Chapter: CHAPTER X


THE house was haunted, long before evening. Shadows slipped down the
walls and waited behind every chair.

Did that door move?

No. She wouldn't go to the Jolly Seventeen. She hadn't energy enough to
caper before them, to smile blandly at Juanita's rudeness. Not today.
But she did want a party. Now! If some one would come in this afternoon,
some one who liked her--Vida or Mrs. Sam Clark or old Mrs. Champ Perry
or gentle Mrs. Dr. Westlake. Or Guy Pollock! She'd telephone----

No. That wouldn't be it. They must come of themselves.

Perhaps they would.

Why not?

She'd have tea ready, anyway. If they came--splendid. If not--what did
she care? She wasn't going to yield to the village and let down; she was
going to keep up a belief in the rite of tea, to which she had always
looked forward as the symbol of a leisurely fine existence. And it would
be just as much fun, even if it was so babyish, to have tea by herself
and pretend that she was entertaining clever men. It would!

She turned the shining thought into action. She bustled to the kitchen,
stoked the wood-range, sang Schumann while she boiled the kettle, warmed
up raisin cookies on a newspaper spread on the rack in the oven. She
scampered up-stairs to bring down her filmiest tea-cloth. She arranged
a silver tray. She proudly carried it into the living-room and set it on
the long cherrywood table, pushing aside a hoop of embroidery, a volume
of Conrad from the library, copies of the Saturday Evening Post, the
Literary Digest, and Kennicott's National Geographic Magazine.

She moved the tray back and forth and regarded the effect. She shook
her head. She busily unfolded the sewing-table set it in the bay-window,
patted the tea-cloth to smoothness, moved the tray. "Some time I'll have
a mahogany tea-table," she said happily.

She had brought in two cups, two plates. For herself, a straight chair,
but for the guest the big wing-chair, which she pantingly tugged to the
table.

She had finished all the preparations she could think of. She sat and
waited. She listened for the door-bell, the telephone. Her eagerness was
stilled. Her hands drooped.

Surely Vida Sherwin would hear the summons.

She glanced through the bay-window. Snow was sifting over the ridge
of the Howland house like sprays of water from a hose. The wide
yards across the street were gray with moving eddies. The black trees
shivered. The roadway was gashed with ruts of ice.

She looked at the extra cup and plate. She looked at the wing-chair. It
was so empty.

The tea was cold in the pot. With wearily dipping fingertip she tested
it. Yes. Quite cold. She couldn't wait any longer.

The cup across from her was icily clean, glisteningly empty.

Simply absurd to wait. She poured her own cup of tea. She sat and stared
at it. What was it she was going to do now? Oh yes; how idiotic; take a
lump of sugar.

She didn't want the beastly tea.

She was springing up. She was on the couch, sobbing.



II


She was thinking more sharply than she had for weeks.

She reverted to her resolution to change the town--awaken it, prod it,
"reform" it. What if they were wolves instead of lambs? They'd eat her
all the sooner if she was meek to them. Fight or be eaten. It was easier
to change the town completely than to conciliate it! She could not take
their point of view; it was a negative thing; an intellectual squalor;
a swamp of prejudices and fears. She would have to make them take hers.
She was not a Vincent de Paul, to govern and mold a people. What of
that? The tiniest change in their distrust of beauty would be the
beginning of the end; a seed to sprout and some day with thickening
roots to crack their wall of mediocrity. If she could not, as she
desired, do a great thing nobly and with laughter, yet she need not be
content with village nothingness. She would plant one seed in the blank
wall.

Was she just? Was it merely a blank wall, this town which to three
thousand and more people was the center of the universe? Hadn't she,
returning from Lac-qui-Meurt, felt the heartiness of their greetings?
No. The ten thousand Gopher Prairies had no monopoly of greetings and
friendly hands. Sam Clark was no more loyal than girl librarians she
knew in St. Paul, the people she had met in Chicago. And those others
had so much that Gopher Prairie complacently lacked--the world of gaiety
and adventure, of music and the integrity of bronze, of remembered
mists from tropic isles and Paris nights and the walls of Bagdad, of
industrial justice and a God who spake not in doggerel hymns.

