prompt:
Chapter: CHAPTER XXXIII

FOR a month which was one suspended moment of doubt she saw Erik only
casually, at an Eastern Star dance, at the shop, where, in the
presence of Nat Hicks, they conferred with immense particularity on the
significance of having one or two buttons on the cuff of Kennicott's New
Suit. For the benefit of beholders they were respectably vacuous.

Thus barred from him, depressed in the thought of Fern, Carol was
suddenly and for the first time convinced that she loved Erik.

She told herself a thousand inspiriting things which he would say if he
had the opportunity; for them she admired him, loved him. But she was
afraid to summon him. He understood, he did not come. She forgot her
every doubt of him, and her discomfort in his background. Each day it
seemed impossible to get through the desolation of not seeing him. Each
morning, each afternoon, each evening was a compartment divided from all
other units of time, distinguished by a sudden "Oh! I want to see Erik!"
which was as devastating as though she had never said it before.

There were wretched periods when she could not picture him. Usually
he stood out in her mind in some little moment--glancing up from his
preposterous pressing-iron, or running on the beach with Dave Dyer.
But sometimes he had vanished; he was only an opinion. She worried then
about his appearance: Weren't his wrists too large and red? Wasn't his
nose a snub, like so many Scandinavians? Was he at all the graceful
thing she had fancied? When she encountered him on the street she was
as much reassuring herself as rejoicing in his presence. More disturbing
than being unable to visualize him was the darting remembrance of some
intimate aspect: his face as they had walked to the boat together at the
picnic; the ruddy light on his temples, neck-cords, flat cheeks.

On a November evening when Kennicott was in the country she answered the
bell and was confused to find Erik at the door, stooped, imploring, his
hands in the pockets of his topcoat. As though he had been rehearsing
his speech he instantly besought:

"Saw your husband driving away. I've got to see you. I can't stand it.
Come for a walk. I know! People might see us. But they won't if we hike
into the country. I'll wait for you by the elevator. Take as long as you
want to--oh, come quick!"

"In a few minutes," she promised.

She murmured, "I'll just talk to him for a quarter of an hour and come
home." She put an her tweed coat and rubber overshoes, considering how
honest and hopeless are rubbers, how clearly their chaperonage proved
that she wasn't going to a lovers' tryst.

She found him in the shadow of the grain-elevator, sulkily kicking at
a rail of the side-track. As she came toward him she fancied that his
whole body expanded. But he said nothing, nor she; he patted her sleeve,
she returned the pat, and they crossed the railroad tracks, found a
road, clumped toward open country.

"Chilly night, but I like this melancholy gray," he said.

"Yes."

They passed a moaning clump of trees and splashed along the wet road.
He tucked her hand into the side-pocket of his overcoat. She caught his
thumb and, sighing, held it exactly as Hugh held hers when they went
walking. She thought about Hugh. The current maid was in for the
evening, but was it safe to leave the baby with her? The thought was
distant and elusive.

Erik began to talk, slowly, revealingly. He made for her a picture of
his work in a large tailor shop in Minneapolis: the steam and heat, and
the drudgery; the men in darned vests and crumpled trousers, men who
"rushed growlers of beer" and were cynical about women, who laughed at
him and played jokes on him. "But I didn't mind, because I could keep
away from them outside. I used to go to the Art Institute and the Walker
Gallery, and tramp clear around Lake Harriet, or hike out to the Gates
house and imagine it was a chateau in Italy and I lived in it. I was a
marquis and collected tapestries--that was after I was wounded in Padua.
The only really bad time was when a tailor named Finkelfarb found a
diary I was trying to keep and he read it aloud in the shop--it was a
bad fight." He laughed. "I got fined five dollars. But that's all gone
now. Seems as though you stand between me and the gas stoves--the long
flames with mauve edges, licking up around the irons and making that
sneering sound all day--aaaaah!"

