicago. Beyond
Chicago----? She saw the lakes and stubble fields, heard the rhythm
of insects and the creak of a buggy, was greeted by Sam Clark's "Well,
well, how's the little lady?"

Nobody in Washington cared enough for her to fret about her sins as Sam
did.

But that night they had at the flat a man just back from Finland.

II

She was on the Powhatan roof with the captain. At a table, somewhat
vociferously buying improbable "soft drinks" for two fluffy girls, was a
man with a large familiar back.

"Oh! I think I know him," she murmured.

"Who? There? Oh, Bresnahan, Percy Bresnahan."

"Yes. You've met him? What sort of a man is he?"

"He's a good-hearted idiot. I rather like him, and I believe that as a
salesman of motors he's a wonder. But he's a nuisance in the aeronautic
section. Tries so hard to be useful but he doesn't know anything--he
doesn't know anything. Rather pathetic: rich man poking around and
trying to be useful. Do you want to speak to him?"

"No--no--I don't think so."

III

She was at a motion-picture show. The film was a highly advertised
and abysmal thing smacking of simpering hair-dressers, cheap perfume,
red-plush suites on the back streets of tenderloins, and complacent fat
women chewing gum. It pretended to deal with the life of studios. The
leading man did a portrait which was a masterpiece. He also saw visions
in pipe-smoke, and was very brave and poor and pure. He had ringlets,
and his masterpiece was strangely like an enlarged photograph.

Carol prepared to leave.

On the screen, in the role of a composer, appeared an actor called Eric
Valour.

She was startled, incredulous, then wretched. Looking straight out at
her, wearing a beret and a velvet jacket, was Erik Valborg.

He had a pale part, which he played neither well nor badly. She
speculated, "I could have made so much of him----" She did not finish
her speculation.

She went home and read Kennicott's letters. They had seemed stiff and
undetailed, but now there strode from them a personality, a personality
unlike that of the languishing young man in the velvet jacket playing a
dummy piano in a canvas room.

IV

Kennicott first came to see her in November, thirteen months after her
arrival in Washington. When he announced that he was coming she was not
at all sure that she wished to see him. She was glad that he had made
the decision himself.

She had leave from the office for two days.

She watched him marching from the train, solid, assured, carrying his
heavy suit-case, and she was diffident--he was such a bulky person to
handle. They kissed each other questioningly, and said at the same time,
"You're looking fine; how's the baby?" and "You're looking awfully well,
dear; how is everything?"

He grumbled, "I don't want to butt in on any plans you've made or your
friends or anything, but if you've got time for it, I'd like to chase
around Washington, and take in some restaurants and shows and stuff, and
forget work for a while."

She realized, in the taxicab, that he was wearing a soft gray suit, a
soft easy hat, a flippant tie.

"Like the new outfit? Got 'em in Chicago. Gosh, I hope they're the kind
you like."

They spent half an hour at the flat, with Hugh. She was flustered, but
he gave no sign of kissing her again.

As he moved about the small rooms she realized that he had had his new
tan shoes polished to a brassy luster. There was a recent cut on
his chin. He must have shaved on the train just before coming into
Washington.

It was pleasant to feel how important she was, how many people she
recognized, as she took him to the Capitol, as she told him (he asked
and she obligingly guessed) how many feet it was to the top of the dome,
as she pointed out Senator LaFollette and the vice-president, and
at lunch-time showed herself an habitue by leading him through the
catacombs to the senate restaurant.

She realized that he was slightly more bald. The familiar way in which
his hair was parted on the left side agitated her. She looked down
at his hands, and the fact that his nails were as ill-treated as ever
touched her more than his pleading shoe-shine.

"You'd like to motor down to Mount Vernon this afternoon, wouldn't you?"
she said.

It was the one thing he had planned. He was delighted that it seemed to
be a perfectly well bred and Washingtonian thing to do.

He shyly held her hand on the way, and told her the news: they were
excavating the basement for the new schoolbuilding, Vida "made him tired
the way she always looked at the Maje," poor Chet Dashaway had been
killed in a motor accident out on the Coast. He did not coax her to like
him. At Mount Vernon he admired the paneled library and Washington's
dental tools.

She knew that he would want oysters, that he would have heard of
Harvey's apropos of Grant and Blaine, and she took him there. At dinner
his hearty voice, his holiday enjoyment of everything, turned into
nervousness in his desire to know a number of interesting matters, such
as whether they still were married. But he did not ask questions, and
he said nothing about her returning. He cleared his throat and observed,
"Oh say, been trying out the old camera. Don't you think these are
pretty good?"