One seed. Which seed it was did not matter. All knowledge and freedom
were one. But she had delayed so long in finding that seed. Could she
do something with this Thanatopsis Club? Or should she make her house
so charming that it would be an influence? She'd make Kennicott like
poetry. That was it, for a beginning! She conceived so clear a picture
of their bending over large fair pages by the fire (in a non-existent
fireplace) that the spectral presences slipped away. Doors no longer
moved; curtains were not creeping shadows but lovely dark masses in the
dusk; and when Bea came home Carol was singing at the piano which she
had not touched for many days.

Their supper was the feast of two girls. Carol was in the dining-room,
in a frock of black satin edged with gold, and Bea, in blue gingham and
an apron, dined in the kitchen; but the door was open between, and
Carol was inquiring, "Did you see any ducks in Dahl's window?" and Bea
chanting, "No, ma'am. Say, ve have a svell time, dis afternoon. Tina she
have coffee and knackebrod, and her fella vos dere, and ve yoost laughed
and laughed, and her fella say he vos president and he going to make
me queen of Finland, and Ay stick a fedder in may hair and say Ay bane
going to go to var--oh, ve vos so foolish and ve LAUGH so!"

When Carol sat at the piano again she did not think of her husband but
of the book-drugged hermit, Guy Pollock. She wished that Pollock would
come calling.

"If a girl really kissed him, he'd creep out of his den and be human. If
Will were as literate as Guy, or Guy were as executive as Will, I think
I could endure even Gopher Prairie. It's so hard to mother Will. I
could be maternal with Guy. Is that what I want, something to mother, a
man or a baby or a town? I WILL have a baby. Some day. But to have him
isolated here all his receptive years----

"And so to bed.

"Have I found my real level in Bea and kitchen-gossip?

"Oh, I do miss you, Will. But it will be pleasant to turn over in bed as
often as I want to, without worrying about waking you up.

"Am I really this settled thing called a 'married woman'? I feel
so unmarried tonight. So free. To think that there was once a Mrs.
Kennicott who let herself worry over a town called Gopher Prairie when
there was a whole world outside it!

"Of course Will is going to like poetry."



III


A black February day. Clouds hewn of ponderous timber weighing down
on the earth; an irresolute dropping of snow specks upon the trampled
wastes. Gloom but no veiling of angularity. The lines of roofs and
sidewalks sharp and inescapable.

The second day of Kennicott's absence.

She fled from the creepy house for a walk. It was thirty below zero;
too cold to exhilarate her. In the spaces between houses the wind caught
her. It stung, it gnawed at nose and ears and aching cheeks, and she
hastened from shelter to shelter, catching her breath in the lee of a
barn, grateful for the protection of a billboard covered with ragged
posters showing layer under layer of paste-smeared green and streaky
red.

The grove of oaks at the end of the street suggested Indians, hunting,
snow-shoes, and she struggled past the earth-banked cottages to the
open country, to a farm and a low hill corrugated with hard snow. In
her loose nutria coat, seal toque, virginal cheeks unmarked by lines of
village jealousies, she was as out of place on this dreary hillside as
a scarlet tanager on an ice-floe. She looked down on Gopher Prairie. The
snow, stretching without break from streets to devouring prairie beyond,
wiped out the town's pretense of being a shelter. The houses were black
specks on a white sheet. Her heart shivered with that still loneliness
as her body shivered with the wind.

She ran back into the huddle of streets, all the while protesting that
she wanted a city's yellow glare of shop-windows and restaurants, or the
primitive forest with hooded furs and a rifle, or a barnyard warm and
steamy, noisy with hens and cattle, certainly not these dun houses,
these yards choked with winter ash-piles, these roads of dirty snow and
clotted frozen mud. The zest of winter was gone. Three months more, till
May, the cold might drag on, with the snow ever filthier, the weakened
body less resistent. She wondered why the good citizens insisted on
adding the chill of prejudice, why they did not make the houses of their
spirits more warm and frivolous, like the wise chatterers of Stockholm
and Moscow.

