Chapter: CHAPTER V


I


"WE'LL steal the whole day, and go hunting. I want you to see the
country round here," Kennicott announced at breakfast. "I'd take the
car--want you to see how swell she runs since I put in a new piston.
But we'll take a team, so we can get right out into the fields. Not many
prairie chickens left now, but we might just happen to run onto a small
covey."

He fussed over his hunting-kit. He pulled his hip boots out to full
length and examined them for holes. He feverishly counted his shotgun
shells, lecturing her on the qualities of smokeless powder. He drew the
new hammerless shotgun out of its heavy tan leather case and made her
peep through the barrels to see how dazzlingly free they were from rust.

The world of hunting and camping-outfits and fishing-tackle was
unfamiliar to her, and in Kennicott's interest she found something
creative and joyous. She examined the smooth stock, the carved hard
rubber butt of the gun. The shells, with their brass caps and sleek
green bodies and hieroglyphics on the wads, were cool and comfortably
heavy in her hands.

Kennicott wore a brown canvas hunting-coat with vast pockets lining
the inside, corduroy trousers which bulged at the wrinkles, peeled and
scarred shoes, a scarecrow felt hat. In this uniform he felt virile.
They clumped out to the livery buggy, they packed the kit and the box of
lunch into the back, crying to each other that it was a magnificent day.

Kennicott had borrowed Jackson Elder's red and white English setter, a
complacent dog with a waving tail of silver hair which flickered in the
sunshine. As they started, the dog yelped, and leaped at the horses'
heads, till Kennicott took him into the buggy, where he nuzzled Carol's
knees and leaned out to sneer at farm mongrels.

The grays clattered out on the hard dirt road with a pleasant song of
hoofs: "Ta ta ta rat! Ta ta ta rat!" It was early and fresh, the air
whistling, frost bright on the golden rod. As the sun warmed the world
of stubble into a welter of yellow they turned from the highroad,
through the bars of a farmer's gate, into a field, slowly bumping over
the uneven earth. In a hollow of the rolling prairie they lost sight
even of the country road. It was warm and placid. Locusts trilled among
the dry wheat-stalks, and brilliant little flies hurtled across the
buggy. A buzz of content filled the air. Crows loitered and gossiped in
the sky.

The dog had been let out and after a dance of excitement he settled down
to a steady quartering of the field, forth and back, forth and back, his
nose down.

"Pete Rustad owns this farm, and he told me he saw a small covey of
chickens in the west forty, last week. Maybe we'll get some sport after
all," Kennicott chuckled blissfully.

She watched the dog in suspense, breathing quickly every time he seemed
to halt. She had no desire to slaughter birds, but she did desire to
belong to Kennicott's world.

The dog stopped, on the point, a forepaw held up.

"By golly! He's hit a scent! Come on!" squealed Kennicott. He leaped
from the buggy, twisted the reins about the whip-socket, swung her out,
caught up his gun, slipped in two shells, stalked toward the rigid dog,
Carol pattering after him. The setter crawled ahead, his tail quivering,
his belly close to the stubble. Carol was nervous. She expected clouds
of large birds to fly up instantly. Her eyes were strained with staring.
But they followed the dog for a quarter of a mile, turning, doubling,
crossing two low hills, kicking through a swale of weeds, crawling
between the strands of a barbed-wire fence. The walking was hard on
her pavement-trained feet. The earth was lumpy, the stubble prickly and
lined with grass, thistles, abortive stumps of clover. She dragged and
floundered.

She heard Kennicott gasp, "Look!" Three gray birds were starting up
from the stubble. They were round, dumpy, like enormous bumble bees.
Kennicott was sighting, moving the barrel. She was agitated. Why didn't
he fire? The birds would be gone! Then a crash, another, and two birds
turned somersaults in the air, plumped down.

When he showed her the birds she had no sensation of blood. These heaps
of feathers were so soft and unbruised--there was about them no hint of
death. She watched her conquering man tuck them into his inside pocket,
and trudged with him back to the buggy.

They found no more prairie chickens that morning.

At noon they drove into her first farmyard, a private village, a white
house with no porches save a low and quite dirty stoop at the back,
a crimson barn with white trimmings, a glazed brick silo, an
ex-carriage-shed, now the garage of a Ford, an unpainted cow-stable, a
chicken-house, a pig-pen, a corn-crib, a granary, the galvanized-iron
skeleton tower of a wind-mill. The dooryard was of packed yellow clay,
treeless, barren of grass, littered with rusty plowshares and wheels
of discarded cultivators. Hardened trampled mud, like lava, filled the
pig-pen. The doors of the house were grime-rubbed, the corners and eaves
were rusted with rain, and the child who stared at them from the kitchen
window was smeary-faced. But beyond the barn was a clump of scarlet
geraniums; the prairie breeze was sunshine in motion; the flashing metal
blades of the windmill revolved with a lively hum; a horse neighed, a
rooster crowed, martins flew in and out of the cow-stable.

A small spare woman with flaxen hair trotted from the house. She was
twanging a Swedish patois--not in monotone, like English, but singing
it, with a lyrical whine:

"Pete he say you kom pretty soon hunting, doctor. My, dot's fine you
kom. Is dis de bride? Ohhhh! Ve yoost say las' night, ve hope maybe ve
see her som day. My, soch a pretty lady!" Mrs. Rustad was shining with
welcome. "Vell, vell! Ay hope you lak dis country! Von't you stay for
dinner, doctor?"

"No, but I wonder if you wouldn't like to give us a glass of milk?"
condescended Kennicott.

"Vell Ay should say Ay vill! You vait har a second and Ay run on de
milk-house!" She nervously hastened to a tiny red building beside the
windmill; she came back with a pitcher of milk from which Carol filled
the thermos bottle.

As they drove off Carol admired, "She's the dearest thing I ever saw.
And she adores you. You are the Lord of the Manor."

"Oh no," much pleased, "but still they do ask my advice about things.
Bully people, these Scandinavian farmers. And prosperous, too. Helga
Rustad, she's still scared of America, but her kids will be doctors and
lawyers and governors of the state and any darn thing they want to."

"I wonder----" Carol was plunged back into last night's Weltschmerz.
"I wonder if these farmers aren't bigger than we are? So simple and
hard-working. The town lives on them. We townies are parasites, and yet
we feel superior to them. Last night I heard Mr. Haydock talking about
'hicks.' Apparently he despises the farmers because they haven't reached
the social heights of selling thread and buttons."

"Parasites? Us? Where'd the farmers be without the town? Who lends them
money? Who--why, we supply them with everything!"

"Don't you find that some of the farmers think they pay too much for the
services of the towns?"

"Oh, of course there's a lot of cranks among the farmers same as there
are among any class. Listen to some of these kickers, a fellow'd
think that the farmers ought to run the state and the whole
shooting-match--probably if they had their way they'd fill up the
legislature with a lot of farmers in manure-covered boots--yes, and
they'd come tell me I was hired on a salary now, and couldn't fix my
fees! That'd be fine for you, wouldn't it!"

"But why shouldn't they?"

"Why? That bunch of----Telling ME----Oh, for heaven's sake, let's quit
arguing. All this discussing may be all right at a party but----Let's
forget it while we're hunting."

"I know. The Wonderlust--probably it's a worse affliction than the
Wanderlust. I just wonder----"

She told herself that she had everything in the world. And after each
self-rebuke she stumbled again on "I just wonder----"

They ate their sandwiches by a prairie slew: long grass reaching up out
of clear water, mossy bogs, red-winged black-birds, the scum a splash of
gold-green. Kennicott smoked a pipe while she leaned back in the buggy
and let her tired spirit be absorbed in the Nirvana of the incomparable
sky.

They lurched to the highroad and awoke from their sun-soaked drowse at
the sound of the clopping hoofs. They paused to look for partridges in a
rim of woods, little woods, very clean and shiny and gay, silver birches
and poplars with immaculate green trunks, encircling a lake of sandy
bottom, a splashing seclusion demure in the welter of hot prairie.

Kennicott brought down a fat red squirrel and at dusk he had a dramatic
shot at a flight of ducks whirling down from the upper air, skimming the
lake, instantly vanishing.

They drove home under the sunset. Mounds of straw, and wheat-stacks like
bee-hives, stood out in startling rose and gold, and the green-tufted
stubble glistened. As the vast girdle of crimson darkened, the fulfilled
land became autumnal in deep reds and browns. The black road before
the buggy turned to a faint lavender, then was blotted to uncertain
grayness. Cattle came in a long line up to the barred gates of the
farmyards, and over the resting land was a dark glow.