He tossed over to her thirty prints of Gopher Prairie and the country
about. Without defense, she was thrown into it. She remembered that he
had lured her with photographs in courtship days; she made a note of
his sameness, his satisfaction with the tactics which had proved good
before; but she forgot it in the familiar places. She was seeing
the sun-speckled ferns among birches on the shore of Minniemashie,
wind-rippled miles of wheat, the porch of their own house where Hugh had
played, Main Street where she knew every window and every face.

She handed them back, with praise for his photography, and he talked of
lenses and time-exposures.

Dinner was over and they were gossiping of her friends at the flat, but
an intruder was with them, sitting back, persistent, inescapable. She
could not endure it. She stammered:

"I had you check your bag at the station because I wasn't quite sure
where you'd stay. I'm dreadfully sorry we haven't room to put you up at
the flat. We ought to have seen about a room for you before. Don't you
think you better call up the Willard or the Washington now?"

He peered at her cloudily. Without words he asked, without speech she
answered, whether she was also going to the Willard or the Washington.
But she tried to look as though she did not know that they were debating
anything of the sort. She would have hated him had he been meek about
it. But he was neither meek nor angry. However impatient he may have
been with her blandness he said readily:

"Yes, guess I better do that. Excuse me a second. Then how about
grabbing a taxi (Gosh, isn't it the limit the way these taxi shuffers
skin around a corner? Got more nerve driving than I have!) and going
up to your flat for a while? Like to meet your friends--must be fine
women--and I might take a look and see how Hugh sleeps. Like to know how
he breathes. Don't think he has adenoids, but I better make sure, eh?"
He patted her shoulder.

At the flat they found her two housemates and a girl who had been to
jail for suffrage. Kennicott fitted in surprisingly. He laughed at the
girl's story of the humors of a hunger-strike; he told the secretary
what to do when her eyes were tired from typing; and the teacher asked
him--not as the husband of a friend but as a physician--whether there
was "anything to this inoculation for colds."

His colloquialisms seemed to Carol no more lax than their habitual
slang.

Like an older brother he kissed her good-night in the midst of the
company.

"He's terribly nice," said her housemates, and waited for confidences.
They got none, nor did her own heart. She could find nothing definite to
agonize about. She felt that she was no longer analyzing and controlling
forces, but swept on by them.

He came to the flat for breakfast, and washed the dishes. That was her
only occasion for spite. Back home he never thought of washing dishes!

She took him to the obvious "sights"--the Treasury, the Monument, the
Corcoran Gallery, the Pan-American Building, the Lincoln Memorial, with
the Potomac beyond it and the Arlington hills and the columns of the Lee
Mansion. For all his willingness to play there was over him a melancholy
which piqued her. His normally expressionless eyes had depths to them
now, and strangeness. As they walked through Lafayette Square, looking
past the Jackson statue at the lovely tranquil facade of the White
House, he sighed, "I wish I'd had a shot at places like this. When I was
in the U., I had to earn part of my way, and when I wasn't doing that
or studying, I guess I was roughhousing. My gang were a great bunch for
bumming around and raising Cain. Maybe if I'd been caught early and
sent to concerts and all that----Would I have been what you call
intelligent?"

"Oh, my dear, don't be humble! You are intelligent! For instance, you're
the most thorough doctor----"

He was edging about something he wished to say. He pounced on it:

"You did like those pictures of G. P. pretty well, after all, didn't
you!"

"Yes, of course."

"Wouldn't be so bad to have a glimpse of the old town, would it!"

"No, it wouldn't. Just as I was terribly glad to see the Haydocks.
But please understand me! That doesn't mean that I withdraw all my
criticisms. The fact that I might like a glimpse of old friends hasn't
any particular relation to the question of whether Gopher Prairie
oughtn't to have festivals and lamb chops."

Hastily, "No, no! Sure not. I und'stand."

"But I know it must have been pretty tiresome to have to live with
anybody as perfect as I was."

He grinned. She liked his grin.

V

He was thrilled by old negro coachmen, admirals, aeroplanes, the
building to which his income tax would eventually go, a Rolls-Royce,
Lynnhaven oysters, the Supreme Court Room, a New York theatrical manager
down for the try-out of a play, the house where Lincoln died, the cloaks
of Italian officers, the barrows at which clerks buy their box-lunches
at noon, the barges on the Chesapeake Canal, and the fact that District
of Columbia cars had both District and Maryland licenses.

She resolutely took him to her favorite white and green cottages and
Georgian houses. He admitted that fanlights, and white shutters against
rosy brick, were more homelike than a painty wooden box. He volunteered,
"I see how you mean. They make me think of these pictures of an
old-fashioned Christmas. Oh, if you keep at it long enough you'll have
Sam and me reading poetry and everything. Oh say, d' I tell you about
this fierce green Jack Elder's had his machine painted?"