Her fingers tightened about his thumb as she perceived the hot low room,
the pounding of pressing-irons, the reek of scorched cloth, and Erik
among giggling gnomes. His fingertip crept through the opening of her
glove and smoothed her palm. She snatched her hand away, stripped off
her glove, tucked her hand back into his.

He was saying something about a "wonderful person." In her tranquillity
she let the words blow by and heeded only the beating wings of his
voice.

She was conscious that he was fumbling for impressive speech.

"Say, uh--Carol, I've written a poem about you."

"That's nice. Let's hear it."

"Damn it, don't be so casual about it! Can't you take me seriously?"

"My dear boy, if I took you seriously----! I don't want us to be hurt
more than--more than we will be. Tell me the poem. I've never had a poem
written about me!"

"It isn't really a poem. It's just some words that I love because it
seems to me they catch what you are. Of course probably they won't seem
so to anybody else, but----Well----

     Little and tender and merry and wise
     With eyes that meet my eyes.

Do you get the idea the way I do?"

"Yes! I'm terribly grateful!" And she was grateful--while she
impersonally noted how bad a verse it was.

She was aware of the haggard beauty in the lowering night. Monstrous
tattered clouds sprawled round a forlorn moon; puddles and rocks
glistened with inner light. They were passing a grove of scrub poplars,
feeble by day but looming now like a menacing wall. She stopped. They
heard the branches dripping, the wet leaves sullenly plumping on the
soggy earth.

"Waiting--waiting--everything is waiting," she whispered. She drew her
hand from his, pressed her clenched fingers against her lips. She was
lost in the somberness. "I am happy--so we must go home, before we have
time to become unhappy. But can't we sit on a log for a minute and just
listen?"

"No. Too wet. But I wish we could build a fire, and you could sit on
my overcoat beside it. I'm a grand fire-builder! My cousin Lars and me
spent a week one time in a cabin way up in the Big Woods, snowed in.
The fireplace was filled with a dome of ice when we got there, but we
chopped it out, and jammed the thing full of pine-boughs. Couldn't we
build a fire back here in the woods and sit by it for a while?"

She pondered, half-way between yielding and refusal. Her head ached
faintly. She was in abeyance. Everything, the night, his silhouette, the
cautious-treading future, was as undistinguishable as though she were
drifting bodiless in a Fourth Dimension. While her mind groped, the
lights of a motor car swooped round a bend in the road, and they stood
farther apart. "What ought I to do?" she mused. "I think----Oh, I won't
be robbed! I AM good! If I'm so enslaved that I can't sit by the fire
with a man and talk, then I'd better be dead!"

The lights of the thrumming car grew magically; were upon them; abruptly
stopped. From behind the dimness of the windshield a voice, annoyed,
sharp: "Hello there!"

She realized that it was Kennicott.

The irritation in his voice smoothed out. "Having a walk?"

They made schoolboyish sounds of assent.

"Pretty wet, isn't it? Better ride back. Jump up in front here,
Valborg."

His manner of swinging open the door was a command. Carol was conscious
that Erik was climbing in, that she was apparently to sit in the back,
and that she had been left to open the rear door for herself. Instantly
the wonder which had flamed to the gusty skies was quenched, and she was
Mrs. W. P. Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, riding in a squeaking old car,
and likely to be lectured by her husband.

She feared what Kennicott would say to Erik. She bent toward them.
Kennicott was observing, "Going to have some rain before the night 's
over, all right."

"Yes," said Erik.

"Been funny season this year, anyway. Never saw it with such a cold
October and such a nice November. 'Member we had a snow way back on
October ninth! But it certainly was nice up to the twenty-first, this
month--as I remember it, not a flake of snow in November so far, has
there been? But I shouldn't wonder if we'd be having some snow 'most any
time now."

"Yes, good chance of it," said Erik.

"Wish I'd had more time to go after the ducks this fall. By golly, what
do you think?" Kennicott sounded appealing. "Fellow wrote me from Man
Trap Lake that he shot seven mallards and couple of canvas-back in one
hour!"