She circled the outskirts of the town and viewed the slum of "Swede
Hollow." Wherever as many as three houses are gathered there will be a
slum of at least one house. In Gopher Prairie, the Sam Clarks boasted,
"you don't get any of this poverty that you find in cities--always
plenty of work--no need of charity--man got to be blame shiftless if he
don't get ahead." But now that the summer mask of leaves and grass was
gone, Carol discovered misery and dead hope. In a shack of thin boards
covered with tar-paper she saw the washerwoman, Mrs. Steinhof, working
in gray steam. Outside, her six-year-old boy chopped wood. He had a torn
jacket, muffler of a blue like skimmed milk. His hands were covered with
red mittens through which protruded his chapped raw knuckles. He halted
to blow on them, to cry disinterestedly.

A family of recently arrived Finns were camped in an abandoned stable. A
man of eighty was picking up lumps of coal along the railroad.

She did not know what to do about it. She felt that these independent
citizens, who had been taught that they belonged to a democracy, would
resent her trying to play Lady Bountiful.

She lost her loneliness in the activity of the village industries--the
railroad-yards with a freight-train switching, the wheat-elevator,
oil-tanks, a slaughter-house with blood-marks on the snow, the creamery
with the sleds of farmers and piles of milk-cans, an unexplained stone
hut labeled "Danger--Powder Stored Here." The jolly tombstone-yard,
where a utilitarian sculptor in a red calfskin overcoat whistled as
he hammered the shiniest of granite headstones. Jackson Elder's small
planing-mill, with the smell of fresh pine shavings and the burr of
circular saws. Most important, the Gopher Prairie Flour and Milling
Company, Lyman Cass president. Its windows were blanketed with
flour-dust, but it was the most stirring spot in town. Workmen were
wheeling barrels of flour into a box-car; a farmer sitting on sacks of
wheat in a bobsled argued with the wheat-buyer; machinery within the
mill boomed and whined, water gurgled in the ice-freed mill-race.

The clatter was a relief to Carol after months of smug houses. She
wished that she could work in the mill; that she did not belong to the
caste of professional-man's-wife.

She started for home, through the small slum. Before a tar-paper shack,
at a gateless gate, a man in rough brown dogskin coat and black plush
cap with lappets was watching her. His square face was confident,
his foxy mustache was picaresque. He stood erect, his hands in his
side-pockets, his pipe puffing slowly. He was forty-five or -six,
perhaps.

"How do, Mrs. Kennicott," he drawled.

She recalled him--the town handyman, who had repaired their furnace at
the beginning of winter.

"Oh, how do you do," she fluttered.

"My name 's Bjornstam. 'The Red Swede' they call me. Remember? Always
thought I'd kind of like to say howdy to you again."

"Ye--yes----I've been exploring the outskirts of town."

"Yump. Fine mess. No sewage, no street cleaning, and the Lutheran
minister and the priest represent the arts and sciences. Well, thunder,
we submerged tenth down here in Swede Hollow are no worse off than you
folks. Thank God, we don't have to go and purr at Juanity Haydock at the
Jolly Old Seventeen."

The Carol who regarded herself as completely adaptable was uncomfortable
at being chosen as comrade by a pipe-reeking odd-job man. Probably he
was one of her husband's patients. But she must keep her dignity.

"Yes, even the Jolly Seventeen isn't always so exciting. It's very cold
again today, isn't it. Well----"

Bjornstam was not respectfully valedictory. He showed no signs of
pulling a forelock. His eyebrows moved as though they had a life of
their own. With a subgrin he went on:

"Maybe I hadn't ought to talk about Mrs. Haydock and her Solemcholy
Seventeen in that fresh way. I suppose I'd be tickled to death if I was
invited to sit in with that gang. I'm what they call a pariah, I guess.
I'm the town badman, Mrs. Kennicott: town atheist, and I suppose I must
be an anarchist, too. Everybody who doesn't love the bankers and the
Grand Old Republican Party is an anarchist."

Carol had unconsciously slipped from her attitude of departure into an
attitude of listening, her face full toward him, her muff lowered. She
fumbled:

"Yes, I suppose so." Her own grudges came in a flood. "I don't see why
you shouldn't criticize the Jolly Seventeen if you want to. They aren't
sacred."

"Oh yes, they are! The dollar-sign has chased the crucifix clean off
the map. But then, I've got no kick. I do what I please, and I suppose I
ought to let them do the same."

"What do you mean by saying you're a pariah?"