Carol had found the dignity and greatness which had failed her in Main
Street.



II


Till they had a maid they took noon dinner and six o'clock supper at
Mrs. Gurrey's boarding-house.

Mrs. Elisha Gurrey, relict of Deacon Gurrey the dealer in hay and grain,
was a pointed-nosed, simpering woman with iron-gray hair drawn so tight
that it resembled a soiled handkerchief covering her head. But she was
unexpectedly cheerful, and her dining-room, with its thin tablecloth on
a long pine table, had the decency of clean bareness.

In the line of unsmiling, methodically chewing guests, like horses at
a manger, Carol came to distinguish one countenance: the pale, long,
spectacled face and sandy pompadour hair of Mr. Raymond P. Wutherspoon,
known as "Raymie," professional bachelor, manager and one half the
sales-force in the shoe-department of the Bon Ton Store.

"You will enjoy Gopher Prairie very much, Mrs. Kennicott," petitioned
Raymie. His eyes were like those of a dog waiting to be let in out of
the cold. He passed the stewed apricots effusively. "There are a great
many bright cultured people here. Mrs. Wilks, the Christian Science
reader, is a very bright woman--though I am not a Scientist myself,
in fact I sing in the Episcopal choir. And Miss Sherwin of the high
school--she is such a pleasing, bright girl--I was fitting her to a pair
of tan gaiters yesterday, I declare, it really was a pleasure."

"Gimme the butter, Carrie," was Kennicott's comment. She defied him by
encouraging Raymie:

"Do you have amateur dramatics and so on here?"

"Oh yes! The town's just full of talent. The Knights of Pythias put on a
dandy minstrel show last year."

"It's nice you're so enthusiastic."

"Oh, do you really think so? Lots of folks jolly me for trying to get
up shows and so on. I tell them they have more artistic gifts than they
know. Just yesterday I was saying to Harry Haydock: if he would read
poetry, like Longfellow, or if he would join the band--I get so much
pleasure out of playing the cornet, and our band-leader, Del Snafflin,
is such a good musician, I often say he ought to give up his barbering
and become a professional musician, he could play the clarinet in
Minneapolis or New York or anywhere, but--but I couldn't get Harry to
see it at all and--I hear you and the doctor went out hunting yesterday.
Lovely country, isn't it. And did you make some calls? The mercantile
life isn't inspiring like medicine. It must be wonderful to see how
patients trust you, doctor."

"Huh. It's me that's got to do all the trusting. Be damn sight more
wonderful 'f they'd pay their bills," grumbled Kennicott and, to Carol,
he whispered something which sounded like "gentleman hen."

But Raymie's pale eyes were watering at her. She helped him with, "So
you like to read poetry?"

"Oh yes, so much--though to tell the truth, I don't get much time
for reading, we're always so busy at the store and----But we had the
dandiest professional reciter at the Pythian Sisters sociable last
winter."

Carol thought she heard a grunt from the traveling salesman at the end
of the table, and Kennicott's jerking elbow was a grunt embodied. She
persisted:

"Do you get to see many plays, Mr. Wutherspoon?"

He shone at her like a dim blue March moon, and sighed, "No, but I do
love the movies. I'm a real fan. One trouble with books is that they're
not so thoroughly safeguarded by intelligent censors as the movies are,
and when you drop into the library and take out a book you never know
what you're wasting your time on. What I like in books is a wholesome,
really improving story, and sometimes----Why, once I started a novel by
this fellow Balzac that you read about, and it told how a lady wasn't
living with her husband, I mean she wasn't his wife. It went into
details, disgustingly! And the English was real poor. I spoke to the
library about it, and they took it off the shelves. I'm not narrow,
but I must say I don't see any use in this deliberately dragging in
immorality! Life itself is so full of temptations that in literature one
wants only that which is pure and uplifting."

"What's the name of that Balzac yarn? Where can I get hold of it?"
giggled the traveling salesman.

Raymie ignored him. "But the movies, they are mostly clean, and their
humor----Don't you think that the most essential quality for a person to
have is a sense of humor?"

"I don't know. I really haven't much," said Carol.

He shook his finger at her. "Now, now, you're too modest. I'm sure we
can all see that you have a perfectly corking sense of humor. Besides,
Dr. Kennicott wouldn't marry a lady that didn't have. We all know how he
loves his fun!"

"You bet. I'm a jokey old bird. Come on, Carrie; let's beat it,"
remarked Kennicott.

Raymie implored, "And what is your chief artistic interest, Mrs.
Kennicott?"

"Oh----" Aware that the traveling salesman had murmured, "Dentistry,"
she desperately hazarded, "Architecture."

"That's a real nice art. I've always said--when Haydock & Simons were
finishing the new front on the Bon Ton building, the old man came to me,
you know, Harry's father, 'D. H.,' I always call him, and he asked me
how I liked it, and I said to him, 'Look here, D. H.,' I said--you see,
he was going to leave the front plain, and I said to him, 'It's all very
well to have modern lighting and a big display-space,' I said, 'but when
you get that in, you want to have some architecture, too,' I said, and
he laughed and said he guessed maybe I was right, and so he had 'em put
on a cornice."

"Tin!" observed the traveling salesman.

Raymie bared his teeth like a belligerent mouse. "Well, what if it is
tin? That's not my fault. I told D. H. to make it polished granite. You
make me tired!"

"Leave us go! Come on, Carrie, leave us go!" from Kennicott.

Raymie waylaid them in the hall and secretly informed Carol that she
musn't mind the traveling salesman's coarseness--he belonged to the
hwa pollwa.

Kennicott chuckled, "Well, child, how about it? Do you prefer an
artistic guy like Raymie to stupid boobs like Sam Clark and me?"

"My dear! Let's go home, and play pinochle, and laugh, and be foolish,
and slip up to bed, and sleep without dreaming. It's beautiful to be
just a solid citizeness!"



III

From the Gopher Prairie Weekly Dauntless:


One of the most charming affairs of the season was held Tuesday evening
at the handsome new residence of Sam and Mrs. Clark when many of our
most prominent citizens gathered to greet the lovely new bride of our
popular local physician, Dr. Will Kennicott. All present spoke of the
many charms of the bride, formerly Miss Carol Milford of St. Paul. Games
and stunts were the order of the day, with merry talk and conversation.
At a late hour dainty refreshments were served, and the party broke up
with many expressions of pleasure at the pleasant affair. Among those
present were Mesdames Kennicott, Elder----

* * * * *

Dr. Will Kennicott, for the past several years one of our most popular
and skilful physicians and surgeons, gave the town a delightful surprise
when he returned from an extended honeymoon tour in Colorado this week
with his charming bride, nee Miss Carol Milford of St. Paul, whose
family are socially prominent in Minneapolis and Mankato. Mrs. Kennicott
is a lady of manifold charms, not only of striking charm of appearance
but is also a distinguished graduate of a school in the East and has
for the past year been prominently connected in an important position
of responsibility with the St. Paul Public Library, in which city Dr.
"Will" had the good fortune to meet her. The city of Gopher Prairie
welcomes her to our midst and prophesies for her many happy years in
the energetic city of the twin lakes and the future. The Dr. and Mrs.
Kennicott will reside for the present at the Doctor's home on Poplar
Street which his charming mother has been keeping for him who has now
returned to her own home at Lac-qui-Meurt leaving a host of friends who
regret her absence and hope to see her soon with us again.



IV


She knew that if she was ever to effect any of the "reforms" which she
had pictured, she must have a starting-place. What confused her during
the three or four months after her marriage was not lack of perception
that she must be definite, but sheer careless happiness of her first
home.

In the pride of being a housewife she loved every detail--the brocade
armchair with the weak back, even the brass water-cock on the hot-water
reservoir, when she had become familiar with it by trying to scour it to
brilliance.

She found a maid--plump radiant Bea Sorenson from Scandia Crossing. Bea
was droll in her attempt to be at once a respectful servant and a bosom
friend. They laughed together over the fact that the stove did not draw,
over the slipperiness of fish in the pan.

Like a child playing Grandma in a trailing skirt, Carol paraded uptown
for her marketing, crying greetings to housewives along the way.
Everybody bowed to her, strangers and all, and made her feel that they
wanted her, that she belonged here. In city shops she was merely A
Customer--a hat, a voice to bore a harassed clerk. Here she was Mrs. Doc
Kennicott, and her preferences in grape-fruit and manners were known
and remembered and worth discussing . . . even if they weren't worth
fulfilling.

