prompt:
Chapter: CHAPTER XXX

FERN Mullins rushed into the house on a Saturday morning early in
September and shrieked at Carol, "School starts next Tuesday. I've got
to have one more spree before I'm arrested. Let's get up a picnic down
the lake for this afternoon. Won't you come, Mrs. Kennicott, and the
doctor? Cy Bogart wants to go--he's a brat but he's lively."

"I don't think the doctor can go," sedately. "He said something about
having to make a country call this afternoon. But I'd love to."

"That's dandy! Who can we get?"

"Mrs. Dyer might be chaperon. She's been so nice. And maybe Dave, if he
could get away from the store."

"How about Erik Valborg? I think he's got lots more style than these
town boys. You like him all right, don't you?"

So the picnic of Carol, Fern, Erik, Cy Bogart, and the Dyers was not
only moral but inevitable.

They drove to the birch grove on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie.
Dave Dyer was his most clownish self. He yelped, jigged, wore Carol's
hat, dropped an ant down Fern's back, and when they went swimming (the
women modestly changing in the car with the side curtains up, the men
undressing behind the bushes, constantly repeating, "Gee, hope we don't
run into poison ivy"), Dave splashed water on them and dived to clutch
his wife's ankle. He infected the others. Erik gave an imitation of
the Greek dancers he had seen in vaudeville, and when they sat down to
picnic supper spread on a lap-robe on the grass, Cy climbed a tree to
throw acorns at them.

But Carol could not frolic.

She had made herself young, with parted hair, sailor blouse and large
blue bow, white canvas shoes and short linen skirt. Her mirror had
asserted that she looked exactly as she had in college, that her throat
was smooth, her collar-bone not very noticeable. But she was under
restraint. When they swam she enjoyed the freshness of the water but
she was irritated by Cy's tricks, by Dave's excessive good spirits. She
admired Erik's dance; he could never betray bad taste, as Cy did,
and Dave. She waited for him to come to her. He did not come. By his
joyousness he had apparently endeared himself to the Dyers. Maud watched
him and, after supper, cried to him, "Come sit down beside me, bad boy!"
Carol winced at his willingness to be a bad boy and come and sit, at
his enjoyment of a not very stimulating game in which Maud, Dave, and
Cy snatched slices of cold tongue from one another's plates. Maud, it
seemed, was slightly dizzy from the swim. She remarked publicly, "Dr.
Kennicott has helped me so much by putting me on a diet," but it was
to Erik alone that she gave the complete version of her peculiarity in
being so sensitive, so easily hurt by the slightest cross word, that she
simply had to have nice cheery friends.

Erik was nice and cheery.

Carol assured herself, "Whatever faults I may have, I certainly couldn't
ever be jealous. I do like Maud; she's always so pleasant. But I wonder
if she isn't just a bit fond of fishing for men's sympathy? Playing
with Erik, and her married----Well----But she looks at him in that
languishing, swooning, mid-Victorian way. Disgusting!"

Cy Bogart lay between the roots of a big birch, smoking his pipe and
teasing Fern, assuring her that a week from now, when he was again a
high-school boy and she his teacher, he'd wink at her in class. Maud
Dyer wanted Erik to "come down to the beach to see the darling little
minnies." Carol was left to Dave, who tried to entertain her with
humorous accounts of Ella Stowbody's fondness for chocolate peppermints.
She watched Maud Dyer put her hand on Erik's shoulder to steady herself.

"Disgusting!" she thought.

Cy Bogart covered Fern's nervous hand with his red paw, and when she
bounced with half-anger and shrieked, "Let go, I tell you!" he grinned
and waved his pipe--a gangling twenty-year-old satyr.

"Disgusting!"

When Maud and Erik returned and the grouping shifted, Erik muttered at
Carol, "There's a boat on shore. Let's skip off and have a row."

"What will they think?" she worried. She saw Maud Dyer peer at Erik with
moist possessive eyes. "Yes! Let's!" she said.

She cried to the party, with the canonical amount of sprightliness,
"Good-by, everybody. We'll wireless you from China."

As the rhythmic oars plopped and creaked, as she floated on an unreality
of delicate gray over which the sunset was poured out thin, the
irritation of Cy and Maud slipped away. Erik smiled at her proudly. She
considered him--coatless, in white thin shirt. She was conscious of his
male differentness, of his flat masculine sides, his thin thighs, his
easy rowing. They talked of the library, of the movies. He hummed and
she softly sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." A breeze shivered across the
agate lake. The wrinkled water was like armor damascened and polished.
The breeze flowed round the boat in a chill current. Carol drew the
collar of her middy blouse over her bare throat.

"Getting cold. Afraid we'll have to go back," she said.

"Let's not go back to them yet. They'll be cutting up. Let's keep along
the shore."

"But you enjoy the 'cutting up!' Maud and you had a beautiful time."

"Why! We just walked on the shore and talked about fishing!"

She was relieved, and apologetic to her friend Maud. "Of course. I was
joking."

"I'll tell you! Let's land here and sit on the shore--that bunch of
hazel-brush will shelter us from the wind--and watch the sunset. It's
like melted lead. Just a short while! We don't want to go back and
listen to them!"

"No, but----" She said nothing while he sped ashore. The keel clashed
on the stones. He stood on the forward seat, holding out his hand.
They were alone, in the ripple-lapping silence. She rose slowly, slowly
stepped over the water in the bottom of the old boat. She took his hand
confidently. Unspeaking they sat on a bleached log, in a russet twilight
which hinted of autumn. Linden leaves fluttered about them.

"I wish----Are you cold now?" he whispered.

"A little." She shivered. But it was not with cold.

"I wish we could curl up in the leaves there, covered all up, and lie
looking out at the dark."

"I wish we could." As though it was comfortably understood that he did
not mean to be taken seriously.

"Like what all the poets say--brown nymph and faun."

"No. I can't be a nymph any more. Too old----Erik, am I old? Am I faded
and small-towny?"

"Why, you're the youngest----Your eyes are like a girl's. They're
so--well, I mean, like you believed everything. Even if you do teach
me, I feel a thousand years older than you, instead of maybe a year
younger."

"Four or five years younger!"

"Anyway, your eyes are so innocent and your cheeks so soft----Damn it,
it makes me want to cry, somehow, you're so defenseless; and I want to
protect you and----There's nothing to protect you against!"

"Am I young? Am I? Honestly? Truly?" She betrayed for a moment the
childish, mock-imploring tone that comes into the voice of the most
serious woman when an agreeable man treats her as a girl; the childish
tone and childish pursed-up lips and shy lift of the cheek.

"Yes, you are!"

"You're dear to believe it, Will--ERIK!"

"Will you play with me? A lot?"

"Perhaps."

"Would you really like to curl in the leaves and watch the stars swing
by overhead?"

"I think it's rather better to be sitting here!" He twined his fingers
with hers. "And Erik, we must go back."

"Why?"

"It's somewhat late to outline all the history of social custom!"

"I know. We must. Are you glad we ran away though?"

"Yes." She was quiet, perfectly simple. But she rose.

He circled her waist with a brusque arm. She did not resist. She did
not care. He was neither a peasant tailor, a potential artist, a
social complication, nor a peril. He was himself, and in him, in the
personality flowing from him, she was unreasoningly content. In his
nearness she caught a new view of his head; the last light brought out
the planes of his neck, his flat ruddied cheeks, the side of his nose,
the depression of his temples. Not as coy or uneasy lovers but as
companions they walked to the boat, and he lifted her up on the prow.

She began to talk intently, as he rowed: "Erik, you've got to work! You
ought to be a personage. You're robbed of your kingdom. Fight for it!
Take one of these correspondence courses in drawing--they mayn't be any
good in themselves, but they'll make you try to draw and----"

As they reached the picnic ground she perceived that it was dark, that
they had been gone for a long time.

"What will they say?" she wondered.

The others greeted them with the inevitable storm of humor and slight
vexation: "Where the deuce do you think you've been?" "You're a fine
pair, you are!" Erik and Carol looked self-conscious; failed in their
effort to be witty. All the way home Carol was embarrassed. Once Cy
winked at her. That Cy, the Peeping Tom of the garage-loft, should
consider her a fellow-sinner----She was furious and frightened and
exultant by turns, and in all her moods certain that Kennicott would
read her adventuring in her face.

She came into the house awkwardly defiant.