"I'm poor, and yet I don't decently envy the rich. I'm an old bach.
I make enough money for a stake, and then I sit around by myself, and
shake hands with myself, and have a smoke, and read history, and I don't
contribute to the wealth of Brother Elder or Daddy Cass."

"You----I fancy you read a good deal."

"Yep. In a hit-or-a-miss way. I'll tell you: I'm a lone wolf. I trade
horses, and saw wood, and work in lumber-camps--I'm a first-rate
swamper. Always wished I could go to college. Though I s'pose I'd find
it pretty slow, and they'd probably kick me out."

"You really are a curious person, Mr.----"

"Bjornstam. Miles Bjornstam. Half Yank and half Swede. Usually known as
'that damn lazy big-mouthed calamity-howler that ain't satisfied with
the way we run things.' No, I ain't curious--whatever you mean by
that! I'm just a bookworm. Probably too much reading for the amount
of digestion I've got. Probably half-baked. I'm going to get in
'half-baked' first, and beat you to it, because it's dead sure to be
handed to a radical that wears jeans!"

They grinned together. She demanded:

"You say that the Jolly Seventeen is stupid. What makes you think so?"

"Oh, trust us borers into the foundation to know about your leisure
class. Fact, Mrs. Kennicott, I'll say that far as I can make out, the
only people in this man's town that do have any brains--I don't mean
ledger-keeping brains or duck-hunting brains or baby-spanking brains,
but real imaginative brains--are you and me and Guy Pollock and the
foreman at the flour-mill. He's a socialist, the foreman. (Don't tell
Lym Cass that! Lym would fire a socialist quicker than he would a
horse-thief!)"

"Indeed no, I sha'n't tell him."

"This foreman and I have some great set-to's. He's a regular old-line
party-member. Too dogmatic. Expects to reform everything from
deforestration to nosebleed by saying phrases like 'surplus value.'
Like reading the prayer-book. But same time, he's a Plato J. Aristotle
compared with people like Ezry Stowbody or Professor Mott or Julius
Flickerbaugh."

"It's interesting to hear about him."

He dug his toe into a drift, like a schoolboy. "Rats. You mean I talk
too much. Well, I do, when I get hold of somebody like you. You probably
want to run along and keep your nose from freezing."

"Yes, I must go, I suppose. But tell me: Why did you leave Miss Sherwin,
of the high school, out of your list of the town intelligentsia?"

"I guess maybe she does belong in it. From all I can hear she's in
everything and behind everything that looks like a reform--lot more
than most folks realize. She lets Mrs. Reverend Warren, the president
of this-here Thanatopsis Club, think she's running the works, but Miss
Sherwin is the secret boss, and nags all the easy-going dames into doing
something. But way I figure it out----You see, I'm not interested in
these dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin's trying to repair the holes in this
barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing out the water.
And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry to the crew! Me, I want
to yank it up on the ways, and fire the poor bum of a shoemaker that
built it so it sails crooked, and have it rebuilt right, from the keel
up."

"Yes--that--that would be better. But I must run home. My poor nose is
nearly frozen."

"Say, you better come in and get warm, and see what an old bach's shack
is like."

She looked doubtfully at him, at the low shanty, the yard that was
littered with cord-wood, moldy planks, a hoopless wash-tub. She was
disquieted, but Bjornstam did not give her the opportunity to be
delicate. He flung out his hand in a welcoming gesture which assumed
that she was her own counselor, that she was not a Respectable Married
Woman but fully a human being. With a shaky, "Well, just a moment, to
warm my nose," she glanced down the street to make sure that she was not
spied on, and bolted toward the shanty.

She remained for one hour, and never had she known a more considerate
host than the Red Swede.

He had but one room: bare pine floor, small work-bench, wall bunk with
amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-stippled coffee-pot on the
shelf behind the pot-bellied cannon-ball stove, backwoods chairs--one
constructed from half a barrel, one from a tilted plank--and a row of
books incredibly assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of
gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and a spotty treatise on "The
Care, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry and Cattle."

There was but one picture--a magazine color-plate of a steep-roofed
village in the Harz Mountains which suggested kobolds and maidens with
golden hair.