Shopping was a delight of brisk conferences. The very merchants whose
droning she found the dullest at the two or three parties which were
given to welcome her were the pleasantest confidants of all when they
had something to talk about--lemons or cotton voile or floor-oil.
With that skip-jack Dave Dyer, the druggist, she conducted a long
mock-quarrel. She pretended that he cheated her in the price of
magazines and candy; he pretended she was a detective from the Twin
Cities. He hid behind the prescription-counter, and when she stamped
her foot he came out wailing, "Honest, I haven't done nothing crooked
today--not yet."

She never recalled her first impression of Main Street; never
had precisely the same despair at its ugliness. By the end of two
shopping-tours everything had changed proportions. As she never entered
it, the Minniemashie House ceased to exist for her. Clark's Hardware
Store, Dyer's Drug Store, the groceries of Ole Jenson and Frederick
Ludelmeyer and Howland & Gould, the meat markets, the notions
shop--they expanded, and hid all other structures. When she entered Mr.
Ludelmeyer's store and he wheezed, "Goot mornin', Mrs. Kennicott. Vell,
dis iss a fine day," she did not notice the dustiness of the shelves
nor the stupidity of the girl clerk; and she did not remember the mute
colloquy with him on her first view of Main Street.

She could not find half the kinds of food she wanted, but that made
shopping more of an adventure. When she did contrive to get sweetbreads
at Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market the triumph was so vast that she buzzed
with excitement and admired the strong wise butcher, Mr. Dahl.

She appreciated the homely ease of village life. She liked the old men,
farmers, G.A.R. veterans, who when they gossiped sometimes squatted on
their heels on the sidewalk, like resting Indians, and reflectively spat
over the curb.

She found beauty in the children.

She had suspected that her married friends exaggerated their passion
for children. But in her work in the library, children had become
individuals to her, citizens of the State with their own rights and
their own senses of humor. In the library she had not had much time
to give them, but now she knew the luxury of stopping, gravely asking
Bessie Clark whether her doll had yet recovered from its rheumatism, and
agreeing with Oscar Martinsen that it would be Good Fun to go trapping
"mushrats."

She touched the thought, "It would be sweet to have a baby of my own. I
do want one. Tiny----No! Not yet! There's so much to do. And I'm still
tired from the job. It's in my bones."

She rested at home. She listened to the village noises common to all
the world, jungle or prairie; sounds simple and charged with magic--dogs
barking, chickens making a gurgling sound of content, children at play,
a man beating a rug, wind in the cottonwood trees, a locust fiddling,
a footstep on the walk, jaunty voices of Bea and a grocer's boy in the
kitchen, a clinking anvil, a piano--not too near.

Twice a week, at least, she drove into the country with Kennicott, to
hunt ducks in lakes enameled with sunset, or to call on patients who
looked up to her as the squire's lady and thanked her for toys and
magazines. Evenings she went with her husband to the motion pictures and
was boisterously greeted by every other couple; or, till it became too
cold, they sat on the porch, bawling to passers-by in motors, or to
neighbors who were raking the leaves. The dust became golden in the low
sun; the street was filled with the fragrance of burning leaves.



V


But she hazily wanted some one to whom she could say what she thought.

On a slow afternoon when she fidgeted over sewing and wished that the
telephone would ring, Bea announced Miss Vida Sherwin.

Despite Vida Sherwin's lively blue eyes, if you had looked at her in
detail you would have found her face slightly lined, and not so much
sallow as with the bloom rubbed off; you would have found her chest
flat, and her fingers rough from needle and chalk and penholder; her
blouses and plain cloth skirts undistinguished; and her hat worn too far
back, betraying a dry forehead. But you never did look at Vida Sherwin
in detail. You couldn't. Her electric activity veiled her. She was as
energetic as a chipmunk. Her fingers fluttered; her sympathy came out
in spurts; she sat on the edge of a chair in eagerness to be near her
auditor, to send her enthusiasms and optimism across.

She rushed into the room pouring out: "I'm afraid you'll think the
teachers have been shabby in not coming near you, but we wanted to
give you a chance to get settled. I am Vida Sherwin, and I try to teach
French and English and a few other things in the high school."

"I've been hoping to know the teachers. You see, I was a librarian----"

"Oh, you needn't tell me. I know all about you! Awful how much I
know--this gossipy village. We need you so much here. It's a dear loyal
town (and isn't loyalty the finest thing in the world!) but it's a
rough diamond, and we need you for the polishing, and we're ever so
humble----" She stopped for breath and finished her compliment with a
smile.

"If I COULD help you in any way----Would I be committing the
unpardonable sin if I whispered that I think Gopher Prairie is a tiny
bit ugly?"

"Of course it's ugly. Dreadfully! Though I'm probably the only person in
town to whom you could safely say that. (Except perhaps Guy Pollock
the lawyer--have you met him?--oh, you MUST!--he's simply a
darling--intelligence and culture and so gentle.) But I don't care so
much about the ugliness. That will change. It's the spirit that gives
me hope. It's sound. Wholesome. But afraid. It needs live creatures like
you to awaken it. I shall slave-drive you!"

"Splendid. What shall I do? I've been wondering if it would be possible
to have a good architect come here to lecture."

"Ye-es, but don't you think it would be better to work with existing
agencies? Perhaps it will sound slow to you, but I was thinking----It
would be lovely if we could get you to teach Sunday School."

Carol had the empty expression of one who finds that she has been
affectionately bowing to a complete stranger. "Oh yes. But I'm afraid I
wouldn't be much good at that. My religion is so foggy."

"I know. So is mine. I don't care a bit for dogma. Though I do stick
firmly to the belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man
and the leadership of Jesus. As you do, of course."

Carol looked respectable and thought about having tea.

"And that's all you need teach in Sunday School. It's the personal
influence. Then there's the library-board. You'd be so useful on that.
And of course there's our women's study club--the Thanatopsis Club."

"Are they doing anything? Or do they read papers made out of the
Encyclopedia?"

Miss Sherwin shrugged. "Perhaps. But still, they are so earnest. They
will respond to your fresher interest. And the Thanatopsis does do a
good social work--they've made the city plant ever so many trees, and
they run the rest-room for farmers' wives. And they do take such an
interest in refinement and culture. So--in fact, so very unique."

Carol was disappointed--by nothing very tangible. She said politely,
"I'll think them all over. I must have a while to look around first."

Miss Sherwin darted to her, smoothed her hair, peered at her. "Oh,
my dear, don't you suppose I know? These first tender days of
marriage--they're sacred to me. Home, and children that need you, and
depend on you to keep them alive, and turn to you with their wrinkly
little smiles. And the hearth and----" She hid her face from Carol as
she made an activity of patting the cushion of her chair, but she went
on with her former briskness:

"I mean, you must help us when you're ready. . . . I'm afraid you'll
think I'm conservative. I am! So much to conserve. All this treasure of
American ideals. Sturdiness and democracy and opportunity. Maybe not at
Palm Beach. But, thank heaven, we're free from such social distinctions
in Gopher Prairie. I have only one good quality--overwhelming belief in
the brains and hearts of our nation, our state, our town. It's so strong
that sometimes I do have a tiny effect on the haughty ten-thousandaires.
I shake 'em up and make 'em believe in ideals--yes, in themselves. But
I get into a rut of teaching. I need young critical things like you to
punch me up. Tell me, what are you reading?"

"I've been re-reading 'The Damnation of Theron Ware.' Do you know it?"

"Yes. It was clever. But hard. Man wanted to tear down, not build up.
Cynical. Oh, I do hope I'm not a sentimentalist. But I can't see any use
in this high-art stuff that doesn't encourage us day-laborers to plod
on."

Ensued a fifteen-minute argument about the oldest topic in the world:
It's art but is it pretty? Carol tried to be eloquent regarding honesty
of observation. Miss Sherwin stood out for sweetness and a cautious use
of the uncomfortable properties of light. At the end Carol cried:

"I don't care how much we disagree. It's a relief to have somebody
talk something besides crops. Let's make Gopher Prairie rock to its
foundations: let's have afternoon tea instead of afternoon coffee."

The delighted Bea helped her bring out the ancestral folding
sewing-table, whose yellow and black top was scarred with dotted lines
from a dressmaker's tracing-wheel, and to set it with an embroidered
lunch-cloth, and the mauve-glazed Japanese tea-set which she had brought
from St. Paul. Miss Sherwin confided her latest scheme--moral motion
pictures for country districts, with light from a portable dynamo
hitched to a Ford engine. Bea was twice called to fill the hot-water
pitcher and to make cinnamon toast.