"That must have been fine," said Erik.

Carol was ignored. But Kennicott was blustrously cheerful. He shouted
to a farmer, as he slowed up to pass the frightened team, "There we
are--schon gut!" She sat back, neglected, frozen, unheroic heroine in
a drama insanely undramatic. She made a decision resolute and enduring.
She would tell Kennicott----What would she tell him? She could not say
that she loved Erik. DID she love him? But she would have it out.
She was not sure whether it was pity for Kennicott's blindness, or
irritation at his assumption that he was enough to fill any woman's
life, which prompted her, but she knew that she was out of the trap,
that she could be frank; and she was exhilarated with the adventure of
it . . . while in front he was entertaining Erik:

"Nothing like an hour on a duck-pass to make you relish your victuals
and----Gosh, this machine hasn't got the power of a fountain pen. Guess
the cylinders are jam-cram-full of carbon again. Don't know but what
maybe I'll have to put in another set of piston-rings."

He stopped on Main Street and clucked hospitably, "There, that'll give
you just a block to walk. G' night."

Carol was in suspense. Would Erik sneak away?

He stolidly moved to the back of the car, thrust in his hand, muttered,
"Good night--Carol. I'm glad we had our walk." She pressed his hand. The
car was flapping on. He was hidden from her--by a corner drug store on
Main Street!

Kennicott did not recognize her till he drew up before the house. Then
he condescended, "Better jump out here and I'll take the boat around
back. Say, see if the back door is unlocked, will you?" She unlatched
the door for him. She realized that she still carried the damp glove she
had stripped off for Erik. She drew it on. She stood in the center of
the living-room, unmoving, in damp coat and muddy rubbers. Kennicott was
as opaque as ever. Her task wouldn't be anything so lively as having
to endure a scolding, but only an exasperating effort to command his
attention so that he would understand the nebulous things she had to
tell him, instead of interrupting her by yawning, winding the clock, and
going up to bed. She heard him shoveling coal into the furnace. He came
through the kitchen energetically, but before he spoke to her he did
stop in the hall, did wind the clock.

He sauntered into the living-room and his glance passed from her
drenched hat to her smeared rubbers. She could hear--she could hear,
see, taste, smell, touch--his "Better take your coat off, Carrie; looks
kind of wet." Yes, there it was:

"Well, Carrie, you better----" He chucked his own coat on a chair,
stalked to her, went on with a rising tingling voice, "----you better
cut it out now. I'm not going to do the out-raged husband stunt. I like
you and I respect you, and I'd probably look like a boob if I tried to
be dramatic. But I think it's about time for you and Valborg to call a
halt before you get in Dutch, like Fern Mullins did."

"Do you----"

"Course. I know all about it. What d' you expect in a town that's as
filled with busybodies, that have plenty of time to stick their noses
into other folks' business, as this is? Not that they've had the nerve
to do much tattling to me, but they've hinted around a lot, and anyway,
I could see for myself that you liked him. But of course I knew how cold
you were, I knew you wouldn't stand it even if Valborg did try to hold
your hand or kiss you, so I didn't worry. But same time, I hope you
don't suppose this husky young Swede farmer is as innocent and Platonic
and all that stuff as you are! Wait now, don't get sore! I'm not
knocking him. He isn't a bad sort. And he's young and likes to gas about
books. Course you like him. That isn't the real rub. But haven't you
just seen what this town can do, once it goes and gets moral on you,
like it did with Fern? You probably think that two young folks making
love are alone if anybody ever is, but there's nothing in this town
that you don't do in company with a whole lot of uninvited but awful
interested guests. Don't you realize that if Ma Westlake and a few
others got started they'd drive you up a tree, and you'd find yourself
so well advertised as being in love with this Valborg fellow that you'd
HAVE to be, just to spite 'em!"

"Let me sit down," was all Carol could say. She drooped on the couch,
wearily, without elasticity.