Her husband, half asleep under the lamp, greeted her, "Well, well, have
nice time?"

She could not answer. He looked at her. But his look did not sharpen.
He began to wind his watch, yawning the old "Welllllll, guess it's about
time to turn in."

That was all. Yet she was not glad. She was almost disappointed.

II

Mrs. Bogart called next day. She had a hen-like, crumb-pecking, diligent
appearance. Her smile was too innocent. The pecking started instantly:

"Cy says you had lots of fun at the picnic yesterday. Did you enjoy it?"

"Oh yes. I raced Cy at swimming. He beat me badly. He's so strong, isn't
he!"

"Poor boy, just crazy to get into the war, too, but----This Erik Valborg
was along, wa'n't he?"

"Yes."

"I think he's an awful handsome fellow, and they say he's smart. Do you
like him?"

"He seems very polite."

"Cy says you and him had a lovely boat-ride. My, that must have been
pleasant."

"Yes, except that I couldn't get Mr. Valborg to say a word. I wanted
to ask him about the suit Mr. Hicks is making for my husband. But he
insisted on singing. Still, it was restful, floating around on the water
and singing. So happy and innocent. Don't you think it's a shame, Mrs.
Bogart, that people in this town don't do more nice clean things like
that, instead of all this horrible gossiping?"

"Yes. . . . Yes."

Mrs. Bogart sounded vacant. Her bonnet was awry; she was incomparably
dowdy. Carol stared at her, felt contemptuous, ready at last to rebel
against the trap, and as the rusty goodwife fished again, "Plannin' some
more picnics?" she flung out, "I haven't the slightest idea! Oh. Is that
Hugh crying? I must run up to him."

But up-stairs she remembered that Mrs. Bogart had seen her walking
with Erik from the railroad track into town, and she was chilly with
disquietude.

At the Jolly Seventeen, two days after, she was effusive to Maud Dyer,
to Juanita Haydock. She fancied that every one was watching her, but
she could not be sure, and in rare strong moments she did not care.
She could rebel against the town's prying now that she had something,
however indistinct, for which to rebel.

In a passionate escape there must be not only a place from which to flee
but a place to which to flee. She had known that she would gladly leave
Gopher Prairie, leave Main Street and all that it signified, but she
had had no destination. She had one now. That destination was not Erik
Valborg and the love of Erik. She continued to assure herself that she
wasn't in love with him but merely "fond of him, and interested in his
success." Yet in him she had discovered both her need of youth and the
fact that youth would welcome her. It was not Erik to whom she must
escape, but universal and joyous youth, in class-rooms, in studios, in
offices, in meetings to protest against Things in General. . . . But
universal and joyous youth rather resembled Erik.

All week she thought of things she wished to say to him. High, improving
things. She began to admit that she was lonely without him. Then she was
afraid.

It was at the Baptist church supper, a week after the picnic, that
she saw him again. She had gone with Kennicott and Aunt Bessie to the
supper, which was spread on oilcloth-covered and trestle-supported
tables in the church basement. Erik was helping Myrtle Cass to fill
coffee cups for the waitresses. The congregation had doffed their
piety. Children tumbled under the tables, and Deacon Pierson greeted the
women with a rolling, "Where's Brother Jones, sister, where's Brother
Jones? Not going to be with us tonight? Well, you tell Sister Perry to
hand you a plate, and make 'em give you enough oyster pie!"

Erik shared in the cheerfulness. He laughed with Myrtle, jogged her
elbow when she was filling cups, made deep mock bows to the waitresses
as they came up for coffee. Myrtle was enchanted by his humor. From the
other end of the room, a matron among matrons, Carol observed
Myrtle, and hated her, and caught herself at it. "To be jealous of
a wooden-faced village girl!" But she kept it up. She detested Erik;
gloated over his gaucheries--his "breaks," she called them. When he
was too expressive, too much like a Russian dancer, in saluting Deacon
Pierson, Carol had the ecstasy of pain in seeing the deacon's sneer.
When, trying to talk to three girls at once, he dropped a cup and
effeminately wailed, "Oh dear!" she sympathized with--and ached
over--the insulting secret glances of the girls.

From meanly hating him she rose to compassion as she saw that his eyes
begged every one to like him. She perceived how inaccurate her judgments
could be. At the picnic she had fancied that Maud Dyer looked upon Erik
too sentimentally, and she had snarled, "I hate these married women who
cheapen themselves and feed on boys." But at the supper Maud was one of
the waitresses; she bustled with platters of cake, she was pleasant to
old women; and to Erik she gave no attention at all. Indeed, when she
had her own supper, she joined the Kennicotts, and how ludicrous it was
to suppose that Maud was a gourmet of emotions Carol saw in the fact
that she talked not to one of the town beaux but to the safe Kennicott
himself!

When Carol glanced at Erik again she discovered that Mrs. Bogart had
an eye on her. It was a shock to know that at last there was something
which could make her afraid of Mrs. Bogart's spying.

"What am I doing? Am I in love with Erik? Unfaithful? I? I want youth
but I don't want him--I mean, I don't want youth--enough to break up my
life. I must get out of this. Quick."

She said to Kennicott on their way home, "Will! I want to run away for a
few days. Wouldn't you like to skip down to Chicago?"

"Still be pretty hot there. No fun in a big city till winter. What do
you want to go for?"

"People! To occupy my mind. I want stimulus."

"Stimulus?" He spoke good-naturedly. "Who's been feeding you meat? You
got that 'stimulus' out of one of these fool stories about wives that
don't know when they're well off. Stimulus! Seriously, though, to cut
out the jollying, I can't get away."

"Then why don't I run off by myself?"

"Why----'Tisn't the money, you understand. But what about Hugh?"

"Leave him with Aunt Bessie. It would be just for a few days."

"I don't think much of this business of leaving kids around. Bad for
'em."

"So you don't think----"

"I'll tell you: I think we better stay put till after the war. Then
we'll have a dandy long trip. No, I don't think you better plan much
about going away now."

So she was thrown at Erik.

III

She awoke at ebb-time, at three of the morning, woke sharply and fully;
and sharply and coldly as her father pronouncing sentence on a cruel
swindler she gave judgment:

"A pitiful and tawdry love-affair.

"No splendor, no defiance. A self-deceived little woman whispering in
corners with a pretentious little man.

"No, he is not. He is fine. Aspiring. It's not his fault. His eyes are
sweet when he looks at me. Sweet, so sweet."

She pitied herself that her romance should be pitiful; she sighed that
in this colorless hour, to this austere self, it should seem tawdry.

Then, in a very great desire of rebellion and unleashing of all her
hatreds, "The pettier and more tawdry it is, the more blame to Main
Street. It shows how much I've been longing to escape. Any way out! Any
humility so long as I can flee. Main Street has done this to me. I came
here eager for nobilities, ready for work, and now----Any way out.

"I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don't
know, they don't understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is.
Like ants and August sun on a wound.

"Tawdry! Pitiful! Carol--the clean girl that used to walk so
fast!--sneaking and tittering in dark corners, being sentimental and
jealous at church suppers!"

At breakfast-time her agonies were night-blurred, and persisted only as
a nervous irresolution.

IV

Few of the aristocrats of the Jolly Seventeen attended the humble
folk-meets of the Baptist and Methodist church suppers, where the Willis
Woodfords, the Dillons, the Champ Perrys, Oleson the butcher, Brad Bemis
the tinsmith, and Deacon Pierson found release from loneliness. But all
of the smart set went to the lawn-festivals of the Episcopal Church, and
were reprovingly polite to outsiders.

The Harry Haydocks gave the last lawn-festival of the season; a splendor
of Japanese lanterns and card-tables and chicken patties and Neapolitan
ice-cream. Erik was no longer entirely an outsider. He was eating his
ice-cream with a group of the people most solidly "in"--the Dyers,
Myrtle Cass, Guy Pollock, the Jackson Elders. The Haydocks themselves
kept aloof, but the others tolerated him. He would never, Carol fancied,
be one of the town pillars, because he was not orthodox in hunting and
motoring and poker. But he was winning approbation by his liveliness,
his gaiety--the qualities least important in him.

When the group summoned Carol she made several very well-taken points in
regard to the weather.

Myrtle cried to Erik, "Come on! We don't belong with these old folks.
I want to make you 'quainted with the jolliest girl, she comes from
Wakamin, she's staying with Mary Howland."