Bjornstam did not fuss over her. He suggested, "Might throw open your
coat and put your feet up on the box in front of the stove." He tossed
his dogskin coat into the bunk, lowered himself into the barrel chair,
and droned on:

"Yeh, I'm probably a yahoo, but by gum I do keep my independence by
doing odd jobs, and that's more 'n these polite cusses like the clerks
in the banks do. When I'm rude to some slob, it may be partly because I
don't know better (and God knows I'm not no authority on trick forks
and what pants you wear with a Prince Albert), but mostly it's because I
mean something. I'm about the only man in Johnson County that remembers
the joker in the Declaration of Independence about Americans being
supposed to have the right to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.'

"I meet old Ezra Stowbody on the street. He looks at me like he wants me
to remember he's a highmuckamuck and worth two hundred thousand dollars,
and he says, 'Uh, Bjornquist----'

"'Bjornstam's my name, Ezra,' I says. HE knows my name, all rightee.

"'Well, whatever your name is,' he says, 'I understand you have a
gasoline saw. I want you to come around and saw up four cords of maple
for me,' he says.

"'So you like my looks, eh?' I says, kind of innocent.

"'What difference does that make? Want you to saw that wood before
Saturday,' he says, real sharp. Common workman going and getting fresh
with a fifth of a million dollars all walking around in a hand-me-down
fur coat!

"'Here's the difference it makes,' I says, just to devil him. 'How do
you know I like YOUR looks?' Maybe he didn't look sore! 'Nope,' I says,
thinking it all over, 'I don't like your application for a loan. Take it
to another bank, only there ain't any,' I says, and I walks off on him.

"Sure. Probably I was surly--and foolish. But I figured there had to be
ONE man in town independent enough to sass the banker!"

He hitched out of his chair, made coffee, gave Carol a cup, and talked
on, half defiant and half apologetic, half wistful for friendliness
and half amused by her surprise at the discovery that there was a
proletarian philosophy.

At the door, she hinted:

"Mr. Bjornstam, if you were I, would you worry when people thought you
were affected?"

"Huh? Kick 'em in the face! Say, if I were a sea-gull, and all over
silver, think I'd care what a pack of dirty seals thought about my
flying?"

It was not the wind at her back, it was the thrust of Bjornstam's scorn
which carried her through town. She faced Juanita Haydock, cocked
her head at Maud Dyer's brief nod, and came home to Bea radiant. She
telephoned Vida Sherwin to "run over this evening." She lustily played
Tschaikowsky--the virile chords an echo of the red laughing philosopher
of the tar-paper shack.

(When she hinted to Vida, "Isn't there a man here who amuses himself by
being irreverent to the village gods--Bjornstam, some such a name?"
the reform-leader said "Bjornstam? Oh yes. Fixes things. He's awfully
impertinent.")



IV


Kennicott had returned at midnight. At breakfast he said four several
times that he had missed her every moment.

On her way to market Sam Clark hailed her, "The top o' the mornin'
to yez! Going to stop and pass the time of day mit Sam'l? Warmer, eh?
What'd the doc's thermometer say it was? Say, you folks better come
round and visit with us, one of these evenings. Don't be so dog-gone
proud, staying by yourselves."

Champ Perry the pioneer, wheat-buyer at the elevator, stopped her in
the post-office, held her hand in his withered paws, peered at her
with faded eyes, and chuckled, "You are so fresh and blooming, my dear.
Mother was saying t'other day that a sight of you was better 'n a dose
of medicine."

In the Bon Ton Store she found Guy Pollock tentatively buying a modest
gray scarf. "We haven't seen you for so long," she said. "Wouldn't you
like to come in and play cribbage, some evening?" As though he meant it,
Pollock begged, "May I, really?"

While she was purchasing two yards of malines the vocal Raymie
Wutherspoon tiptoed up to her, his long sallow face bobbing, and he
besought, "You've just got to come back to my department and see a pair
of patent leather slippers I set aside for you."

In a manner of more than sacerdotal reverence he unlaced her boots,
tucked her skirt about her ankles, slid on the slippers. She took them.

"You're a good salesman," she said.

"I'm not a salesman at all! I just like elegant things. All this is so
inartistic." He indicated with a forlornly waving hand the shelves of
shoe-boxes, the seat of thin wood perforated in rosettes, the display of
shoe-trees and tin boxes of blacking, the lithograph of a smirking
young woman with cherry cheeks who proclaimed in the exalted poetry of
advertising, "My tootsies never got hep to what pedal perfection was
till I got a pair of clever classy Cleopatra Shoes."