He yawned, "Gimme your coat and rubbers," and while she stripped them
off he twiddled his watch-chain, felt the radiator, peered at the
thermometer. He shook out her wraps in the hall, hung them up with
exactly his usual care. He pushed a chair near to her and sat bolt up.
He looked like a physician about to give sound and undesired advice.

Before he could launch into his heavy discourse she desperately got in,
"Please! I want you to know that I was going to tell you everything,
tonight."

"Well, I don't suppose there's really much to tell."

"But there is. I'm fond of Erik. He appeals to something in here." She
touched her breast. "And I admire him. He isn't just a 'young Swede
farmer.' He's an artist----"

"Wait now! He's had a chance all evening to tell you what a whale of
a fine fellow he is. Now it's my turn. I can't talk artistic,
but----Carrie, do you understand my work?" He leaned forward, thick
capable hands on thick sturdy thighs, mature and slow, yet beseeching.
"No matter even if you are cold, I like you better than anybody in
the world. One time I said that you were my soul. And that still goes.
You're all the things that I see in a sunset when I'm driving in from
the country, the things that I like but can't make poetry of. Do you
realize what my job is? I go round twenty-four hours a day, in mud and
blizzard, trying my damnedest to heal everybody, rich or poor. You--that
're always spieling about how scientists ought to rule the world,
instead of a bunch of spread-eagle politicians--can't you see that I'm
all the science there is here? And I can stand the cold and the bumpy
roads and the lonely rides at night. All I need is to have you here at
home to welcome me. I don't expect you to be passionate--not any more
I don't--but I do expect you to appreciate my work. I bring babies into
the world, and save lives, and make cranky husbands quit being mean to
their wives. And then you go and moon over a Swede tailor because he can
talk about how to put ruchings on a skirt! Hell of a thing for a man to
fuss over!"

She flew out at him: "You make your side clear. Let me give mine. I
admit all you say--except about Erik. But is it only you, and the baby,
that want me to back you up, that demand things from me? They're all on
me, the whole town! I can feel their hot breaths on my neck! Aunt Bessie
and that horrible slavering old Uncle Whittier and Juanita and Mrs.
Westlake and Mrs. Bogart and all of them. And you welcome them, you
encourage them to drag me down into their cave! I won't stand it! Do you
hear? Now, right now, I'm done. And it's Erik who gives me the courage.
You say he just thinks about ruches (which do not usually go on skirts,
by the way!). I tell you he thinks about God, the God that Mrs. Bogart
covers up with greasy gingham wrappers! Erik will be a great man some
day, and if I could contribute one tiny bit to his success----"

"Wait, wait, wait now! Hold up! You're assuming that your Erik will make
good. As a matter of fact, at my age he'll be running a one-man tailor
shop in some burg about the size of Schoenstrom."

"He will not!"

"That's what he's headed for now all right, and he's twenty-five or -six
and----What's he done to make you think he'll ever be anything but a
pants-presser?"

"He has sensitiveness and talent----"

"Wait now! What has he actually done in the art line? Has he done one
first-class picture or--sketch, d' you call it? Or one poem, or played
the piano, or anything except gas about what he's going to do?"

She looked thoughtful.

"Then it's a hundred to one shot that he never will. Way I understand
it, even these fellows that do something pretty good at home and get to
go to art school, there ain't more than one out of ten of 'em, maybe one
out of a hundred, that ever get above grinding out a bum living--about
as artistic as plumbing. And when it comes down to this tailor, why,
can't you see--you that take on so about psychology--can't you see that
it's just by contrast with folks like Doc McGanum or Lym Cass that this
fellow seems artistic? Suppose you'd met up with him first in one of
these reg'lar New York studios! You wouldn't notice him any more 'n a
rabbit!"

She huddled over folded hands like a temple virgin shivering on her
knees before the thin warmth of a brazier. She could not answer.