Carol saw him being profuse to the guest from Wakamin. She saw him
confidentially strolling with Myrtle. She burst out to Mrs. Westlake,
"Valborg and Myrtle seem to have quite a crush on each other."

Mrs. Westlake glanced at her curiously before she mumbled, "Yes, don't
they."

"I'm mad, to talk this way," Carol worried.

She had regained a feeling of social virtue by telling Juanita Haydock
"how darling her lawn looked with the Japanese lanterns" when she saw
that Erik was stalking her. Though he was merely ambling about with his
hands in his pockets, though he did not peep at her, she knew that he
was calling her. She sidled away from Juanita. Erik hastened to her. She
nodded coolly (she was proud of her coolness).

"Carol! I've got a wonderful chance! Don't know but what some ways
it might be better than going East to take art. Myrtle Cass says----I
dropped in to say howdy to Myrtle last evening, and had quite a long
talk with her father, and he said he was hunting for a fellow to go to
work in the flour mill and learn the whole business, and maybe become
general manager. I know something about wheat from my farming, and I
worked a couple of months in the flour mill at Curlew when I got sick of
tailoring. What do you think? You said any work was artistic if it was
done by an artist. And flour is so important. What do you think?"

"Wait! Wait!"

This sensitive boy would be very skilfully stamped into conformity by
Lyman Cass and his sallow daughter; but did she detest the plan for this
reason? "I must be honest. I mustn't tamper with his future to please my
vanity." But she had no sure vision. She turned on him:

"How can I decide? It's up to you. Do you want to become a person like
Lym Cass, or do you want to become a person like--yes, like me! Wait!
Don't be flattering. Be honest. This is important."

"I know. I am a person like you now! I mean, I want to rebel."

"Yes. We're alike," gravely.

"Only I'm not sure I can put through my schemes. I really can't draw
much. I guess I have pretty fair taste in fabrics, but since I've known
you I don't like to think about fussing with dress-designing. But as a
miller, I'd have the means--books, piano, travel."

"I'm going to be frank and beastly. Don't you realize that it isn't just
because her papa needs a bright young man in the mill that Myrtle is
amiable to you? Can't you understand what she'll do to you when she has
you, when she sends you to church and makes you become respectable?"

He glared at her. "I don't know. I suppose so."

"You are thoroughly unstable!"

"What if I am? Most fish out of water are! Don't talk like Mrs. Bogart!
How can I be anything but 'unstable'--wandering from farm to tailor
shop to books, no training, nothing but trying to make books talk to
me! Probably I'll fail. Oh, I know it; probably I'm uneven. But I'm not
unstable in thinking about this job in the mill--and Myrtle. I know what
I want. I want you!"

"Please, please, oh, please!"

"I do. I'm not a schoolboy any more. I want you. If I take Myrtle, it's
to forget you."

"Please, please!"

"It's you that are unstable! You talk at things and play at things, but
you're scared. Would I mind it if you and I went off to poverty, and I
had to dig ditches? I would not! But you would. I think you would come
to like me, but you won't admit it. I wouldn't have said this, but when
you sneer at Myrtle and the mill----If I'm not to have good sensible
things like those, d' you think I'll be content with trying to become a
damn dressmaker, after YOU? Are you fair? Are you?"

"No, I suppose not."

"Do you like me? Do you?"

"Yes----No! Please! I can't talk any more."

"Not here. Mrs. Haydock is looking at us."

"No, nor anywhere. O Erik, I am fond of you, but I'm afraid."

"What of?"

"Of Them! Of my rulers--Gopher Prairie. . . . My dear boy, we are
talking very foolishly. I am a normal wife and a good mother, and you
are--oh, a college freshman."

"You do like me! I'm going to make you love me!"

She looked at him once, recklessly, and walked away with a serene gait
that was a disordered flight.

Kennicott grumbled on their way home, "You and this Valborg fellow seem
quite chummy."

"Oh, we are. He's interested in Myrtle Cass, and I was telling him how
nice she is."

In her room she marveled, "I have become a liar. I'm snarled with lies
and foggy analyses and desires--I who was clear and sure."

She hurried into Kennicott's room, sat on the edge of his bed. He
flapped a drowsy welcoming hand at her from the expanse of quilt and
dented pillows.

"Will, I really think I ought to trot off to St. Paul or Chicago or some
place."

"I thought we settled all that, few nights ago! Wait till we can have a
real trip." He shook himself out of his drowsiness. "You might give me a
good-night kiss."

She did--dutifully. He held her lips against his for an intolerable
time. "Don't you like the old man any more?" he coaxed. He sat up and
shyly fitted his palm about the slimness of her waist.

"Of course. I like you very much indeed." Even to herself it sounded
flat. She longed to be able to throw into her voice the facile passion
of a light woman. She patted his cheek.

He sighed, "I'm sorry you're so tired. Seems like----But of course you
aren't very strong."

"Yes. . . . Then you don't think--you're quite sure I ought to stay here
in town?"

"I told you so! I certainly do!"

She crept back to her room, a small timorous figure in white.

"I can't face Will down--demand the right. He'd be obstinate. And I
can't even go off and earn my living again. Out of the habit of it. He's
driving me----I'm afraid of what he's driving me to. Afraid.

"That man in there, snoring in stale air, my husband? Could any ceremony
make him my husband?

"No. I don't want to hurt him. I want to love him. I can't, when I'm
thinking of Erik. Am I too honest--a funny topsy-turvy honesty--the
faithfulness of unfaith? I wish I had a more compartmental mind, like
men. I'm too monogamous--toward Erik!--my child Erik, who needs me.

"Is an illicit affair like a gambling debt--demands stricter honor than
the legitimate debt of matrimony, because it's not legally enforced?

"That's nonsense! I don't care in the least for Erik! Not for any man. I
want to be let alone, in a woman world--a world without Main Street,
or politicians, or business men, or men with that sudden beastly hungry
look, that glistening unfrank expression that wives know----

"If Erik were here, if he would just sit quiet and kind and talk, I
could be still, I could go to sleep.

"I am so tired. If I could sleep----"

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

completion: One day in September, Fern, Erik, Cy Bogart, Carol and the Dyers go for a picnic by the lake. Carol is jealous when she observes Maud Dyer flirting with Erik. When Erik asks Carol to go for a boat ride she accepts to spite Maude. Erik professes his affection for her; she doesn't yield to his advances nor does she resist. They return very late to the rest of the group. The next day Mrs. Bogart arrives and second-handedly questions Carol about Erik and Carol knows that the nosy woman's suspicions have been aroused. At a church dinner the following week Carol is relieved to see that Maud Dyer talks to Will instead of Erik and then she is discomfited to see Mrs. Bogart watching her watch Erik. Carol begins to confuse wanting youth with wanting Erik. She reasons that Main Street's dullness has driven her to desire an escape. Erik tells her that Myrtle Cass' father has offered him a position at the flour mill. Carol asserts that Myrtle Cass is trying to snare him. Erik claims to be interested in Carol, not Myrtle Cass. Carol begins to doubt her marriage


prompt:
Chapter: CHAPTER XXXI

THEIR night came unheralded.

Kennicott was on a country call. It was cool but Carol huddled on the
porch, rocking, meditating, rocking. The house was lonely and repellent,
and though she sighed, "I ought to go in and read--so many things to
read--ought to go in," she remained. Suddenly Erik was coming, turning
in, swinging open the screen door, touching her hand.

"Erik!"

"Saw your husband driving out of town. Couldn't stand it."

"Well----You mustn't stay more than five minutes."

"Couldn't stand not seeing you. Every day, towards evening, felt I had
to see you--pictured you so clear. I've been good though, staying away,
haven't I!"

"And you must go on being good."

"Why must I?"

"We better not stay here on the porch. The Howlands across the street
are such window-peepers, and Mrs. Bogart----"

She did not look at him but she could divine his tremulousness as he
stumbled indoors. A moment ago the night had been coldly empty; now it
was incalculable, hot, treacherous. But it is women who are the calm
realists once they discard the fetishes of the premarital hunt. Carol
was serene as she murmured, "Hungry? I have some little honey-colored
cakes. You may have two, and then you must skip home."

"Take me up and let me see Hugh asleep."

"I don't believe----"

"Just a glimpse!"