"But sometimes," Raymie sighed, "there is a pair of dainty little shoes
like these, and I set them aside for some one who will appreciate. When
I saw these I said right away, 'Wouldn't it be nice if they fitted Mrs.
Kennicott,' and I meant to speak to you first chance I had. I haven't
forgotten our jolly talks at Mrs. Gurrey's!"

That evening Guy Pollock came in and, though Kennicott instantly
impressed him into a cribbage game, Carol was happy again.



V


She did not, in recovering something of her buoyancy, forget her
determination to begin the liberalizing of Gopher Prairie by the easy
and agreeable propaganda of teaching Kennicott to enjoy reading poetry
in the lamplight. The campaign was delayed. Twice he suggested that they
call on neighbors; once he was in the country. The fourth evening
he yawned pleasantly, stretched, and inquired, "Well, what'll we do
tonight? Shall we go to the movies?"

"I know exactly what we're going to do. Now don't ask questions! Come
and sit down by the table. There, are you comfy? Lean back and forget
you're a practical man, and listen to me."

It may be that she had been influenced by the managerial Vida Sherwin;
certainly she sounded as though she was selling culture. But she dropped
it when she sat on the couch, her chin in her hands, a volume of Yeats
on her knees, and read aloud.

Instantly she was released from the homely comfort of a prairie town.
She was in the world of lonely things--the flutter of twilight linnets,
the aching call of gulls along a shore to which the netted foam crept
out of darkness, the island of Aengus and the elder gods and the eternal
glories that never were, tall kings and women girdled with crusted gold,
the woful incessant chanting and the----

"Heh-cha-cha!" coughed Dr. Kennicott. She stopped. She remembered that
he was the sort of person who chewed tobacco. She glared, while he
uneasily petitioned, "That's great stuff. Study it in college? I
like poetry fine--James Whitcomb Riley and some of Longfellow--this
'Hiawatha.' Gosh, I wish I could appreciate that highbrow art stuff. But
I guess I'm too old a dog to learn new tricks."

With pity for his bewilderment, and a certain desire to giggle, she
consoled him, "Then let's try some Tennyson. You've read him?"

"Tennyson? You bet. Read him in school. There's that:

     And let there be no (what is it?) of farewell
     When I put out to sea,
     But let the----

Well, I don't remember all of it but----Oh, sure! And there's that 'I
met a little country boy who----' I don't remember exactly how it goes,
but the chorus ends up, 'We are seven.'"

"Yes. Well----Shall we try 'The Idylls of the King?' They're so full of
color."

"Go to it. Shoot." But he hastened to shelter himself behind a cigar.

She was not transported to Camelot. She read with an eye cocked on him,
and when she saw how much he was suffering she ran to him, kissed his
forehead, cried, "You poor forced tube-rose that wants to be a decent
turnip!"

"Look here now, that ain't----"

"Anyway, I sha'n't torture you any longer."

She could not quite give up. She read Kipling, with a great deal of
emphasis:


There's a REGIMENT a-COMING down the GRAND Trunk ROAD.


He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal and reassured. But
when he complimented her, "That was fine. I don't know but what you
can elocute just as good as Ella Stowbody," she banged the book and
suggested that they were not too late for the nine o'clock show at the
movies.

That was her last effort to harvest the April wind, to teach divine
unhappiness by a correspondence course, to buy the lilies of Avalon and
the sunsets of Cockaigne in tin cans at Ole Jenson's Grocery.

But the fact is that at the motion-pictures she discovered herself
laughing as heartily as Kennicott at the humor of an actor who stuffed
spaghetti down a woman's evening frock. For a second she loathed her
laughter; mourned for the day when on her hill by the Mississippi
she had walked the battlements with queens. But the celebrated cinema
jester's conceit of dropping toads into a soup-plate flung her into
unwilling tittering, and the afterglow faded, the dead queens fled
through darkness.