VI

They were at dinner.

He hinted, "Before you showed me those places today, I'd already made up
my mind that when I built the new house we used to talk about, I'd fix
it the way you wanted it. I'm pretty practical about foundations and
radiation and stuff like that, but I guess I don't know a whole lot
about architecture."

"My dear, it occurs to me with a sudden shock that I don't either!"

"Well--anyway--you let me plan the garage and the plumbing, and you do
the rest, if you ever--I mean--if you ever want to."

Doubtfully, "That's sweet of you."

"Look here, Carrie; you think I'm going to ask you to love me. I'm not.
And I'm not going to ask you to come back to Gopher Prairie!"

She gaped.

"It's been a whale of a fight. But I guess I've got myself to see that
you won't ever stand G. P. unless you WANT to come back to it. I needn't
say I'm crazy to have you. But I won't ask you. I just want you to know
how I wait for you. Every mail I look for a letter, and when I get one
I'm kind of scared to open it, I'm hoping so much that you're coming
back. Evenings----You know I didn't open the cottage down at the lake at
all, this past summer. Simply couldn't stand all the others laughing and
swimming, and you not there. I used to sit on the porch, in town, and
I--I couldn't get over the feeling that you'd simply run up to the drug
store and would be right back, and till after it got dark I'd catch
myself watching, looking up the street, and you never came, and the
house was so empty and still that I didn't like to go in. And sometimes
I fell asleep there, in my chair, and didn't wake up till after
midnight, and the house----Oh, the devil! Please get me, Carrie. I just
want you to know how welcome you'll be if you ever do come. But I'm not
asking you to."

"You're----It's awfully----"

"'Nother thing. I'm going to be frank. I haven't always been absolutely,
uh, absolutely, proper. I've always loved you more than anything else in
the world, you and the kid. But sometimes when you were chilly to me I'd
get lonely and sore, and pike out and----Never intended----"

She rescued him with a pitying, "It's all right. Let's forget it."

"But before we were married you said if your husband ever did anything
wrong, you'd want him to tell you."

"Did I? I can't remember. And I can't seem to think. Oh, my dear, I
do know how generously you're trying to make me happy. The only thing
is----I can't think. I don't know what I think."

"Then listen! Don't think! Here's what I want you to do! Get a two-weeks
leave from your office. Weather's beginning to get chilly here. Let's
run down to Charleston and Savannah and maybe Florida.

"A second honeymoon?" indecisively.

"No. Don't even call it that. Call it a second wooing. I won't ask
anything. I just want the chance to chase around with you. I guess I
never appreciated how lucky I was to have a girl with imagination and
lively feet to play with. So----Could you maybe run away and see the
South with me? If you wanted to, you could just--you could just pretend
you were my sister and----I'll get an extra nurse for Hugh! I'll get the
best dog-gone nurse in Washington!"

VII

It was in the Villa Margherita, by the palms of the Charleston Battery
and the metallic harbor, that her aloofness melted.

When they sat on the upper balcony, enchanted by the moon glitter, she
cried, "Shall I go back to Gopher Prairie with you? Decide for me. I'm
tired of deciding and undeciding."

"No. You've got to do your own deciding. As a matter of fact, in spite
of this honeymoon, I don't think I want you to come home. Not yet."

She could only stare.

"I want you to be satisfied when you get there. I'll do everything I can
to keep you happy, but I'll make lots of breaks, so I want you to take
time and think it over."

She was relieved. She still had a chance to seize splendid indefinite
freedoms. She might go--oh, she'd see Europe, somehow, before she was
recaptured. But she also had a firmer respect for Kennicott. She had
fancied that her life might make a story. She knew that there was
nothing heroic or obviously dramatic in it, no magic of rare hours,
nor valiant challenge, but it seemed to her that she was of some
significance because she was commonplaceness, the ordinary life of the
age, made articulate and protesting. It had not occurred to her that
there was also a story of Will Kennicott, into which she entered only so
much as he entered into hers; that he had bewilderments and concealments
as intricate as her own, and soft treacherous desires for sympathy.

Thus she brooded, looking at the amazing sea, holding his hand.

VIII

She was in Washington; Kennicott was in Gopher Prairie, writing as dryly
as ever about water-pipes and goose-hunting and Mrs. Fageros's mastoid.

She was talking at dinner to a generalissima of suffrage. Should she
return?