Kennicott rose quickly, sat on the couch, took both her hands. "Suppose
he fails--as he will! Suppose he goes back to tailoring, and you're his
wife. Is that going to be this artistic life you've been thinking about?
He's in some bum shack, pressing pants all day, or stooped over sewing,
and having to be polite to any grouch that blows in and jams a dirty
stinking old suit in his face and says, 'Here you, fix this, and be
blame quick about it.' He won't even have enough savvy to get him a big
shop. He'll pike along doing his own work--unless you, his wife, go help
him, go help him in the shop, and stand over a table all day, pushing a
big heavy iron. Your complexion will look fine after about fifteen years
of baking that way, won't it! And you'll be humped over like an old
hag. And probably you'll live in one room back of the shop. And then
at night--oh, you'll have your artist--sure! He'll come in stinking
of gasoline, and cranky from hard work, and hinting around that if it
hadn't been for you, he'd of gone East and been a great artist. Sure!
And you'll be entertaining his relatives----Talk about Uncle Whit!
You'll be having some old Axel Axelberg coming in with manure on his
boots and sitting down to supper in his socks and yelling at you, 'Hurry
up now, you vimmin make me sick!' Yes, and you'll have a squalling brat
every year, tugging at you while you press clothes, and you won't love
'em like you do Hugh up-stairs, all downy and asleep----"

"Please! Not any more!"

Her face was on his knee.

He bent to kiss her neck. "I don't want to be unfair. I guess love is
a great thing, all right. But think it would stand much of that kind of
stuff? Oh, honey, am I so bad? Can't you like me at all? I've--I've been
so fond of you!"

She snatched up his hand, she kissed it. Presently she sobbed, "I won't
ever see him again. I can't, now. The hot living-room behind the tailor
shop----I don't love him enough for that. And you are----Even if I were
sure of him, sure he was the real thing, I don't think I could actually
leave you. This marriage, it weaves people together. It's not easy to
break, even when it ought to be broken."

"And do you want to break it?"

"No!"

He lifted her, carried her up-stairs, laid her on her bed, turned to the
door.

"Come kiss me," she whimpered.

He kissed her lightly and slipped away. For an hour she heard him moving
about his room, lighting a cigar, drumming with his knuckles on a chair.
She felt that he was a bulwark between her and the darkness that grew
thicker as the delayed storm came down in sleet.

II

He was cheery and more casual than ever at breakfast. All day she tried
to devise a way of giving Erik up. Telephone? The village central would
unquestionably "listen in." A letter? It might be found. Go to see
him? Impossible. That evening Kennicott gave her, without comment, an
envelope. The letter was signed "E. V."

I know I can't do anything but make trouble for you, I think. I am going
to Minneapolis tonight and from there as soon as I can either to New
York or Chicago. I will do as big things as I can. I--I can't write I
love you too much--God keep you.

Until she heard the whistle which told her that the Minneapolis train
was leaving town, she kept herself from thinking, from moving. Then it
was all over. She had no plan nor desire for anything.

When she caught Kennicott looking at her over his newspaper she fled
to his arms, thrusting the paper aside, and for the first time in years
they were lovers. But she knew that she still had no plan in life, save
always to go along the same streets, past the same people, to the same
shops.

III

A week after Erik's going the maid startled her by announcing, "There's
a Mr. Valborg down-stairs say he vant to see you."

She was conscious of the maid's interested stare, angry at this
shattering of the calm in which she had hidden. She crept down, peeped
into the living-room. It was not Erik Valborg who stood there; it was a
small, gray-bearded, yellow-faced man in mucky boots, canvas jacket, and
red mittens. He glowered at her with shrewd red eyes.

"You de doc's wife?"

"Yes."

"I'm Adolph Valborg, from up by Jefferson. I'm Erik's father."

"Oh!" He was a monkey-faced little man, and not gentle.

"What you done wit' my son?"

"I don't think I understand you."

"I t'ink you're going to understand before I get t'rough! Where is he?"

"Why, really----I presume that he's in Minneapolis."