"Well----"

She doubtfully led the way to the hallroom-nursery. Their heads close,
Erik's curls pleasant as they touched her cheek, they looked in at the
baby. Hugh was pink with slumber. He had burrowed into his pillow with
such energy that it was almost smothering him. Beside it was a celluloid
rhinoceros; tight in his hand a torn picture of Old King Cole.

"Shhh!" said Carol, quite automatically. She tiptoed in to pat the
pillow. As she returned to Erik she had a friendly sense of his waiting
for her. They smiled at each other. She did not think of Kennicott, the
baby's father. What she did think was that some one rather like Erik, an
older and surer Erik, ought to be Hugh's father. The three of them would
play--incredible imaginative games.

"Carol! You've told me about your own room. Let me peep in at it."

"But you mustn't stay, not a second. We must go downstairs."

"Yes."

"Will you be good?"

"R-reasonably!" He was pale, large-eyed, serious.

"You've got to be more than reasonably good!" She felt sensible and
superior; she was energetic about pushing open the door.

Kennicott had always seemed out of place there but Erik surprisingly
harmonized with the spirit of the room as he stroked the books, glanced
at the prints. He held out his hands. He came toward her. She was weak,
betrayed to a warm softness. Her head was tilted back. Her eyes were
closed. Her thoughts were formless but many-colored. She felt his kiss,
diffident and reverent, on her eyelid.

Then she knew that it was impossible.

She shook herself. She sprang from him. "Please!" she said sharply.

He looked at her unyielding.

"I am fond of you," she said. "Don't spoil everything. Be my friend."

"How many thousands and millions of women must have said that! And now
you! And it doesn't spoil everything. It glorifies everything."

"Dear, I do think there's a tiny streak of fairy in you--whatever you do
with it. Perhaps I'd have loved that once. But I won't. It's too late.
But I'll keep a fondness for you. Impersonal--I will be impersonal! It
needn't be just a thin talky fondness. You do need me, don't you? Only
you and my son need me. I've wanted so to be wanted! Once I wanted
love to be given to me. Now I'll be content if I can give. . . . Almost
content!

"We women, we like to do things for men. Poor men! We swoop on you when
you're defenseless and fuss over you and insist on reforming you. But
it's so pitifully deep in us. You'll be the one thing in which I haven't
failed. Do something definite! Even if it's just selling cottons. Sell
beautiful cottons--caravans from China----"

"Carol! Stop! You do love me!"

"I do not! It's just----Can't you understand? Everything crushes in on
me so, all the gaping dull people, and I look for a way out----Please
go. I can't stand any more. Please!"

He was gone. And she was not relieved by the quiet of the house. She was
empty and the house was empty and she needed him. She wanted to go
on talking, to get this threshed out, to build a sane friendship. She
wavered down to the living-room, looked out of the bay-window. He was
not to be seen. But Mrs. Westlake was. She was walking past, and in
the light from the corner arc-lamp she quickly inspected the porch, the
windows. Carol dropped the curtain, stood with movement and reflection
paralyzed. Automatically, without reasoning, she mumbled, "I will see
him again soon and make him understand we must be friends. But----The
house is so empty. It echoes so."

II

Kennicott had seemed nervous and absent-minded through that supper-hour,
two evenings after. He prowled about the living-room, then growled:

"What the dickens have you been saying to Ma Westlake?"

Carol's book rattled. "What do you mean?"

"I told you that Westlake and his wife were jealous of us, and here you
been chumming up to them and----From what Dave tells me, Ma Westlake has
been going around town saying you told her that you hate Aunt Bessie,
and that you fixed up your own room because I snore, and you said
Bjornstam was too good for Bea, and then, just recent, that you were
sore on the town because we don't all go down on our knees and beg this
Valborg fellow to come take supper with us. God only knows what else she
says you said."

"It's not true, any of it! I did like Mrs. Westlake, and I've called on
her, and apparently she's gone and twisted everything I've said----"

"Sure. Of course she would. Didn't I tell you she would? She's an old
cat, like her pussyfooting, hand-holding husband. Lord, if I was sick,
I'd rather have a faith-healer than Westlake, and she's another slice
off the same bacon. What I can't understand though----"

She waited, taut.

"----is whatever possessed you to let her pump you, bright a girl as
you are. I don't care what you told her--we all get peeved sometimes
and want to blow off steam, that's natural--but if you wanted to keep it
dark, why didn't you advertise it in the Dauntless, or get a megaphone
and stand on top of the hotel and holler, or do anything besides spill
it to her!"

"I know. You told me. But she was so motherly. And I didn't have any
woman----Vida 's become so married and proprietary."

"Well, next time you'll have better sense."

He patted her head, flumped down behind his newspaper, said nothing
more.

Enemies leered through the windows, stole on her from the hall. She had
no one save Erik. This kind good man Kennicott--he was an elder
brother. It was Erik, her fellow outcast, to whom she wanted to run for
sanctuary. Through her storm she was, to the eye, sitting quietly with
her fingers between the pages of a baby-blue book on home-dressmaking.
But her dismay at Mrs. Westlake's treachery had risen to active dread.
What had the woman said of her and Erik? What did she know? What had she
seen? Who else would join in the baying hunt? Who else had seen her
with Erik? What had she to fear from the Dyers, Cy Bogart, Juanita, Aunt
Bessie? What precisely had she answered to Mrs. Bogart's questioning?

All next day she was too restless to stay home, yet as she walked the
streets on fictitious errands she was afraid of every person she met.
She waited for them to speak; waited with foreboding. She repeated, "I
mustn't ever see Erik again." But the words did not register. She had no
ecstatic indulgence in the sense of guilt which is, to the women of Main
Street, the surest escape from blank tediousness.

At five, crumpled in a chair in the living-room, she started at the
sound of the bell. Some one opened the door. She waited, uneasy. Vida
Sherwin charged into the room. "Here's the one person I can trust!"
Carol rejoiced.

Vida was serious but affectionate. She bustled at Carol with, "Oh, there
you are, dearie, so glad t' find you in, sit down, want to talk to you."

Carol sat, obedient.

Vida fussily tugged over a large chair and launched out:

"I've been hearing vague rumors you were interested in this Erik
Valborg. I knew you couldn't be guilty, and I'm surer than ever of it
now. Here we are, as blooming as a daisy."

"How does a respectable matron look when she feels guilty?"

Carol sounded resentful.

"Why----Oh, it would show! Besides! I know that you, of all people, are
the one that can appreciate Dr. Will."

"What have you been hearing?"

"Nothing, really. I just heard Mrs. Bogart say she'd seen you and
Valborg walking together a lot." Vida's chirping slackened. She looked
at her nails. "But----I suspect you do like Valborg. Oh, I don't mean in
any wrong way. But you're young; you don't know what an innocent liking
might drift into. You always pretend to be so sophisticated and all,
but you're a baby. Just because you are so innocent, you don't know what
evil thoughts may lurk in that fellow's brain."

"You don't suppose Valborg could actually think about making love to
me?"

Her rather cheap sport ended abruptly as Vida cried, with contorted
face, "What do you know about the thoughts in hearts? You just play at
reforming the world. You don't know what it means to suffer."

There are two insults which no human being will endure: the assertion
that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion
that he has never known trouble. Carol said furiously, "You think I
don't suffer? You think I've always had an easy----"

"No, you don't. I'm going to tell you something I've never told a living
soul, not even Ray." The dam of repressed imagination which Vida had
builded for years, which now, with Raymie off at the wars, she was
building again, gave way.

"I was--I liked Will terribly well. One time at a party--oh, before
he met you, of course--but we held hands, and we were so happy. But I
didn't feel I was really suited to him. I let him go. Please don't think
I still love him! I see now that Ray was predestined to be my mate. But
because I liked him, I know how sincere and pure and noble Will is, and
his thoughts never straying from the path of rectitude, and----If I gave
him up to you, at least you've got to appreciate him! We danced together
and laughed so, and I gave him up, but----This IS my affair! I'm NOT
intruding! I see the whole thing as he does, because of all I've told
you. Maybe it's shameless to bare my heart this way, but I do it for
him--for him and you!"

Carol understood that Vida believed herself to have recited minutely and
brazenly a story of intimate love; understood that, in alarm, she was
trying to cover her shame as she struggled on, "Liked him in the most
honorable way--simply can't help it if I still see things through
his eyes----If I gave him up, I certainly am not beyond my rights
in demanding that you take care to avoid even the appearance of evil
and----" She was weeping; an insignificant, flushed, ungracefully
weeping woman.