The leader spoke wearily:

"My dear, I'm perfectly selfish. I can't quite visualize the needs of
your husband, and it seems to me that your baby will do quite as well in
the schools here as in your barracks at home."

"Then you think I'd better not go back?" Carol sounded disappointed.

"It's more difficult than that. When I say that I'm selfish I mean that
the only thing I consider about women is whether they're likely to prove
useful in building up real political power for women. And you? Shall I
be frank? Remember when I say 'you' I don't mean you alone. I'm thinking
of thousands of women who come to Washington and New York and
Chicago every year, dissatisfied at home and seeking a sign in the
heavens--women of all sorts, from timid mothers of fifty in cotton
gloves, to girls just out of Vassar who organize strikes in their own
fathers' factories! All of you are more or less useful to me, but only
a few of you can take my place, because I have one virtue (only one): I
have given up father and mother and children for the love of God.

"Here's the test for you: Do you come to 'conquer the East,' as people
say, or do you come to conquer yourself?

"It's so much more complicated than any of you know--so much more
complicated than I knew when I put on Ground Grippers and started out to
reform the world. The final complication in 'conquering Washington' or
'conquering New York' is that the conquerors must beyond all things not
conquer! It must have been so easy in the good old days when authors
dreamed only of selling a hundred thousand volumes, and sculptors
of being feted in big houses, and even the Uplifters like me had a
simple-hearted ambition to be elected to important offices and invited
to go round lecturing. But we meddlers have upset everything. Now the
one thing that is disgraceful to any of us is obvious success. The
Uplifter who is very popular with wealthy patrons can be pretty sure
that he has softened his philosophy to please them, and the author who
is making lots of money--poor things, I've heard 'em apologizing for it
to the shabby bitter-enders; I've seen 'em ashamed of the sleek luggage
they got from movie rights.

"Do you want to sacrifice yourself in such a topsy-turvy world, where
popularity makes you unpopular with the people you love, and the only
failure is cheap success, and the only individualist is the person who
gives up all his individualism to serve a jolly ungrateful proletariat
which thumbs its nose at him?"

Carol smiled ingratiatingly, to indicate that she was indeed one who
desired to sacrifice, but she sighed, "I don't know; I'm afraid I'm not
heroic. I certainly wasn't out home. Why didn't I do big effective----"

"Not a matter of heroism. Matter of endurance. Your Middlewest is
double-Puritan--prairie Puritan on top of New England Puritan; bluff
frontiersman on the surface, but in its heart it still has the ideal of
Plymouth Rock in a sleet-storm. There's one attack you can make on it,
perhaps the only kind that accomplishes much anywhere: you can keep on
looking at one thing after another in your home and church and bank, and
ask why it is, and who first laid down the law that it had to be that
way. If enough of us do this impolitely enough, then we'll become
civilized in merely twenty thousand years or so, instead of having
to wait the two hundred thousand years that my cynical anthropologist
friends allow. . . . Easy, pleasant, lucrative home-work for wives:
asking people to define their jobs. That's the most dangerous doctrine I
know!"

Carol was mediating, "I will go back! I will go on asking questions.
I've always done it, and always failed at it, and it's all I can do. I'm
going to ask Ezra Stowbody why he's opposed to the nationalization of
railroads, and ask Dave Dyer why a druggist always is pleased when he's
called 'doctor,' and maybe ask Mrs. Bogart why she wears a widow's veil
that looks like a dead crow."

The woman leader straightened. "And you have one thing. You have a baby
to hug. That's my temptation. I dream of babies--of a baby--and I sneak
around parks to see them playing. (The children in Dupont Circle are
like a poppy-garden.) And the antis call me 'unsexed'!"

Carol was thinking, in panic, "Oughtn't Hugh to have country air? I
won't let him become a yokel. I can guide him away from street-corner
loafing. . . . I think I can."

On her way home: "Now that I've made a precedent, joined the union and
gone out on one strike and learned personal solidarity, I won't be
so afraid. Will won't always be resisting my running away. Some day I
really will go to Europe with him . . . or without him.

"I've lived with people who are not afraid to go to jail. I could invite
a Miles Bjornstam to dinner without being afraid of the Haydocks . . . I
think I could.

"I'll take back the sound of Yvette Guilbert's songs and Elman's violin.
They'll be only the lovelier against the thrumming of crickets in the
stubble on an autumn day.

"I can laugh now and be serene . . . I think I can."

Though she should return, she said, she would not be utterly defeated.
She was glad of her rebellion. The prairie was no longer empty land in
the sun-glare; it was the living tawny beast which she had fought and
made beautiful by fighting; and in the village streets were shadows of
her desires and the sound of her marching and the seeds of mystery and
greatness.