"You presume!" He looked through her with a contemptuousness such as
she could not have imagined. Only an insane contortion of spelling could
portray his lyric whine, his mangled consonants. He clamored, "Presume!
Dot's a fine word! I don't want no fine words and I don't want no more
lies! I want to know what you KNOW!"

"See here, Mr. Valborg, you may stop this bullying right now. I'm not
one of your farmwomen. I don't know where your son is, and there's no
reason why I should know." Her defiance ran out in face of his immense
flaxen stolidity. He raised his fist, worked up his anger with the
gesture, and sneered:

"You dirty city women wit' your fine ways and fine dresses! A father
come here trying to save his boy from wickedness, and you call him a
bully! By God, I don't have to take nothin' off you nor your husband! I
ain't one of your hired men. For one time a woman like you is going to
hear de trut' about what you are, and no fine city words to it, needer."

"Really, Mr. Valborg----"

"What you done wit' him? Heh? I'll yoost tell you what you done! He was
a good boy, even if he was a damn fool. I want him back on de farm. He
don't make enough money tailoring. And I can't get me no hired man! I
want to take him back on de farm. And you butt in and fool wit' him and
make love wit' him, and get him to run away!"

"You are lying! It's not true that----It's not true, and if it were, you
would have no right to speak like this."

"Don't talk foolish. I know. Ain't I heard from a fellow dot live right
here in town how you been acting wit' de boy? I know what you done!
Walking wit' him in de country! Hiding in de woods wit' him! Yes and I
guess you talk about religion in de woods! Sure! Women like you--you're
worse dan street-walkers! Rich women like you, wit' fine husbands and
no decent work to do--and me, look at my hands, look how I work, look at
those hands! But you, oh God no, you mustn't work, you're too fine to
do decent work. You got to play wit' young fellows, younger as you are,
laughing and rolling around and acting like de animals! You let my son
alone, d' you hear?" He was shaking his fist in her face. She could
smell the manure and sweat. "It ain't no use talkin' to women like you.
Get no trut' out of you. But next time I go by your husband!"

He was marching into the hall. Carol flung herself on him, her clenching
hand on his hayseed-dusty shoulder. "You horrible old man, you've always
tried to turn Erik into a slave, to fatten your pocketbook! You've
sneered at him, and overworked him, and probably you've succeeded in
preventing his ever rising above your muck-heap! And now because you
can't drag him back, you come here to vent----Go tell my husband, go
tell him, and don't blame me when he kills you, when my husband kills
you--he will kill you----"

The man grunted, looked at her impassively, said one word, and walked
out.

She heard the word very plainly.

She did not quite reach the couch. Her knees gave way, she pitched
forward. She heard her mind saying, "You haven't fainted. This is
ridiculous. You're simply dramatizing yourself. Get up." But she could
not move. When Kennicott arrived she was lying on the couch. His step
quickened. "What's happened, Carrie? You haven't got a bit of blood in
your face."

She clutched his arm. "You've got to be sweet to me, and kind! I'm going
to California--mountains, sea. Please don't argue about it, because I'm
going."

Quietly, "All right. We'll go. You and I. Leave the kid here with Aunt
Bessie."

"Now!"

"Well yes, just as soon as we can get away. Now don't talk any more.
Just imagine you've already started." He smoothed her hair, and not till
after supper did he continue: "I meant it about California. But I think
we better wait three weeks or so, till I get hold of some young fellow
released from the medical corps to take my practice. And if people are
gossiping, you don't want to give them a chance by running away. Can you
stand it and face 'em for three weeks or so?"

"Yes," she said emptily.

IV

People covertly stared at her on the street. Aunt Bessie tried to
catechize her about Erik's disappearance, and it was Kennicott who
silenced the woman with a savage, "Say, are you hinting that Carrie had
anything to do with that fellow's beating it? Then let me tell you, and
you can go right out and tell the whole bloomin' town, that Carrie and
I took Val--took Erik riding, and he asked me about getting a better job
in Minneapolis, and I advised him to go to it. . . . Getting much sugar
in at the store now?"