When Kennicott came home at five he tried to be courtly, as befits the
husband of one who has afternoon tea. Carol suggested that Miss Sherwin
stay for supper, and that Kennicott invite Guy Pollock, the much-praised
lawyer, the poetic bachelor.

Yes, Pollock could come. Yes, he was over the grippe which had prevented
his going to Sam Clark's party.

Carol regretted her impulse. The man would be an opinionated politician,
heavily jocular about The Bride. But at the entrance of Guy Pollock she
discovered a personality. Pollock was a man of perhaps thirty-eight,
slender, still, deferential. His voice was low. "It was very good of you
to want me," he said, and he offered no humorous remarks, and did not
ask her if she didn't think Gopher Prairie was "the livest little burg
in the state."

She fancied that his even grayness might reveal a thousand tints of
lavender and blue and silver.

At supper he hinted his love for Sir Thomas Browne, Thoreau, Agnes
Repplier, Arthur Symons, Claude Washburn, Charles Flandrau. He presented
his idols diffidently, but he expanded in Carol's bookishness, in Miss
Sherwin's voluminous praise, in Kennicott's tolerance of any one who
amused his wife.

Carol wondered why Guy Pollock went on digging at routine law-cases;
why he remained in Gopher Prairie. She had no one whom she could ask.
Neither Kennicott nor Vida Sherwin would understand that there might be
reasons why a Pollock should not remain in Gopher Prairie. She enjoyed
the faint mystery. She felt triumphant and rather literary. She already
had a Group. It would be only a while now before she provided the town
with fanlights and a knowledge of Galsworthy. She was doing things! As
she served the emergency dessert of cocoanut and sliced oranges, she
cried to Pollock, "Don't you think we ought to get up a dramatic club?"




CHAPTER VI


I

WHEN the first dubious November snow had filtered down, shading with
white the bare clods in the plowed fields, when the first small fire
had been started in the furnace, which is the shrine of a Gopher Prairie
home, Carol began to make the house her own. She dismissed the parlor
furniture--the golden oak table with brass knobs, the moldy brocade
chairs, the picture of "The Doctor." She went to Minneapolis, to scamper
through department stores and small Tenth Street shops devoted to
ceramics and high thought. She had to ship her treasures, but she wanted
to bring them back in her arms.

Carpenters had torn out the partition between front parlor and back
parlor, thrown it into a long room on which she lavished yellow and
deep blue; a Japanese obi with an intricacy of gold thread on stiff
ultramarine tissue, which she hung as a panel against the maize wall; a
couch with pillows of sapphire velvet and gold bands; chairs which, in
Gopher Prairie, seemed flippant. She hid the sacred family phonograph in
the dining-room, and replaced its stand with a square cabinet on which
was a squat blue jar between yellow candles.

Kennicott decided against a fireplace. "We'll have a new house in a
couple of years, anyway."

She decorated only one room. The rest, Kennicott hinted, she'd better
leave till he "made a ten-strike."

The brown cube of a house stirred and awakened; it seemed to be in
motion; it welcomed her back from shopping; it lost its mildewed
repression.

The supreme verdict was Kennicott's "Well, by golly, I was afraid the
new junk wouldn't be so comfortable, but I must say this divan, or
whatever you call it, is a lot better than that bumpy old sofa we had,
and when I look around----Well, it's worth all it cost, I guess."

Every one in town took an interest in the refurnishing. The carpenters
and painters who did not actually assist crossed the lawn to peer
through the windows and exclaim, "Fine! Looks swell!" Dave Dyer at
the drug store, Harry Haydock and Raymie Wutherspoon at the Bon Ton,
repeated daily, "How's the good work coming? I hear the house is getting
to be real classy."

Even Mrs. Bogart.

Mrs. Bogart lived across the alley from the rear of Carol's house. She
was a widow, and a Prominent Baptist, and a Good Influence. She had so
painfully reared three sons to be Christian gentlemen that one of them
had become an Omaha bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus
N. Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most brazen
member of the toughest gang in Boytown.

Mrs. Bogart was not the acid type of Good Influence. She was the soft,
damp, fat, sighing, indigestive, clinging, melancholy, depressingly
hopeful kind. There are in every large chicken-yard a number of old and
indignant hens who resemble Mrs. Bogart, and when they are served at
Sunday noon dinner, as fricasseed chicken with thick dumplings, they
keep up the resemblance.

Carol had noted that Mrs. Bogart from her side window kept an eye upon
the house. The Kennicotts and Mrs. Bogart did not move in the same
sets--which meant precisely the same in Gopher Prairie as it did on
Fifth Avenue or in Mayfair. But the good widow came calling.

She wheezed in, sighed, gave Carol a pulpy hand, sighed, glanced sharply
at the revelation of ankles as Carol crossed her legs, sighed, inspected
the new blue chairs, smiled with a coy sighing sound, and gave voice:

"I've wanted to call on you so long, dearie, you know we're neighbors,
but I thought I'd wait till you got settled, you must run in and see me,
how much did that big chair cost?"

"Seventy-seven dollars!"

"Sev----Sakes alive! Well, I suppose it's all right for them that can
afford it, though I do sometimes think----Of course as our pastor said
once, at Baptist Church----By the way, we haven't seen you there yet,
and of course your husband was raised up a Baptist, and I do hope
he won't drift away from the fold, of course we all know there isn't
anything, not cleverness or gifts of gold or anything, that can make
up for humility and the inward grace and they can say what they want to
about the P. E. church, but of course there's no church that has more
history or has stayed by the true principles of Christianity better
than the Baptist Church and----In what church were you raised, Mrs.
Kennicott?"

"W-why, I went to Congregational, as a girl in Mankato, but my college
was Universalist."

"Well----But of course as the Bible says, is it the Bible, at least I
know I have heard it in church and everybody admits it, it's proper for
the little bride to take her husband's vessel of faith, so we all hope
we shall see you at the Baptist Church and----As I was saying, of course
I agree with Reverend Zitterel in thinking that the great trouble with
this nation today is lack of spiritual faith--so few going to church,
and people automobiling on Sunday and heaven knows what all. But still
I do think that one trouble is this terrible waste of money, people
feeling that they've got to have bath-tubs and telephones in their
houses----I heard you were selling the old furniture cheap."

"Yes!"

"Well--of course you know your own mind, but I can't help thinking, when
Will's ma was down here keeping house for him--SHE used to run in to SEE
me, real OFTEN!--it was good enough furniture for her. But there, there,
I mustn't croak, I just wanted to let you know that when you find you
can't depend on a lot of these gadding young folks like the Haydocks and
the Dyers--and heaven only knows how much money Juanita Haydock blows in
in a year--why then you may be glad to know that slow old Aunty Bogart
is always right there, and heaven knows----" A portentous sigh. "--I
HOPE you and your husband won't have any of the troubles, with sickness
and quarreling and wasting money and all that so many of these young
couples do have and----But I must be running along now, dearie. It's
been such a pleasure and----Just run in and see me any time. I hope Will
is well? I thought he looked a wee mite peaked."

It was twenty minutes later when Mrs. Bogart finally oozed out of the
front door. Carol ran back into the living-room and jerked open the
windows. "That woman has left damp finger-prints in the air," she said.



II


Carol was extravagant, but at least she did not try to clear herself of
blame by going about whimpering, "I know I'm terribly extravagant but I
don't seem to be able to help it."

Kennicott had never thought of giving her an allowance. His mother had
never had one! As a wage-earning spinster Carol had asserted to her
fellow librarians that when she was married, she was going to have an
allowance and be business-like and modern. But it was too much trouble
to explain to Kennicott's kindly stubbornness that she was a practical
housekeeper as well as a flighty playmate. She bought a budget-plan
account book and made her budgets as exact as budgets are likely to be
when they lack budgets.

For the first month it was a honeymoon jest to beg prettily, to confess,
"I haven't a cent in the house, dear," and to be told, "You're an
extravagant little rabbit." But the budget book made her realize how
inexact were her finances. She became self-conscious; occasionally she
was indignant that she should always have to petition him for the money
with which to buy his food. She caught herself criticizing his belief
that, since his joke about trying to keep her out of the poorhouse had
once been accepted as admirable humor, it should continue to be his
daily bon mot. It was a nuisance to have to run down the street after
him because she had forgotten to ask him for money at breakfast.

But she couldn't "hurt his feelings," she reflected. He liked the
lordliness of giving largess.

She tried to reduce the frequency of begging by opening accounts and
having the bills sent to him. She had found that staple groceries,
sugar, flour, could be most cheaply purchased at Axel Egge's rustic
general store. She said sweetly to Axel:

"I think I'd better open a charge account here."

"I don't do no business except for cash," grunted Axel.