Carol could not endure it. She ran to Vida, kissed her forehead,
comforted her with a murmur of dove-like sounds, sought to reassure her
with worn and hastily assembled gifts of words: "Oh, I appreciate it so
much," and "You are so fine and splendid," and "Let me assure you there
isn't a thing to what you've heard," and "Oh, indeed, I do know how
sincere Will is, and as you say, so--so sincere."

Vida believed that she had explained many deep and devious matters. She
came out of her hysteria like a sparrow shaking off rain-drops. She sat
up, and took advantage of her victory:

"I don't want to rub it in, but you can see for yourself now, this is
all a result of your being so discontented and not appreciating the dear
good people here. And another thing: People like you and me, who want to
reform things, have to be particularly careful about appearances. Think
how much better you can criticize conventional customs if you yourself
live up to them, scrupulously. Then people can't say you're attacking
them to excuse your own infractions."

To Carol was given a sudden great philosophical understanding, an
explanation of half the cautious reforms in history. "Yes. I've heard
that plea. It's a good one. It sets revolts aside to cool. It keeps
strays in the flock. To word it differently: 'You must live up to the
popular code if you believe in it; but if you don't believe in it, then
you MUST live up to it!'"

"I don't think so at all," said Vida vaguely. She began to look hurt,
and Carol let her be oracular.

III

Vida had done her a service; had made all agonizing seem so fatuous that
she ceased writhing and saw that her whole problem was simple as mutton:
she was interested in Erik's aspiration; interest gave her a hesitating
fondness for him; and the future would take care of the event. . . .
But at night, thinking in bed, she protested, "I'm not a falsely
accused innocent, though! If it were some one more resolute than Erik, a
fighter, an artist with bearded surly lips----They're only in books.
Is that the real tragedy, that I never shall know tragedy, never find
anything but blustery complications that turn out to be a farce?

"No one big enough or pitiful enough to sacrifice for. Tragedy in
neat blouses; the eternal flame all nice and safe in a kerosene stove.
Neither heroic faith nor heroic guilt. Peeping at love from behind lace
curtains--on Main Street!"

Aunt Bessie crept in next day, tried to pump her, tried to prime the
pump by again hinting that Kennicott might have his own affairs. Carol
snapped, "Whatever I may do, I'll have you to understand that Will is
only too safe!" She wished afterward that she had not been so lofty. How
much would Aunt Bessie make of "Whatever I may do?"

When Kennicott came home he poked at things, and hemmed, and brought
out, "Saw aunty, this afternoon. She said you weren't very polite to
her."

Carol laughed. He looked at her in a puzzled way and fled to his
newspaper.

IV

She lay sleepless. She alternately considered ways of leaving Kennicott,
and remembered his virtues, pitied his bewilderment in face of the
subtle corroding sicknesses which he could not dose nor cut out. Didn't
he perhaps need her more than did the book-solaced Erik? Suppose Will
were to die, suddenly. Suppose she never again saw him at breakfast,
silent but amiable, listening to her chatter. Suppose he never again
played elephant for Hugh. Suppose----A country call, a slippery road,
his motor skidding, the edge of the road crumbling, the car turning
turtle, Will pinned beneath, suffering, brought home maimed, looking at
her with spaniel eyes--or waiting for her, calling for her, while she
was in Chicago, knowing nothing of it. Suppose he were sued by some
vicious shrieking woman for malpractice. He tried to get witnesses;
Westlake spread lies; his friends doubted him; his self-confidence was
so broken that it was horrible to see the indecision of the decisive
man; he was convicted, handcuffed, taken on a train----

She ran to his room. At her nervous push the door swung sharply in,
struck a chair. He awoke, gasped, then in a steady voice: "What is it,
dear? Anything wrong?" She darted to him, fumbled for the familiar harsh
bristly cheek. How well she knew it, every seam, and hardness of bone,
and roll of fat! Yet when he sighed, "This is a nice visit," and dropped
his hand on her thin-covered shoulder, she said, too cheerily, "I
thought I heard you moaning. So silly of me. Good night, dear."

V

She did not see Erik for a fortnight, save once at church and once when
she went to the tailor shop to talk over the plans, contingencies, and
strategy of Kennicott's annual campaign for getting a new suit. Nat
Hicks was there, and he was not so deferential as he had been. With
unnecessary jauntiness he chuckled, "Some nice flannels, them
samples, heh?" Needlessly he touched her arm to call attention to the
fashion-plates, and humorously he glanced from her to Erik. At home she
wondered if the little beast might not be suggesting himself as a rival
to Erik, but that abysmal bedragglement she would not consider.

She saw Juanita Haydock slowly walking past the house--as Mrs. Westlake
had once walked past.

She met Mrs. Westlake in Uncle Whittier's store, and before that alert
stare forgot her determination to be rude, and was shakily cordial.

She was sure that all the men on the street, even Guy Pollock and Sam
Clark, leered at her in an interested hopeful way, as though she were
a notorious divorcee. She felt as insecure as a shadowed criminal. She
wished to see Erik, and wished that she had never seen him. She fancied
that Kennicott was the only person in town who did not know all--know
incomparably more than there was to know--about herself and Erik. She
crouched in her chair as she imagined men talking of her, thick-voiced,
obscene, in barber shops and the tobacco-stinking pool parlor.

Through early autumn Fern Mullins was the only person who broke the
suspense. The frivolous teacher had come to accept Carol as of her
own youth, and though school had begun she rushed in daily to suggest
dances, welsh-rabbit parties.

Fern begged her to go as chaperon to a barn-dance in the country, on a
Saturday evening. Carol could not go. The next day, the storm crashed.

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

completion: One night while Will is on a house-call, Erik comes to see Carol. She lets him kiss her on her eyelid and then realizes that a romance with him is not possible. He leaves and Carol notices Mrs. Westlake watching from her home across the street. The next day Kennicott tells her that Ma Westlake has been spreading confidences that Carol told her. Vida visits and tries to convice her to desist in her attentions to Erik by confessing her own feelings, now long past, for Carol's husband. Carol realizes that that tragedy of her own life is that she will never have real tragedy, only Main Street melodrama. She feels guilty and begins to believe that all the men in town suspect her of being morally loose. Only Fern remains her devoted friend


prompt:
Chapter: CHAPTER XXXII

I

CAROL was on the back porch, tightening a bolt on the baby's go-cart,
this Sunday afternoon. Through an open window of the Bogart house she
heard a screeching, heard Mrs. Bogart's haggish voice:

" . . . did too, and there's no use your denying it no you don't, you march
yourself right straight out of the house . . . never in my life heard of
such . . . never had nobody talk to me like . . . walk in the ways of sin
and nastiness . . . leave your clothes here, and heaven knows that's more
than you deserve . . . any of your lip or I'll call the policeman."

The voice of the other interlocutor Carol did not catch, nor, though
Mrs. Bogart was proclaiming that he was her confidant and present
assistant, did she catch the voice of Mrs. Bogart's God.

"Another row with Cy," Carol inferred.

She trundled the go-cart down the back steps and tentatively wheeled it
across the yard, proud of her repairs. She heard steps on the sidewalk.
She saw not Cy Bogart but Fern Mullins, carrying a suit-case, hurrying
up the street with her head low. The widow, standing on the porch with
buttery arms akimbo, yammered after the fleeing girl:

"And don't you dare show your face on this block again. You can send the
drayman for your trunk. My house has been contaminated long enough. Why
the Lord should afflict me----"

Fern was gone. The righteous widow glared, banged into the house, came
out poking at her bonnet, marched away. By this time Carol was staring
in a manner not visibly to be distinguished from the window-peeping of
the rest of Gopher Prairie. She saw Mrs. Bogart enter the Howland house,
then the Casses'. Not till suppertime did she reach the Kennicotts. The
doctor answered her ring, and greeted her, "Well, well? how's the good
neighbor?"

The good neighbor charged into the living-room, waving the most unctuous
of black kid gloves and delightedly sputtering:

"You may well ask how I am! I really do wonder how I could go through
the awful scenes of this day--and the impudence I took from that woman's
tongue, that ought to be cut out----"

"Whoa! Whoa! Hold up!" roared Kennicott. "Who's the hussy, Sister
Bogart? Sit down and take it cool and tell us about it."