VI


She went to the Jolly Seventeen's afternoon bridge. She had learned
the elements of the game from the Sam Clarks. She played quietly and
reasonably badly. She had no opinions on anything more polemic than
woolen union-suits, a topic on which Mrs. Howland discoursed for five
minutes. She smiled frequently, and was the complete canary-bird in her
manner of thanking the hostess, Mrs. Dave Dyer.

Her only anxious period was during the conference on husbands.

The young matrons discussed the intimacies of domesticity with a
frankness and a minuteness which dismayed Carol. Juanita Haydock
communicated Harry's method of shaving, and his interest in
deer-shooting. Mrs. Gougerling reported fully, and with some irritation,
her husband's inappreciation of liver and bacon. Maud Dyer chronicled
Dave's digestive disorders; quoted a recent bedtime controversy with
him in regard to Christian Science, socks and the sewing of buttons
upon vests; announced that she "simply wasn't going to stand his always
pawing girls when he went and got crazy-jealous if a man just danced
with her"; and rather more than sketched Dave's varieties of kisses.

So meekly did Carol give attention, so obviously was she at last
desirous of being one of them, that they looked on her fondly, and
encouraged her to give such details of her honeymoon as might be of
interest. She was embarrassed rather than resentful. She deliberately
misunderstood. She talked of Kennicott's overshoes and medical ideals
till they were thoroughly bored. They regarded her as agreeable but
green.

Till the end she labored to satisfy the inquisition. She bubbled at
Juanita, the president of the club, that she wanted to entertain them.
"Only," she said, "I don't know that I can give you any refreshments as
nice as Mrs. Dyer's salad, or that simply delicious angel's-food we had
at your house, dear."

"Fine! We need a hostess for the seventeenth of March. Wouldn't it be
awfully original if you made it a St. Patrick's Day bridge! I'll be
tickled to death to help you with it. I'm glad you've learned to play
bridge. At first I didn't hardly know if you were going to like Gopher
Prairie. Isn't it dandy that you've settled down to being homey with us!
Maybe we aren't as highbrow as the Cities, but we do have the daisiest
times and--oh, we go swimming in summer, and dances and--oh, lots of
good times. If folks will just take us as we are, I think we're a pretty
good bunch!"

"I'm sure of it. Thank you so much for the idea about having a St.
Patrick's Day bridge."

"Oh, that's nothing. I always think the Jolly Seventeen are so good at
original ideas. If you knew these other towns Wakamin and Joralemon and
all, you'd find out and realize that G. P. is the liveliest, smartest
town in the state. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan, the famous auto
manufacturer, came from here and----Yes, I think that a St. Patrick's
Day party would be awfully cunning and original, and yet not too queer
or freaky or anything."

 Carol sits alone in her house having no clue what to do. She knows there's a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen women's club, but she can't bring herself to go and be phony around them. Instead, she wishes that someone would come see her. Carol makes tea for herself and a visitor, since she has faith someone will call on her. But no one does, and the tea goes cold. Carol is bitterly disappointed. Carol asks Bea about her day off when she gets back. She envies Bea for being so satisfied with everything around her and decides that she's going to try to create change in her own home before she tries it on Gopher Prairie. She decides she's going to get her husband Will to like poetry. The next day, Carol goes for a walk around Gopher Prairie and wanders by a working-class slum called "Swede Hollow." She feels more connected to reality when she's around these poor people. Carol runs into Miles Bjornstam, the town handyman. Miles speaks to her plainly and criticizes the phoniness of the town. Carol is uncomfortable but also exhilarated to have someone to talk to about this subject. He invites her into his shack, which strikes Carol as improper, but she says yes, anyway. Carol looks around Miles's shack and sees how poor he is compared to her husband Will. But Miles is not self-conscious at all in front of her; he truly doesn't care what people think, and Carol admires him for it. After Carol gets home that day, her husband Will returns from his country trip. The next time Carol heads into the town, everyone acts like they're really happy to see her. It turns out that just a few days' absence is enough to make them want her back. Carol sticks by her resolution to make her husband Will interested in poetry. She sits down with him one night and reads some to him... but it's no use. Will isn't the poetic type, and it's clear that he's suffering just for her sake. In the end, Will and Carol just decide to go to a movie, where Carol finds herself laughing just as much as Will at a stupid comedy. The next time she goes to a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen, Carol avoids saying anything controversial, and she volunteers to have the club's next meeting at her house.