She flared, "Do you know who I am?"

"Yuh, sure, I know. The doc is good for it. But that's yoost a rule I
made. I make low prices. I do business for cash."

She stared at his red impassive face, and her fingers had the
undignified desire to slap him, but her reason agreed with him. "You're
quite right. You shouldn't break your rule for me."

Her rage had not been lost. It had been transferred to her husband. She
wanted ten pounds of sugar in a hurry, but she had no money. She ran up
the stairs to Kennicott's office. On the door was a sign advertising a
headache cure and stating, "The doctor is out, back at----" Naturally,
the blank space was not filled out. She stamped her foot. She ran down
to the drug store--the doctor's club.

As she entered she heard Mrs. Dyer demanding, "Dave, I've got to have
some money."

Carol saw that her husband was there, and two other men, all listening
in amusement.

Dave Dyer snapped, "How much do you want? Dollar be enough?"

"No, it won't! I've got to get some underclothes for the kids."

"Why, good Lord, they got enough now to fill the closet so I couldn't
find my hunting boots, last time I wanted them."

"I don't care. They're all in rags. You got to give me ten dollars----"

Carol perceived that Mrs. Dyer was accustomed to this indignity. She
perceived that the men, particularly Dave, regarded it as an excellent
jest. She waited--she knew what would come--it did. Dave yelped,
"Where's that ten dollars I gave you last year?" and he looked to the
other men to laugh. They laughed.

Cold and still, Carol walked up to Kennicott and commanded, "I want to
see you upstairs."

"Why--something the matter?"

"Yes!"

He clumped after her, up the stairs, into his barren office. Before he
could get out a query she stated:

"Yesterday, in front of a saloon, I heard a German farm-wife beg her
husband for a quarter, to get a toy for the baby--and he refused. Just
now I've heard Mrs. Dyer going through the same humiliation. And I--I'm
in the same position! I have to beg you for money. Daily! I have just
been informed that I couldn't have any sugar because I hadn't the money
to pay for it!"

"Who said that? By God, I'll kill any----"

"Tut. It wasn't his fault. It was yours. And mine. I now humbly beg
you to give me the money with which to buy meals for you to eat. And
hereafter to remember it. The next time, I sha'n't beg. I shall simply
starve. Do you understand? I can't go on being a slave----"

Her defiance, her enjoyment of the role, ran out. She was sobbing
against his overcoat, "How can you shame me so?" and he was blubbering,
"Dog-gone it, I meant to give you some, and I forgot it. I swear I won't
again. By golly I won't!"

He pressed fifty dollars upon her, and after that he remembered to give
her money regularly . . . sometimes.

Daily she determined, "But I must have a stated amount--be
business-like. System. I must do something about it." And daily she
didn't do anything about it.



III


Mrs. Bogart had, by the simpering viciousness of her comments on the new
furniture, stirred Carol to economy. She spoke judiciously to Bea
about left-overs. She read the cookbook again and, like a child with
a picture-book, she studied the diagram of the beef which gallantly
continues to browse though it is divided into cuts.

But she was a deliberate and joyous spendthrift in her preparations for
her first party, the housewarming. She made lists on every envelope
and laundry-slip in her desk. She sent orders to Minneapolis "fancy
grocers." She pinned patterns and sewed. She was irritated when
Kennicott was jocular about "these frightful big doings that are going
on." She regarded the affair as an attack on Gopher Prairie's timidity
in pleasure. "I'll make 'em lively, if nothing else. I'll make 'em stop
regarding parties as committee-meetings."

Kennicott usually considered himself the master of the house. At his
desire, she went hunting, which was his symbol of happiness, and she
ordered porridge for breakfast, which was his symbol of morality. But
when he came home on the afternoon before the housewarming he found
himself a slave, an intruder, a blunderer. Carol wailed, "Fix the
furnace so you won't have to touch it after supper. And for heaven's
sake take that horrible old door-mat off the porch. And put on your nice
brown and white shirt. Why did you come home so late? Would you mind
hurrying? Here it is almost suppertime, and those fiends are just as
likely as not to come at seven instead of eight. PLEASE hurry!"

She was as unreasonable as an amateur leading woman on a first night,
and he was reduced to humility. When she came down to supper, when she
stood in the doorway, he gasped. She was in a silver sheath, the calyx
of a lily, her piled hair like black glass; she had the fragility and
costliness of a Viennese goblet; and her eyes were intense. He was
stirred to rise from the table and to hold the chair for her; and all
through supper he ate his bread dry because he felt that she would think
him common if he said "Will you hand me the butter?"



IV


She had reached the calmness of not caring whether her guests liked
the party or not, and a state of satisfied suspense in regard to Bea's
technique in serving, before Kennicott cried from the bay-window in
the living-room, "Here comes somebody!" and Mr. and Mrs. Luke Dawson
faltered in, at a quarter to eight. Then in a shy avalanche arrived
the entire aristocracy of Gopher Prairie: all persons engaged in a
profession, or earning more than twenty-five hundred dollars a year, or
possessed of grandparents born in America.

Even while they were removing their overshoes they were peeping at the
new decorations. Carol saw Dave Dyer secretively turn over the gold
pillows to find a price-tag, and heard Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh, the
attorney, gasp, "Well, I'll be switched," as he viewed the vermilion
print hanging against the Japanese obi. She was amused. But her high
spirits slackened as she beheld them form in dress parade, in a long,
silent, uneasy circle clear round the living-room. She felt that she had
been magically whisked back to her first party, at Sam Clark's.

"Have I got to lift them, like so many pigs of iron? I don't know that I
can make them happy, but I'll make them hectic."

A silver flame in the darkling circle, she whirled around, drew them
with her smile, and sang, "I want my party to be noisy and undignified!
This is the christening of my house, and I want you to help me have a
bad influence on it, so that it will be a giddy house. For me, won't you
all join in an old-fashioned square dance? And Mr. Dyer will call."

She had a record on the phonograph; Dave Dyer was capering in the center
of the floor, loose-jointed, lean, small, rusty headed, pointed of nose,
clapping his hands and shouting, "Swing y' pardners--alamun lef!"

Even the millionaire Dawsons and Ezra Stowbody and "Professor" George
Edwin Mott danced, looking only slightly foolish; and by rushing about
the room and being coy and coaxing to all persons over forty-five, Carol
got them into a waltz and a Virginia Reel. But when she left them to
disenjoy themselves in their own way Harry Haydock put a one-step record
on the phonograph, the younger people took the floor, and all the elders
sneaked back to their chairs, with crystallized smiles which meant,
"Don't believe I'll try this one myself, but I do enjoy watching the
youngsters dance."

Half of them were silent; half resumed the discussions of that afternoon
in the store. Ezra Stowbody hunted for something to say, hid a yawn, and
offered to Lyman Cass, the owner of the flour-mill, "How d' you folks
like the new furnace, Lym? Huh? So."

"Oh, let them alone. Don't pester them. They must like it, or they
wouldn't do it." Carol warned herself. But they gazed at her so
expectantly when she flickered past that she was reconvinced that in
their debauches of respectability they had lost the power of play as
well as the power of impersonal thought. Even the dancers were gradually
crushed by the invisible force of fifty perfectly pure and well-behaved
and negative minds; and they sat down, two by two. In twenty minutes the
party was again elevated to the decorum of a prayer-meeting.

"We're going to do something exciting," Carol exclaimed to her new
confidante, Vida Sherwin. She saw that in the growing quiet her voice
had carried across the room. Nat Hicks, Ella Stowbody, and Dave Dyer
were abstracted, fingers and lips slightly moving. She knew with a
cold certainty that Dave was rehearsing his "stunt" about the Norwegian
catching the hen, Ella running over the first lines of "An Old
Sweetheart of Mine," and Nat thinking of his popular parody on Mark
Antony's oration.

"But I will not have anybody use the word 'stunt' in my house," she
whispered to Miss Sherwin.

"That's good. I tell you: why not have Raymond Wutherspoon sing?"

"Raymie? Why, my dear, he's the most sentimental yearner in town!"

"See here, child! Your opinions on house-decorating are sound, but your
opinions of people are rotten! Raymie does wag his tail. But the poor
dear----Longing for what he calls 'self-expression' and no training in
anything except selling shoes. But he can sing. And some day when
he gets away from Harry Haydock's patronage and ridicule, he'll do
something fine."

Carol apologized for her superciliousness. She urged Raymie, and warned
the planners of "stunts," "We all want you to sing, Mr. Wutherspoon.
You're the only famous actor I'm going to let appear on the stage
tonight."