"I can't sit down, I must hurry home, but I couldn't devote myself to my
own selfish cares till I'd warned you, and heaven knows I don't expect
any thanks for trying to warn the town against her, there's always so
much evil in the world that folks simply won't see or appreciate your
trying to safeguard them----And forcing herself in here to get in with
you and Carrie, many 's the time I've seen her doing it, and, thank
heaven, she was found out in time before she could do any more harm, it
simply breaks my heart and prostrates me to think what she may have done
already, even if some of us that understand and know about things----"

"Whoa-up! Who are you talking about?"

"She's talking about Fern Mullins," Carol put in, not pleasantly.

"Huh?"

Kennicott was incredulous.

"I certainly am!" flourished Mrs. Bogart, "and good and thankful you
may be that I found her out in time, before she could get YOU into
something, Carol, because even if you are my neighbor and Will's wife
and a cultured lady, let me tell you right now, Carol Kennicott, that
you ain't always as respectful to--you ain't as reverent--you don't
stick by the good old ways like they was laid down for us by God in the
Bible, and while of course there ain't a bit of harm in having a good
laugh, and I know there ain't any real wickedness in you, yet just the
same you don't fear God and hate the transgressors of his commandments
like you ought to, and you may be thankful I found out this serpent I
nourished in my bosom--and oh yes! oh yes indeed! my lady must have
two eggs every morning for breakfast, and eggs sixty cents a dozen, and
wa'n't satisfied with one, like most folks--what did she care how much
they cost or if a person couldn't make hardly nothing on her board and
room, in fact I just took her in out of charity and I might have known
from the kind of stockings and clothes that she sneaked into my house in
her trunk----"

Before they got her story she had five more minutes of obscene
wallowing. The gutter comedy turned into high tragedy, with Nemesis
in black kid gloves. The actual story was simple, depressing, and
unimportant. As to details Mrs. Bogart was indefinite, and angry that
she should be questioned.

Fern Mullins and Cy had, the evening before, driven alone to a
barn-dance in the country. (Carol brought out the admission that Fern
had tried to get a chaperon.) At the dance Cy had kissed Fern--she
confessed that. Cy had obtained a pint of whisky; he said that he didn't
remember where he had got it; Mrs. Bogart implied that Fern had given
it to him; Fern herself insisted that he had stolen it from a farmer's
overcoat--which, Mrs. Bogart raged, was obviously a lie. He had become
soggily drunk. Fern had driven him home; deposited him, retching and
wabbling, on the Bogart porch.

Never before had her boy been drunk, shrieked Mrs. Bogart. When
Kennicott grunted, she owned, "Well, maybe once or twice I've smelled
licker on his breath." She also, with an air of being only too
scrupulously exact, granted that sometimes he did not come home till
morning. But he couldn't ever have been drunk, for he always had
the best excuses: the other boys had tempted him to go down the lake
spearing pickerel by torchlight, or he had been out in a "machine that
ran out of gas." Anyway, never before had her boy fallen into the hands
of a "designing woman."

"What do you suppose Miss Mullins could design to do with him?" insisted
Carol.

Mrs. Bogart was puzzled, gave it up, went on. This morning, when she had
faced both of them, Cy had manfully confessed that all of the blame was
on Fern, because the teacher--his own teacher--had dared him to take a
drink. Fern had tried to deny it.

"Then," gabbled Mrs. Bogart, "then that woman had the impudence to
say to me, 'What purpose could I have in wanting the filthy pup to get
drunk?' That's just what she called him--pup. 'I'll have no such nasty
language in my house,' I says, 'and you pretending and pulling the wool
over people's eyes and making them think you're educated and fit to be
a teacher and look out for young people's morals--you're worse 'n any
street-walker!' I says. I let her have it good. I wa'n't going to flinch
from my bounden duty and let her think that decent folks had to stand
for her vile talk. 'Purpose?' I says, 'Purpose? I'll tell you what
purpose you had! Ain't I seen you making up to everything in pants
that'd waste time and pay attention to your impert'nence? Ain't I seen
you showing off your legs with them short skirts of yours, trying
to make out like you was so girlish and la-de-da, running along the
street?'"

Carol was very sick at this version of Fern's eager youth, but she was
sicker as Mrs. Bogart hinted that no one could tell what had happened
between Fern and Cy before the drive home. Without exactly describing
the scene, by her power of lustful imagination the woman suggested dark
country places apart from the lanterns and rude fiddling and banging
dance-steps in the barn, then madness and harsh hateful conquest. Carol
was too sick to interrupt. It was Kennicott who cried, "Oh, for God's
sake quit it! You haven't any idea what happened. You haven't given us a
single proof yet that Fern is anything but a rattle-brained youngster."

"I haven't, eh? Well, what do you say to this? I come straight out and
I says to her, 'Did you or did you not taste the whisky Cy had?' and she
says, 'I think I did take one sip--Cy made me,' she said. She owned up
to that much, so you can imagine----"

"Does that prove her a prostitute?" asked Carol.

"Carrie! Don't you never use a word like that again!" wailed the
outraged Puritan.

"Well, does it prove her to be a bad woman, that she took a taste of
whisky? I've done it myself!"

"That's different. Not that I approve your doing it. What do the
Scriptures tell us? 'Strong drink is a mocker'! But that's entirely
different from a teacher drinking with one of her own pupils."

"Yes, it does sound bad. Fern was silly, undoubtedly. But as a matter
of fact she's only a year or two older than Cy and probably a good many
years younger in experience of vice."

"That's--not--true! She is plenty old enough to corrupt him!

"The job of corrupting Cy was done by your sinless town, five years
ago!"

Mrs. Bogart did not rage in return. Suddenly she was hopeless. Her head
drooped. She patted her black kid gloves, picked at a thread of her
faded brown skirt, and sighed, "He's a good boy, and awful affectionate
if you treat him right. Some thinks he's terrible wild, but that's
because he's young. And he's so brave and truthful--why, he was one of
the first in town that wanted to enlist for the war, and I had to speak
real sharp to him to keep him from running away. I didn't want him to
get into no bad influences round these camps--and then," Mrs. Bogart
rose from her pitifulness, recovered her pace, "then I go and bring into
my own house a woman that's worse, when all's said and done, than any
bad woman he could have met. You say this Mullins woman is too young
and inexperienced to corrupt Cy. Well then, she's too young and
inexperienced to teach him, too, one or t'other, you can't have your
cake and eat it! So it don't make no difference which reason they fire
her for, and that's practically almost what I said to the school-board."

"Have you been telling this story to the members of the school-board?"

"I certainly have! Every one of 'em! And their wives I says to them,
''Tain't my affair to decide what you should or should not do with your
teachers,' I says, 'and I ain't presuming to dictate in any way, shape,
manner, or form. I just want to know,' I says, 'whether you're going
to go on record as keeping here in our schools, among a lot of innocent
boys and girls, a woman that drinks, smokes, curses, uses bad language,
and does such dreadful things as I wouldn't lay tongue to but you know
what I mean,' I says, 'and if so, I'll just see to it that the town
learns about it.' And that's what I told Professor Mott, too, being
superintendent--and he's a righteous man, not going autoing on the
Sabbath like the school-board members. And the professor as much as
admitted he was suspicious of the Mullins woman himself."

II

Kennicott was less shocked and much less frightened than Carol, and more
articulate in his description of Mrs. Bogart, when she had gone.

Maud Dyer telephoned to Carol and, after a rather improbable question
about cooking lima beans with bacon, demanded, "Have you heard the
scandal about this Miss Mullins and Cy Bogart?"

"I'm sure it's a lie."

"Oh, probably is." Maud's manner indicated that the falsity of the story
was an insignificant flaw in its general delightfulness.

Carol crept to her room, sat with hands curled tight together as she
listened to a plague of voices. She could hear the town yelping with it,
every soul of them, gleeful at new details, panting to win importance by
having details of their own to add. How well they would make up for what
they had been afraid to do by imagining it in another! They who had
not been entirely afraid (but merely careful and sneaky), all the
barber-shop roues and millinery-parlor mondaines, how archly they
were giggling (this second--she could hear them at it); with what
self-commendation they were cackling their suavest wit: "You can't tell
ME she ain't a gay bird; I'm wise!"