Guy Pollock crossed the street to be pleasant apropos of California and
new novels. Vida Sherwin dragged her to the Jolly Seventeen. There, with
every one rigidly listening, Maud Dyer shot at Carol, "I hear Erik has
left town."

Carol was amiable. "Yes, so I hear. In fact, he called me up--told me he
had been offered a lovely job in the city. So sorry he's gone. He would
have been valuable if we'd tried to start the dramatic association
again. Still, I wouldn't be here for the association myself, because
Will is all in from work, and I'm thinking of taking him to California.
Juanita--you know the Coast so well--tell me: would you start in at Los
Angeles or San Francisco, and what are the best hotels?"

The Jolly Seventeen looked disappointed, but the Jolly Seventeen liked
to give advice, the Jolly Seventeen liked to mention the expensive
hotels at which they had stayed. (A meal counted as a stay.) Before they
could question her again Carol escorted in with drum and fife the topic
of Raymie Wutherspoon. Vida had news from her husband. He had been
gassed in the trenches, had been in a hospital for two weeks, had been
promoted to major, was learning French.

She left Hugh with Aunt Bessie.

But for Kennicott she would have taken him. She hoped that in some
miraculous way yet unrevealed she might find it possible to remain in
California. She did not want to see Gopher Prairie again.

The Smails were to occupy the Kennicott house, and quite the hardest
thing to endure in the month of waiting was the series of conferences
between Kennicott and Uncle Whittier in regard to heating the garage and
having the furnace flues cleaned.

Did Carol, Kennicott inquired, wish to stop in Minneapolis to buy new
clothes?

"No! I want to get as far away as I can as soon as I can. Let's wait
till Los Angeles."

"Sure, sure! Just as you like. Cheer up! We're going to have a large
wide time, and everything 'll be different when we come back."

VI

Dusk on a snowy December afternoon. The sleeper which would connect
at Kansas City with the California train rolled out of St. Paul with
a chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick as it crossed the other
tracks. It bumped through the factory belt, gained speed. Carol could
see nothing but gray fields, which had closed in on her all the way from
Gopher Prairie. Ahead was darkness.

"For an hour, in Minneapolis, I must have been near Erik. He's still
there, somewhere. He'll be gone when I come back. I'll never know where
he has gone."

As Kennicott switched on the seat-light she turned drearily to the
illustrations in a motion-picture magazine.

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

completion: A month later Erik comes Carol's house one night when Will is out and demands that she accompany him on a walk in the country. She readily assents. As they walk they hold hands. He recites two lines of a poem he has written for her and she is flattered by what she knows to be his bad verse. A vehicle approaches and stops. From the glare of the lights Carol hears her husband's annoyed voice call to her. He offers them a ride back into town. At home, Kennicott lectures and commands her to quit carrying on with Valborg. He asserts that though she is too romantically frigid to have an affair the town gossips will nevertheless destroy her just as they did Fern Mullins. When Carol defends Erik, Kennicott asserts that the boy will never amount to anything more than a tailor. She succumbs and comes to believe that she needs her husband more than anything. She promises to give up Erik. The next day he sends a note to say he's taking the train to Minneapolis and then to bigger cities. That evening she and Will are lovers for the first time in a long time. One week later, Erik's father knocks on the door and angrily accuses Carol of ruining his son. She faints and when Will arrives home she is supine on the couch; she begs him to take her on a trip to California. He agrees. Before they leave many of the women in town make allusions to Erik in Carol's presence. At a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen she steers the topic away from Erik by asking about Raymie. Vida informs the group that he was gassed in the trenches, has recovered and been promoted to major. Carol and Will leave Hugh with Aunt Bessie and leave on a train for California.