While Raymie blushed and admitted, "Oh, they don't want to hear me," he
was clearing his throat, pulling his clean handkerchief farther out of
his breast pocket, and thrusting his fingers between the buttons of his
vest.

In her affection for Raymie's defender, in her desire to "discover
artistic talent," Carol prepared to be delighted by the recital.

Raymie sang "Fly as a Bird," "Thou Art My Dove," and "When the Little
Swallow Leaves Its Tiny Nest," all in a reasonably bad offertory tenor.

Carol was shuddering with the vicarious shame which sensitive people
feel when they listen to an "elocutionist" being humorous, or to a
precocious child publicly doing badly what no child should do at all.
She wanted to laugh at the gratified importance in Raymie's half-shut
eyes; she wanted to weep over the meek ambitiousness which clouded like
an aura his pale face, flap ears, and sandy pompadour. She tried to look
admiring, for the benefit of Miss Sherwin, that trusting admirer of all
that was or conceivably could be the good, the true, and the beautiful.

At the end of the third ornithological lyric Miss Sherwin roused from
her attitude of inspired vision and breathed to Carol, "My! That was
sweet! Of course Raymond hasn't an unusually good voice, but don't you
think he puts such a lot of feeling into it?"

Carol lied blackly and magnificently, but without originality: "Oh yes,
I do think he has so much FEELING!"

She saw that after the strain of listening in a cultured manner the
audience had collapsed; had given up their last hope of being amused.
She cried, "Now we're going to play an idiotic game which I learned in
Chicago. You will have to take off your shoes, for a starter! After that
you will probably break your knees and shoulder-blades."

Much attention and incredulity. A few eyebrows indicating a verdict that
Doc Kennicott's bride was noisy and improper.

"I shall choose the most vicious, like Juanita Haydock and myself, as
the shepherds. The rest of you are wolves. Your shoes are the sheep.
The wolves go out into the hall. The shepherds scatter the sheep through
this room, then turn off all the lights, and the wolves crawl in from
the hall and in the darkness they try to get the shoes away from
the shepherds--who are permitted to do anything except bite and use
black-jacks. The wolves chuck the captured shoes out into the hall. No
one excused! Come on! Shoes off!"

Every one looked at every one else and waited for every one else to
begin.

Carol kicked off her silver slippers, and ignored the universal glance
at her arches. The embarrassed but loyal Vida Sherwin unbuttoned her
high black shoes. Ezra Stowbody cackled, "Well, you're a terror to old
folks. You're like the gals I used to go horseback-riding with, back in
the sixties. Ain't much accustomed to attending parties barefoot,
but here goes!" With a whoop and a gallant jerk Ezra snatched off his
elastic-sided Congress shoes.

The others giggled and followed.

When the sheep had been penned up, in the darkness the timorous wolves
crept into the living-room, squealing, halting, thrown out of their
habit of stolidity by the strangeness of advancing through nothingness
toward a waiting foe, a mysterious foe which expanded and grew more
menacing. The wolves peered to make out landmarks, they touched gliding
arms which did not seem to be attached to a body, they quivered with a
rapture of fear. Reality had vanished. A yelping squabble suddenly rose,
then Juanita Haydock's high titter, and Guy Pollock's astonished, "Ouch!
Quit! You're scalping me!"

Mrs. Luke Dawson galloped backward on stiff hands and knees into the
safety of the lighted hallway, moaning, "I declare, I nev' was so
upset in my life!" But the propriety was shaken out of her, and she
delightedly continued to ejaculate "Nev' in my LIFE" as she saw the
living-room door opened by invisible hands and shoes hurling through it,
as she heard from the darkness beyond the door a squawling, a bumping,
a resolute "Here's a lot of shoes. Come on, you wolves. Ow! Y' would,
would you!"

When Carol abruptly turned on the lights in the embattled living-room,
half of the company were sitting back against the walls, where they had
craftily remained throughout the engagement, but in the middle of the
floor Kennicott was wrestling with Harry Haydock--their collars torn
off, their hair in their eyes; and the owlish Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh
was retreating from Juanita Haydock, and gulping with unaccustomed
laughter. Guy Pollock's discreet brown scarf hung down his back. Young
Rita Simons's net blouse had lost two buttons, and betrayed more of her
delicious plump shoulder than was regarded as pure in Gopher Prairie.
Whether by shock, disgust, joy of combat, or physical activity, all the
party were freed from their years of social decorum. George Edwin Mott
giggled; Luke Dawson twisted his beard; Mrs. Clark insisted, "I did too,
Sam--I got a shoe--I never knew I could fight so terrible!"

Carol was certain that she was a great reformer.

She mercifully had combs, mirrors, brushes, needle and thread ready. She
permitted them to restore the divine decency of buttons.

The grinning Bea brought down-stairs a pile of soft thick sheets of
paper with designs of lotos blossoms, dragons, apes, in cobalt and
crimson and gray, and patterns of purple birds flying among sea-green
trees in the valleys of Nowhere.

"These," Carol announced, "are real Chinese masquerade costumes. I got
them from an importing shop in Minneapolis. You are to put them on over
your clothes, and please forget that you are Minnesotans, and turn into
mandarins and coolies and--and samurai (isn't it?), and anything else
you can think of."

While they were shyly rustling the paper costumes she disappeared. Ten
minutes after she gazed down from the stairs upon grotesquely ruddy
Yankee heads above Oriental robes, and cried to them, "The Princess
Winky Poo salutes her court!"

As they looked up she caught their suspense of admiration. They saw an
airy figure in trousers and coat of green brocade edged with gold; a
high gold collar under a proud chin; black hair pierced with jade pins;
a languid peacock fan in an out-stretched hand; eyes uplifted to a
vision of pagoda towers. When she dropped her pose and smiled down
she discovered Kennicott apoplectic with domestic pride--and gray Guy
Pollock staring beseechingly. For a second she saw nothing in all the
pink and brown mass of their faces save the hunger of the two men.

She shook off the spell and ran down. "We're going to have a real
Chinese concert. Messrs. Pollock, Kennicott, and, well, Stowbody are
drummers; the rest of us sing and play the fife."

The fifes were combs with tissue paper; the drums were tabourets and the
sewing-table. Loren Wheeler, editor of the Dauntless, led the orchestra,
with a ruler and a totally inaccurate sense of rhythm. The music was a
reminiscence of tom-toms heard at circus fortune-telling tents or at
the Minnesota State Fair, but the whole company pounded and puffed and
whined in a sing-song, and looked rapturous.

Before they were quite tired of the concert Carol led them in a dancing
procession to the dining-room, to blue bowls of chow mein, with Lichee
nuts and ginger preserved in syrup.

None of them save that city-rounder Harry Haydock had heard of any
Chinese dish except chop sooey. With agreeable doubt they ventured
through the bamboo shoots into the golden fried noodles of the chow
mein; and Dave Dyer did a not very humorous Chinese dance with Nat
Hicks; and there was hubbub and contentment.

Carol relaxed, and found that she was shockingly tired. She had carried
them on her thin shoulders. She could not keep it up. She longed for
her father, that artist at creating hysterical parties. She thought of
smoking a cigarette, to shock them, and dismissed the obscene thought
before it was quite formed. She wondered whether they could for five
minutes be coaxed to talk about something besides the winter top
of Knute Stamquist's Ford, and what Al Tingley had said about his
mother-in-law. She sighed, "Oh, let 'em alone. I've done enough." She
crossed her trousered legs, and snuggled luxuriously above her saucer
of ginger; she caught Pollock's congratulatory still smile, and thought
well of herself for having thrown a rose light on the pallid lawyer;
repented the heretical supposition that any male save her husband
existed; jumped up to find Kennicott and whisper, "Happy, my lord? . . .
No, it didn't cost much!"

"Best party this town ever saw. Only----Don't cross your legs in that
costume. Shows your knees too plain."

She was vexed. She resented his clumsiness. She returned to Guy Pollock
and talked of Chinese religions--not that she knew anything whatever
about Chinese religions, but he had read a book on the subject as, on
lonely evenings in his office, he had read at least one book on every
subject in the world. Guy's thin maturity was changing in her vision
to flushed youth and they were roaming an island in the yellow sea of
chatter when she realized that the guests were beginning that cough
which indicated, in the universal instinctive language, that they
desired to go home and go to bed.

While they asserted that it had been "the nicest party they'd ever
seen--my! so clever and original," she smiled tremendously, shook hands,
and cried many suitable things regarding children, and being sure to
wrap up warmly, and Raymie's singing and Juanita Haydock's prowess at
games. Then she turned wearily to Kennicott in a house filled with quiet
and crumbs and shreds of Chinese costumes.