And not one man in town to carry out their pioneer tradition of superb
and contemptuous cursing, not one to verify the myth that their "rough
chivalry" and "rugged virtues" were more generous than the petty
scandal-picking of older lands, not one dramatic frontiersman to
thunder, with fantastic and fictional oaths, "What are you hinting
at? What are you snickering at? What facts have you? What are these
unheard-of sins you condemn so much--and like so well?"

No one to say it. Not Kennicott nor Guy Pollock nor Champ Perry.

Erik? Possibly. He would sputter uneasy protest.

She suddenly wondered what subterranean connection her interest in Erik
had with this affair. Wasn't it because they had been prevented by her
caste from bounding on her own trail that they were howling at Fern?

III

Before supper she found, by half a dozen telephone calls, that Fern had
fled to the Minniemashie House. She hastened there, trying not to be
self-conscious about the people who looked at her on the street. The
clerk said indifferently that he "guessed" Miss Mullins was up in Room
37, and left Carol to find the way. She hunted along the stale-smelling
corridors with their wallpaper of cerise daisies and poison-green
rosettes, streaked in white spots from spilled water, their frayed red
and yellow matting, and rows of pine doors painted a sickly blue. She
could not find the number. In the darkness at the end of a corridor she
had to feel the aluminum figures on the door-panels. She was startled
once by a man's voice: "Yep? Whadyuh want?" and fled. When she reached
the right door she stood listening. She made out a long sobbing. There
was no answer till her third knock; then an alarmed "Who is it? Go
away!"

Her hatred of the town turned resolute as she pushed open the door.

Yesterday she had seen Fern Mullins in boots and tweed skirt and
canary-yellow sweater, fleet and self-possessed. Now she lay across
the bed, in crumpled lavender cotton and shabby pumps, very feminine,
utterly cowed. She lifted her head in stupid terror. Her hair was in
tousled strings and her face was sallow, creased. Her eyes were a blur
from weeping.

"I didn't! I didn't!" was all she would say at first, and she repeated
it while Carol kissed her cheek, stroked her hair, bathed her forehead.
She rested then, while Carol looked about the room--the welcome to
strangers, the sanctuary of hospitable Main Street, the lucrative
property of Kennicott's friend, Jackson Elder. It smelled of old linen
and decaying carpet and ancient tobacco smoke. The bed was rickety,
with a thin knotty mattress; the sand-colored walls were scratched and
gouged; in every corner, under everything, were fluffy dust and cigar
ashes; on the tilted wash-stand was a nicked and squatty pitcher; the
only chair was a grim straight object of spotty varnish; but there was
an altogether splendid gilt and rose cuspidor.

She did not try to draw out Fern's story; Fern insisted on telling it.

She had gone to the party, not quite liking Cy but willing to endure him
for the sake of dancing, of escaping from Mrs. Bogart's flow of moral
comments, of relaxing after the first strained weeks of teaching. Cy
"promised to be good." He was, on the way out. There were a few workmen
from Gopher Prairie at the dance, with many young farm-people. Half
a dozen squatters from a degenerate colony in a brush-hidden hollow,
planters of potatoes, suspected thieves, came in noisily drunk. They all
pounded the floor of the barn in old-fashioned square dances, swinging
their partners, skipping, laughing, under the incantations of Del
Snafflin the barber, who fiddled and called the figures. Cy had two
drinks from pocket-flasks. Fern saw him fumbling among the overcoats
piled on the feedbox at the far end of the barn; soon after she heard a
farmer declaring that some one had stolen his bottle. She taxed Cy with
the theft; he chuckled, "Oh, it's just a joke; I'm going to give it
back." He demanded that she take a drink. Unless she did, he wouldn't
return the bottle.

"I just brushed my lips with it, and gave it back to him," moaned Fern.
She sat up, glared at Carol. "Did you ever take a drink?"

"I have. A few. I'd love to have one right now! This contact with
righteousness has about done me up!"

Fern could laugh then. "So would I! I don't suppose I've had five drinks
in my life, but if I meet just one more Bogart and Son----Well, I didn't
really touch that bottle--horrible raw whisky--though I'd have loved
some wine. I felt so jolly. The barn was almost like a stage scene--the
high rafters, and the dark stalls, and tin lanterns swinging, and a
silage-cutter up at the end like some mysterious kind of machine. And
I'd been having lots of fun dancing with the nicest young farmer, so
strong and nice, and awfully intelligent. But I got uneasy when I saw
how Cy was. So I doubt if I touched two drops of the beastly stuff. Do
you suppose God is punishing me for even wanting wine?"

"My dear, Mrs. Bogart's god may be--Main Street's god. But all the
courageous intelligent people are fighting him . . . though he slay us."

Fern danced again with the young farmer; she forgot Cy while she was
talking with a girl who had taken the University agricultural course.
Cy could not have returned the bottle; he came staggering toward
her--taking time to make himself offensive to every girl on the way
and to dance a jig. She insisted on their returning. Cy went with her,
chuckling and jigging. He kissed her, outside the door. . . . "And
to think I used to think it was interesting to have men kiss you at
a dance!". . . She ignored the kiss, in the need of getting him home
before he started a fight. A farmer helped her harness the buggy, while
Cy snored in the seat. He awoke before they set out; all the way home he
alternately slept and tried to make love to her.

"I'm almost as strong as he is. I managed to keep him away while I
drove--such a rickety buggy. I didn't feel like a girl; I felt like a
scrubwoman--no, I guess I was too scared to have any feelings at all. It
was terribly dark. I got home, somehow. But it was hard, the time I had
to get out, and it was quite muddy, to read a sign-post--I lit matches
that I took from Cy's coat pocket, and he followed me--he fell off
the buggy step into the mud, and got up and tried to make love to me,
and----I was scared. But I hit him. Quite hard. And got in, and so he
ran after the buggy, crying like a baby, and I let him in again, and
right away again he was trying----But no matter. I got him home. Up on
the porch. Mrs. Bogart was waiting up. . . .

"You know, it was funny; all the time she was--oh, talking to me--and Cy
was being terribly sick--I just kept thinking, 'I've still got to drive
the buggy down to the livery stable. I wonder if the livery man will be
awake?' But I got through somehow. I took the buggy down to the stable,
and got to my room. I locked my door, but Mrs. Bogart kept saying
things, outside the door. Stood out there saying things about me,
dreadful things, and rattling the knob. And all the while I could hear
Cy in the back yard-being sick. I don't think I'll ever marry any man.
And then today----

"She drove me right out of the house. She wouldn't listen to me, all
morning. Just to Cy. I suppose he's over his headache now. Even at
breakfast he thought the whole thing was a grand joke. I suppose right
this minute he's going around town boasting about his 'conquest.' You
understand--oh, DON'T you understand? I DID keep him away! But I don't
see how I can face my school. They say country towns are fine for
bringing up boys in, but----I can't believe this is me, lying here and
saying this. I don't BELIEVE what happened last night.

"Oh. This was curious: When I took off my dress last night--it was a
darling dress, I loved it so, but of course the mud had spoiled it. I
cried over it and----No matter. But my white silk stockings were all
torn, and the strange thing is, I don't know whether I caught my legs
in the briers when I got out to look at the sign-post, or whether Cy
scratched me when I was fighting him off."

IV

Sam Clark was president of the school-board. When Carol told him Fern's
story Sam looked sympathetic and neighborly, and Mrs. Clark sat by
cooing, "Oh, isn't that too bad." Carol was interrupted only when Mrs.
Clark begged, "Dear, don't speak so bitter about 'pious' people. There's
lots of sincere practising Christians that are real tolerant. Like the
Champ Perrys."

"Yes. I know. Unfortunately there are enough kindly people in the
churches to keep them going."

When Carol had finished, Mrs. Clark breathed, "Poor girl; I don't doubt
her story a bit," and Sam rumbled, "Yuh, sure. Miss Mullins is young and
reckless, but everybody in town, except Ma Bogart, knows what Cy is. But
Miss Mullins was a fool to go with him."

"But not wicked enough to pay for it with disgrace?"

"N-no, but----" Sam avoided verdicts, clung to the entrancing horrors
of the story. "Ma Bogart cussed her out all morning, did she? Jumped her
neck, eh? Ma certainly is one hell-cat."

"Yes, you know how she is; so vicious."

"Oh no, her best style ain't her viciousness. What she pulls in our
store is to come in smiling with Christian Fortitude and keep a clerk
busy for one hour while she picks out half a dozen fourpenny nails. I
remember one time----"

"Sam!" Carol was uneasy. "You'll fight for Fern, won't you? When Mrs.
Bogart came to see you did she make definite charges?"