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: Carol and Will travel for three and a half months. Carol manages to escape the Gopher Prairie malaise but eventually she longs for her son and they return. They leave Monterrey California on a beautiful sunny day and arrive in Gopher Prairie during a sleet storm. While they wait for a cab at the Haydock's, Juanita relates the latest gossip which is not very different from the gossip extant at their departure. When their cab comically wrecks against a tree, they elect to walk home. Kennicott observes all the small improvements about the town but Carol sees only its brute ugliness. She is happy to see Hugh but quickly despairs when her old dissatisfaction returns. Soon afterward Old Mrs. Perry dies of illness and Carol observes how the town turns its back on poor old Champ Perry who loses his job without a pension. She convinces Lyman Cass to give him an easy job as a night watchman. Major Raymond Wutherspoon returns from the war and for a time the town moons over him. Many people, including Will Kennicott, make a good deal of money on the rising wheat prices and land speculation and one speculator, James Blausser convinces the town to engage in a booster campaign. Everyone in town loves Honest Jim but Carol hates his obvious, crude mannerisms. At Jim's behest the town gears up to attract industry and government and puts in a White Way. Carol is disgusted by the town's new egomania. Kennicott is annoyed and angry that Carol does not share his enthusiasm for the boosting. One night an argument between Carol and Will erupts and Carol tells her husband that she is leaving until she can discover her work - that which will satisfy her; she doesn't know how long she will be gone and she intends to take Hugh. Kennicott protests that he needs her and she retorts: "You have a right to me if you can keep me. Can you. He has no reply. After a month of arguing she departs with Hugh for Washington, D. C. to find war-work. When she leaves on the train she feels lonely and empty but free


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: In Washington she finds office work at the Bureau of War Risk Management. She discovers that business women have freedom without losing domesticity and she loves the city's element of mystery. Through it all, however, she recognizes a streak of Main Street in the transplanted people from town's like Gopher Prairie who cleave together in the cities and shut out anything that does not remind them of home. She becomes friendly with a group of suffragettes. Though she never officially joins the group they adopt her and take her on their picnics and social gatherings. Most of her salary goes to a nurse for Hugh but she is happy in her small flat that she shares with other working girls whose open manners pleasantly shock her and knowledgeable conversation makes her wish to be younger. From these girls she learns of towns all over the country much worse than Gopher Prairie. Washington imbues Carol with poise and a comfortably impersonal attitude that allows her to rise above the pettiness of her former state of mind. She learns that laughter, not disgust or anger, is the best defense


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: A year passes. She sees the Haydocks in town on business and is genuinely glad to see friends from Gopher Prairie, though she is equally glad to meet someone at the flat just in from Finland that night. Later, while speaking with a captain, she sees Percy Bresnahan. In the captain's opinion, Bresnahan is a nice enough fellow but a hopeless bother. She sees a rather bad motion-picture and is startled to see Erik Valborg in a small and poorly acted part. After thirteen months Will comes for a visit that is both awkward and a relief. While sightseeing and going to restaurants and talking of inconsequential matters they cautiously negotiate their relationship. Carol finds that she is not ready to return to Gopher Prairie. He confesses that he misses her terribly but doesn't expect her to return until she is ready of her own accord. He begins to confess his adultery but she stops him and tells him to forget it. He asks her to take two weeks off of work to go to Charleston and Savannah with him - not a second honeymoon, he insists, but rather a second wooing. In Charleston she thinks she might return to him but he tells her to wait until she is ready. She finds a new respect for her husband and considers that his life, like hers, is something of a story. Sometime after Will returns to Gopher Prairie, Carol dines with a senior member of the suffragette movement. She asks the older woman's advice on whether she should return to her husband and the small town. The woman tells her that if she returns she should always question things and never expect change to come quickly. The woman tells her to think in terms of thousands of years. Carol believes she is ready to face Main Street. She realizes that she no longer hates the town - rather, she sympathizes with it and understands it and is ready to tolerate it. After five more precious months in Washington she returns to Gopher Prairie pregnant with her second child