He was gurgling, "I tell you, Carrie, you certainly are a wonder, and
guess you're right about waking folks up. Now you've showed 'em how,
they won't go on having the same old kind of parties and stunts and
everything. Here! Don't touch a thing! Done enough. Pop up to bed, and
I'll clear up."

His wise surgeon's-hands stroked her shoulder, and her irritation at his
clumsiness was lost in his strength.



V

From the Weekly Dauntless:


One of the most delightful social events of recent months was held
Wednesday evening in the housewarming of Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott, who
have completely redecorated their charming home on Poplar Street, and
is now extremely nifty in modern color scheme. The doctor and his bride
were at home to their numerous friends and a number of novelties in
diversions were held, including a Chinese orchestra in original and
genuine Oriental costumes, of which Ye Editor was leader. Dainty
refreshments were served in true Oriental style, and one and all voted a
delightful time.



VI


The week after, the Chet Dashaways gave a party. The circle of mourners
kept its place all evening, and Dave Dyer did the "stunt" of the
Norwegian and the hen.




CHAPTER VII


I

GOPHER PRAIRIE was digging in for the winter. Through late November and
all December it snowed daily; the thermometer was at zero and might
drop to twenty below, or thirty. Winter is not a season in the North
Middlewest; it is an industry. Storm sheds were erected at every door.
In every block the householders, Sam Clark, the wealthy Mr. Dawson, all
save asthmatic Ezra Stowbody who extravagantly hired a boy, were seen
perilously staggering up ladders, carrying storm windows and screwing
them to second-story jambs. While Kennicott put up his windows Carol
danced inside the bedrooms and begged him not to swallow the screws,
which he held in his mouth like an extraordinary set of external false
teeth.

The universal sign of winter was the town handyman--Miles Bjornstam, a
tall, thick, red-mustached bachelor, opinionated atheist, general-store
arguer, cynical Santa Claus. Children loved him, and he sneaked
away from work to tell them improbable stories of sea-faring and
horse-trading and bears. The children's parents either laughed at him
or hated him. He was the one democrat in town. He called both Lyman Cass
the miller and the Finn homesteader from Lost Lake by their first names.
He was known as "The Red Swede," and considered slightly insane.

Bjornstam could do anything with his hands--solder a pan, weld an
automobile spring, soothe a frightened filly, tinker a clock, carve a
Gloucester schooner which magically went into a bottle. Now, for a week,
he was commissioner general of Gopher Prairie. He was the only person
besides the repairman at Sam Clark's who understood plumbing. Everybody
begged him to look over the furnace and the water-pipes. He rushed
from house to house till after bedtime--ten o'clock. Icicles from burst
water-pipes hung along the skirt of his brown dog-skin overcoat; his
plush cap, which he never took off in the house, was a pulp of ice and
coal-dust; his red hands were cracked to rawness; he chewed the stub of
a cigar.

But he was courtly to Carol. He stooped to examine the furnace flues; he
straightened, glanced down at her, and hemmed, "Got to fix your furnace,
no matter what else I do."

The poorer houses of Gopher Prairie, where the services of Miles
Bjornstam were a luxury--which included the shanty of Miles
Bjornstam--were banked to the lower windows with earth and manure. Along
the railroad the sections of snow fence, which had been stacked all
summer in romantic wooden tents occupied by roving small boys, were set
up to prevent drifts from covering the track.

The farmers came into town in home-made sleighs, with bed-quilts and hay
piled in the rough boxes.

Fur coats, fur caps, fur mittens, overshoes buckling almost to the
knees, gray knitted scarfs ten feet long, thick woolen socks, canvas
jackets lined with fluffy yellow wool like the plumage of ducklings,
moccasins, red flannel wristlets for the blazing chapped wrists
of boys--these protections against winter were busily dug out of
moth-ball-sprinkled drawers and tar-bags in closets, and all over town
small boys were squealing, "Oh, there's my mittens!" or "Look at my
shoe-packs!" There is so sharp a division between the panting summer and
the stinging winter of the Northern plains that they rediscovered with
surprise and a feeling of heroism this armor of an Artic explorer.

Winter garments surpassed even personal gossip as the topic at parties.
It was good form to ask, "Put on your heavies yet?" There were as many
distinctions in wraps as in motor cars. The lesser sort appeared in
yellow and black dogskin coats, but Kennicott was lordly in a long
raccoon ulster and a new seal cap. When the snow was too deep for his
motor he went off on country calls in a shiny, floral, steel-tipped
cutter, only his ruddy nose and his cigar emerging from the fur.

Carol herself stirred Main Street by a loose coat of nutria. Her
finger-tips loved the silken fur.

Her liveliest activity now was organizing outdoor sports in the
motor-paralyzed town.

The automobile and bridge-whist had not only made more evident the
social divisions in Gopher Prairie but they had also enfeebled the
love of activity. It was so rich-looking to sit and drive--and so easy.
Skiing and sliding were "stupid" and "old-fashioned." In fact, the
village longed for the elegance of city recreations almost as much as
the cities longed for village sports; and Gopher Prairie took as
much pride in neglecting coasting as St. Paul--or New York--in going
coasting. Carol did inspire a successful skating-party in mid-November.
Plover Lake glistened in clear sweeps of gray-green ice, ringing to the
skates. On shore the ice-tipped reeds clattered in the wind, and oak
twigs with stubborn last leaves hung against a milky sky. Harry Haydock
did figure-eights, and Carol was certain that she had found the perfect
life. But when snow had ended the skating and she tried to get up a
moonlight sliding party, the matrons hesitated to stir away from their
radiators and their daily bridge-whist imitations of the city. She had
to nag them. They scooted down a long hill on a bob-sled, they upset
and got snow down their necks they shrieked that they would do it again
immediately--and they did not do it again at all.

She badgered another group into going skiing. They shouted and threw
snowballs, and informed her that it was SUCH fun, and they'd have
another skiing expedition right away, and they jollily returned home and
never thereafter left their manuals of bridge.

Carol was discouraged. She was grateful when Kennicott invited her to
go rabbit-hunting in the woods. She waded down stilly cloisters
between burnt stump and icy oak, through drifts marked with a million
hieroglyphics of rabbit and mouse and bird. She squealed as he leaped
on a pile of brush and fired at the rabbit which ran out. He belonged
there, masculine in reefer and sweater and high-laced boots. That night
she ate prodigiously of steak and fried potatoes; she produced electric
sparks by touching his ear with her finger-tip; she slept twelve hours;
and awoke to think how glorious was this brave land.

She rose to a radiance of sun on snow. Snug in her furs she
trotted up-town. Frosted shingles smoked against a sky colored like
flax-blossoms, sleigh-bells clinked, shouts of greeting were loud in the
thin bright air, and everywhere was a rhythmic sound of wood-sawing. It
was Saturday, and the neighbors' sons were getting up the winter fuel.
Behind walls of corded wood in back yards their sawbucks stood in
depressions scattered with canary-yellow flakes of sawdust. The frames
of their buck-saws were cherry-red, the blades blued steel, and the
fresh cut ends of the sticks--poplar, maple, iron-wood, birch--were
marked with engraved rings of growth. The boys wore shoe-packs, blue
flannel shirts with enormous pearl buttons, and mackinaws of crimson,
lemon yellow, and foxy brown.

Carol cried "Fine day!" to the boys; she came in a glow to Howland &
Gould's grocery, her collar white with frost from her breath; she bought
a can of tomatoes as though it were Orient fruit; and returned home
planning to surprise Kennicott with an omelet creole for dinner.

So brilliant was the snow-glare that when she entered the house she
saw the door-knobs, the newspaper on the table, every white surface as
dazzling mauve, and her head was dizzy in the pyrotechnic dimness. When
her eyes had recovered she felt expanded, drunk with health, mistress of
life. The world was so luminous that she sat down at her rickety little
desk in the living-room to make a poem. (She got no farther than "The
sky is bright, the sun is warm, there ne'er will be another storm.")

In the mid-afternoon of this same day Kennicott was called into the
country. It was Bea's evening out--her evening for the Lutheran Dance.
Carol was alone from three till midnight. She wearied of reading pure
love stories in the magazines and sat by a radiator, beginning to brood.

Thus she chanced to discover that she had nothing to do.



II


She had, she meditated, passed through the novelty of seeing the
town and meeting people, of skating and sliding and hunting. Bea was
competent; there was no household labor except sewing and darning
and gossipy assistance to Bea in bed-making. She couldn't satisfy her
ingenuity in planning meals. At Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market you didn't
give orders--you wofully inquired whether there was anything today
besides steak and pork and ham. The cuts of beef were not cuts. They
were hacks. Lamb chops were as exotic as sharks' fins. The meat-dealers
shipped their best to the city, with its higher prices.