"Well, yes, you might say she did."

"But the school-board won't act on them?"

"Guess we'll more or less have to."

"But you'll exonerate Fern?"

"I'll do what I can for the girl personally, but you know what the board
is. There's Reverend Zitterel; Sister Bogart about half runs his church,
so of course he'll take her say-so; and Ezra Stowbody, as a banker he
has to be all hell for morality and purity. Might 's well admit it,
Carrie; I'm afraid there'll be a majority of the board against her. Not
that any of us would believe a word Cy said, not if he swore it on a
stack of Bibles, but still, after all this gossip, Miss Mullins wouldn't
hardly be the party to chaperon our basket-ball team when it went out of
town to play other high schools, would she!"

"Perhaps not, but couldn't some one else?"

"Why, that's one of the things she was hired for." Sam sounded stubborn.

"Do you realize that this isn't just a matter of a job, and hiring and
firing; that it's actually sending a splendid girl out with a beastly
stain on her, giving all the other Bogarts in the world a chance at her?
That's what will happen if you discharge her."

Sam moved uncomfortably, looked at his wife, scratched his head, sighed,
said nothing.

"Won't you fight for her on the board? If you lose, won't you, and
whoever agrees with you, make a minority report?"

"No reports made in a case like this. Our rule is to just decide the
thing and announce the final decision, whether it's unanimous or not."

"Rules! Against a girl's future! Dear God! Rules of a school-board! Sam!
Won't you stand by Fern, and threaten to resign from the board if they
try to discharge her?"

Rather testy, tired of so many subtleties, he complained, "Well, I'll do
what I can, but I'll have to wait till the board meets."

And "I'll do what I can," together with the secret admission "Of
course you and I know what Ma Bogart is," was all Carol could get
from Superintendent George Edwin Mott, Ezra Stowbody, the Reverend Mr.
Zitterel or any other member of the school-board.

Afterward she wondered whether Mr. Zitterel could have been referring
to herself when he observed, "There's too much license in high places
in this town, though, and the wages of sin is death--or anyway, bein'
fired." The holy leer with which the priest said it remained in her
mind.

She was at the hotel before eight next morning. Fern longed to go to
school, to face the tittering, but she was too shaky. Carol read to
her all day and, by reassuring her, convinced her own self that the
school-board would be just. She was less sure of it that evening when,
at the motion pictures, she heard Mrs. Gougerling exclaim to Mrs.
Howland, "She may be so innocent and all, and I suppose she probably is,
but still, if she drank a whole bottle of whisky at that dance, the way
everybody says she did, she may have forgotten she was so innocent! Hee,
hee, hee!" Maud Dyer, leaning back from her seat, put in, "That's what
I've said all along. I don't want to roast anybody, but have you noticed
the way she looks at men?"

"When will they have me on the scaffold?" Carol speculated.

Nat Hicks stopped the Kennicotts on their way home. Carol hated him for
his manner of assuming that they two had a mysterious understanding.
Without quite winking he seemed to wink at her as he gurgled, "What do
you folks think about this Mullins woman? I'm not strait-laced, but I
tell you we got to have decent women in our schools. D' you know what I
heard? They say whatever she may of done afterwards, this Mullins dame
took two quarts of whisky to the dance with her, and got stewed before
Cy did! Some tank, that wren! Ha, ha, ha!"

"Rats, I don't believe it," Kennicott muttered.

He got Carol away before she was able to speak.

She saw Erik passing the house, late, alone, and she stared after him,
longing for the lively bitterness of the things he would say about the
town. Kennicott had nothing for her but "Oh, course, ev'body likes a
juicy story, but they don't intend to be mean."

She went up to bed proving to herself that the members of the
school-board were superior men.

It was Tuesday afternoon before she learned that the board had met
at ten in the morning and voted to "accept Miss Fern Mullins's
resignation." Sam Clark telephoned the news to her. "We're not making
any charges. We're just letting her resign. Would you like to drop over
to the hotel and ask her to write the resignation, now we've accepted
it? Glad I could get the board to put it that way. It's thanks to you."

"But can't you see that the town will take this as proof of the
charges?"

"We're--not--making--no--charges--whatever!" Sam was obviously finding
it hard to be patient.

Fern left town that evening.

Carol went with her to the train. The two girls elbowed through a silent
lip-licking crowd. Carol tried to stare them down but in face of
the impishness of the boys and the bovine gaping of the men, she was
embarrassed. Fern did not glance at them. Carol felt her arm tremble,
though she was tearless, listless, plodding. She squeezed Carol's hand,
said something unintelligible, stumbled up into the vestibule.

Carol remembered that Miles Bjornstam had also taken a train. What would
be the scene at the station when she herself took departure?

She walked up-town behind two strangers.

One of them was giggling, "See that good-looking wench that got on here?
The swell kid with the small black hat? She's some charmer! I was here
yesterday, before my jump to Ojibway Falls, and I heard all about
her. Seems she was a teacher, but she certainly was a high-roller--O
boy!--high, wide, and fancy! Her and couple of other skirts bought a
whole case of whisky and went on a tear, and one night, darned if this
bunch of cradle-robbers didn't get hold of some young kids, just small
boys, and they all got lit up like a White Way, and went out to a
roughneck dance, and they say----"

The narrator turned, saw a woman near and, not being a common person nor
a coarse workman but a clever salesman and a householder, lowered
his voice for the rest of the tale. During it the other man laughed
hoarsely.

Carol turned off on a side-street.

She passed Cy Bogart. He was humorously narrating some achievement to a
group which included Nat Hicks, Del Snafflin, Bert Tybee the bartender,
and A. Tennyson O'Hearn the shyster lawyer. They were men far older than
Cy but they accepted him as one of their own, and encouraged him to go
on.

It was a week before she received from Fern a letter of which this was a
part:

. . . & of course my family did not really believe the story but as
they were sure I must have done something wrong they just lectured
me generally, in fact jawed me till I have gone to live at a boarding
house. The teachers' agencies must know the story, man at one almost
slammed the door in my face when I went to ask about a job, & at another
the woman in charge was beastly. Don't know what I will do. Don't seem
to feel very well. May marry a fellow that's in love with me but he's so
stupid that he makes me SCREAM.

Dear Mrs. Kennicott you were the only one that believed me. I guess it's
a joke on me, I was such a simp, I felt quite heroic while I was driving
the buggy back that night & keeping Cy away from me. I guess I expected
the people in Gopher Prairie to admire me. I did use to be admired for
my athletics at the U.--just five months ago.

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

completion: One morning Carol hears an argument coming from the Bogart home. Soon Fern emerges, downcast and carrying a suitcase. The widow Bogart follows shouting denunciations. That evening Mrs. Bogart arrives at the Kennicott's and after a great deal of self-righteous pity blurts out the story: Fern and Cy had gone to a barn dance and when they returned Cyrus was drunk. When Mrs. Bogart accused the girl of trying to corrupt her son Fern replied: "What purpose could I have in wanting the filthy pup to get drunk. Fern also asserted that Cy had stolen a bottle of whiskey from a farmer's coat pocket. This had enraged Mrs. Bogart who threw the girl out of the house after she admitted that Cy had forced her to have a drink of the whiskey. Mrs. Bogart hinted that nobody could account for Fern's behavior on the ride home. Furthermore, Mrs. Bogart had gone to all the members of the school board to complain. Carol rushes to see Fern who has fled to the only hotel, the Minniemashie House, and finds the girl distraught. She pours out her story - that she was having a great time at the dance, Cy got drunk on stolen liquor and then she had to drive home and fight him off the whole way. When they returned Mrs. Bogart said nasty things to her while Cy was sick and then he accused her of getting him drunk on purpose. Carol goes to the various members of the school board to plead Fern's case. They believe her and have no illusions about Cy's character but they claim that the stain of the gossip won't wash out. Carol tells them that the girl will be ruined if she is summarily dismissed. The next day Carol overhears inflated gossip about Fern around town and wonders when she will suffer the same fate for her burgeoning relationship with Erik. The next day the board decides to accept Fern's resignation without making any formal charges. Carol walks the trembling girl to the train and is disgusted to observe Cy Bogart bragging to some men on the street. A week later she receives a letter from Fern: Her parents have rejected her and she can't find another job. She thanks Carol for her kindness