IX

Her active hatred of Gopher Prairie had run out. She saw it now as a
toiling new settlement. With sympathy she remembered Kennicott's defense
of its citizens as "a lot of pretty good folks, working hard and trying
to bring up their families the best they can." She recalled tenderly the
young awkwardness of Main Street and the makeshifts of the little brown
cottages; she pitied their shabbiness and isolation; had compassion for
their assertion of culture, even as expressed in Thanatopsis papers, for
their pretense of greatness, even as trumpeted in "boosting." She saw
Main Street in the dusty prairie sunset, a line of frontier shanties
with solemn lonely people waiting for her, solemn and lonely as an old
man who has outlived his friends. She remembered that Kennicott and Sam
Clark had listened to her songs, and she wanted to run to them and sing.

"At last," she rejoiced, "I've come to a fairer attitude toward the
town. I can love it, now."

She was, perhaps, rather proud of herself for having acquired so much
tolerance.

She awoke at three in the morning, after a dream of being tortured by
Ella Stowbody and the Widow Bogart.

"I've been making the town a myth. This is how people keep up the
tradition of the perfect home-town, the happy boyhood, the brilliant
college friends. We forget so. I've been forgetting that Main Street
doesn't think it's in the least lonely and pitiful. It thinks it's God's
Own Country. It isn't waiting for me. It doesn't care."

But the next evening she again saw Gopher Prairie as her home, waiting
for her in the sunset, rimmed round with splendor.

She did not return for five months more; five months crammed with greedy
accumulation of sounds and colors to take back for the long still days.

She had spent nearly two years in Washington.

When she departed for Gopher Prairie, in June, her second baby was
stirring within her.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: After one year's stay in Washington, Carol gets tired of her office work. One day, while having tea, she notices the young girls. They talk about bedroom farce and running up to New York and Carol feels very old and rustic. When one of the girls gives orders to the chauffeur, Carol realizes that she herself is only a Government clerk from a small place called Gopher Prairie. Then she sees Juanita and Harry Haydock walking down the road and runs to them with joy. She clings to them and gives them dinner at St. Marks. She listens to all the gossip about Gopher Prairie eagerly and feels sorry to let them go. Once she goes out with the captain to a restaurant. She notices Bresnahan entertaining two ladies. The captain informs Carol that though Bresnahan is good sales man of motor cars, he is a nuisance in the aeronautic section. She watches a movie and is shocked to see Erik Valborg appear in a minor role. She feels very sorry for him. She receives Kennicott's letter and finds that Kennicott has a personality, which Erik can never have. Kennicott comes to Washington to see her. She is touched to see him in a new soft gray suit and a new tie. His shoes are polished to a shine and he had shaved perhaps before getting off the train. She takes two days leave from her office to be with him. Kennicott spends half an hour in her flat with Hugh. She takes him around Washington. She feels moved when she finds that he is slightly balder and his fingernails are as roughly treated as ever. He gives her news of Gopher Prairie. They had started the construction of the new school building. Vida made him tired by the way she looked at her Maje. Chet Dashaway had been killed in a motor accident. But he never tells her to like him or return to him. He wants to know if they are still married but he never asks any questions. He shows her photographs of Gopher Prairie. She looks at them and remembers his first wooing. She informs him that he will have to stay at a hotel but he does not get angry or hurt. He wants to go to her flat to see Hugh and meet her friends. He makes friends easily with her housemates and suggests remedies for red eyes and inoculation for cold. The next day he comes to the flat for breakfast and washes the dishes. They go sight seeing. He tells her how he had to earn while he was studying. He regrets the fact that his friends in college did nothing but loaf around and cause nuisance. He feels that he should have attended concerts at that age so that she would have thought of him as intelligent. He asks her if she liked the photos and if she would like to see Gopher Prairie. She tells him that if she did she would retain the right to criticize it. She admits that she must have been tiresome to live with and likes the way he grins when she says that. Kennicott feels thrilled to see the old Negro coachman, the admirals, the building to which his income tax went and the place where Lincoln died. Carol takes him to the green cottages and the Georgian houses. He admits that they looked very pretty. At dinner he tells her that she could plan the house, leaving the furnace and the garage to him if she liked to go back. He tells her that he would not ask her to love him or go back with him. He wants her to return only if she really wanted to return. He tells her that he loved her as much as he loved her before. He did not go to the lake cottage because he could not bear to be there without her. He also tells her how he waits at the porch hoping that she would come back and how many times he fell asleep there. He tries to confess about Maud but she does not want him to confess anything. She tells Kennicott that she does not know, what to think.