In all the shops there was the same lack of choice. She could not find
a glass-headed picture-nail in town; she did not hunt for the sort of
veiling she wanted--she took what she could get; and only at Howland &
Gould's was there such a luxury as canned asparagus. Routine care was
all she could devote to the house. Only by such fussing as the Widow
Bogart's could she make it fill her time.

She could not have outside employment. To the village doctor's wife it
was taboo.

She was a woman with a working brain and no work.

There were only three things which she could do: Have children; start
her career of reforming; or become so definitely a part of the town that
she would be fulfilled by the activities of church and study-club and
bridge-parties.

Children, yes, she wanted them, but----She was not quite ready. She had
been embarrassed by Kennicott's frankness, but she agreed with him
that in the insane condition of civilization, which made the rearing
of citizens more costly and perilous than any other crime, it was
inadvisable to have children till he had made more money. She was
sorry----Perhaps he had made all the mystery of love a mechanical
cautiousness but----She fled from the thought with a dubious, "Some
day."

Her "reforms," her impulses toward beauty in raw Main Street, they had
become indistinct. But she would set them going now. She would! She
swore it with soft fist beating the edges of the radiator. And at the
end of all her vows she had no notion as to when and where the crusade
was to begin.

Become an authentic part of the town? She began to think with unpleasant
lucidity. She reflected that she did not know whether the people liked
her. She had gone to the women at afternoon-coffees, to the merchants
in their stores, with so many outpouring comments and whimsies that
she hadn't given them a chance to betray their opinions of her. The men
smiled--but did they like her? She was lively among the women--but
was she one of them? She could not recall many times when she had been
admitted to the whispering of scandal which is the secret chamber of
Gopher Prairie conversation.

She was poisoned with doubt, as she drooped up to bed.

Next day, through her shopping, her mind sat back and observed. Dave
Dyer and Sam Clark were as cordial as she had been fancying; but wasn't
there an impersonal abruptness in the "H' are yuh?" of Chet Dashaway?
Howland the grocer was curt. Was that merely his usual manner?

"It's infuriating to have to pay attention to what people think. In
St. Paul I didn't care. But here I'm spied on. They're watching
me. I mustn't let it make me self-conscious," she coaxed
herself--overstimulated by the drug of thought, and offensively on the
defensive.



III


A thaw which stripped the snow from the sidewalks; a ringing iron night
when the lakes could be heard booming; a clear roistering morning. In
tam o'shanter and tweed skirt Carol felt herself a college junior going
out to play hockey. She wanted to whoop, her legs ached to run. On the
way home from shopping she yielded, as a pup would have yielded. She
galloped down a block and as she jumped from a curb across a welter of
slush, she gave a student "Yippee!"

She saw that in a window three old women were gasping. Their triple
glare was paralyzing. Across the street, at another window, the curtain
had secretively moved. She stopped, walked on sedately, changed from the
girl Carol into Mrs. Dr. Kennicott.

She never again felt quite young enough and defiant enough and free
enough to run and halloo in the public streets; and it was as a Nice
Married Woman that she attended the next weekly bridge of the Jolly
Seventeen.



IV


The Jolly Seventeen (the membership of which ranged from fourteen to
twenty-six) was the social cornice of Gopher Prairie. It was the country
club, the diplomatic set, the St. Cecilia, the Ritz oval room, the Club
de Vingt. To belong to it was to be "in." Though its membership partly
coincided with that of the Thanatopsis study club, the Jolly Seventeen
as a separate entity guffawed at the Thanatopsis, and considered it
middle-class and even "highbrow."

Most of the Jolly Seventeen were young married women, with their
husbands as associate members. Once a week they had a women's
afternoon-bridge; once a month the husbands joined them for supper and
evening-bridge; twice a year they had dances at I. O. O. F. Hall. Then
the town exploded. Only at the annual balls of the Firemen and of the
Eastern Star was there such prodigality of chiffon scarfs and tangoing
and heart-burnings, and these rival institutions were not select--hired
girls attended the Firemen's Ball, with section-hands and laborers. Ella
Stowbody had once gone to a Jolly Seventeen Soiree in the village hack,
hitherto confined to chief mourners at funerals; and Harry Haydock and
Dr. Terry Gould always appeared in the town's only specimens of evening
clothes.

The afternoon-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen which followed Carol's
lonely doubting was held at Juanita Haydock's new concrete bungalow,
with its door of polished oak and beveled plate-glass, jar of ferns in
the plastered hall, and in the living-room, a fumed oak Morris chair,
sixteen color-prints, and a square varnished table with a mat made of
cigar-ribbons on which was one Illustrated Gift Edition and one pack of
cards in a burnt-leather case.

Carol stepped into a sirocco of furnace heat. They were already playing.
Despite her flabby resolves she had not yet learned bridge. She was
winningly apologetic about it to Juanita, and ashamed that she should
have to go on being apologetic.

Mrs. Dave Dyer, a sallow woman with a thin prettiness devoted to
experiments in religious cults, illnesses, and scandal-bearing, shook
her finger at Carol and trilled, "You're a naughty one! I don't believe
you appreciate the honor, when you got into the Jolly Seventeen so
easy!"

Mrs. Chet Dashaway nudged her neighbor at the second table. But Carol
kept up the appealing bridal manner so far as possible. She twittered,
"You're perfectly right. I'm a lazy thing. I'll make Will start teaching
me this very evening." Her supplication had all the sound of birdies
in the nest, and Easter church-bells, and frosted Christmas cards.
Internally she snarled, "That ought to be saccharine enough." She sat in
the smallest rocking-chair, a model of Victorian modesty. But she saw or
she imagined that the women who had gurgled at her so welcomingly when
she had first come to Gopher Prairie were nodding at her brusquely.

During the pause after the first game she petitioned Mrs. Jackson Elder,
"Don't you think we ought to get up another bob-sled party soon?"

"It's so cold when you get dumped in the snow," said Mrs. Elder,
indifferently.

"I hate snow down my neck," volunteered Mrs. Dave Dyer, with an
unpleasant look at Carol and, turning her back, she bubbled at Rita
Simons, "Dearie, won't you run in this evening? I've got the loveliest
new Butterick pattern I want to show you."

Carol crept back to her chair. In the fervor of discussing the game they
ignored her. She was not used to being a wallflower. She struggled to
keep from oversensitiveness, from becoming unpopular by the sure method
of believing that she was unpopular; but she hadn't much reserve of
patience, and at the end of the second game, when Ella Stowbody sniffily
asked her, "Are you going to send to Minneapolis for your dress for
the next soiree--heard you were," Carol said "Don't know yet" with
unnecessary sharpness.

She was relieved by the admiration with which the jeune fille Rita
Simons looked at the steel buckles on her pumps; but she resented Mrs.
Howland's tart demand, "Don't you find that new couch of yours is too
broad to be practical?" She nodded, then shook her head, and touchily
left Mrs. Howland to get out of it any meaning she desired. Immediately
she wanted to make peace. She was close to simpering in the sweetness
with which she addressed Mrs Howland: "I think that is the prettiest
display of beef-tea your husband has in his store."

"Oh yes, Gopher Prairie isn't so much behind the times," gibed Mrs.
Howland. Some one giggled.

Their rebuffs made her haughty; her haughtiness irritated them to
franker rebuffs; they were working up to a state of painfully righteous
war when they were saved by the coming of food.

Though Juanita Haydock was highly advanced in the matters of
finger-bowls, doilies, and bath-mats, her "refreshments" were typical
of all the afternoon-coffees. Juanita's best friends, Mrs. Dyer and Mrs.
Dashaway, passed large dinner plates, each with a spoon, a fork, and a
coffee cup without saucer. They apologized and discussed the afternoon's
game as they passed through the thicket of women's feet. Then they
distributed hot buttered rolls, coffee poured from an enamel-ware pot,
stuffed olives, potato salad, and angel's-food cake. There was, even in
the most strictly conforming Gopher Prairie circles, a certain option
as to collations. The olives need not be stuffed. Doughnuts were in some
houses well thought of as a substitute for the hot buttered rolls.
But there was in all the town no heretic save Carol who omitted
angel's-food.

They ate enormously. Carol had a suspicion that the thriftier housewives
made the afternoon treat do for evening supper.

She tried to get back into the current. She edged over to Mrs. McGanum.
Chunky, amiable, young Mrs. McGanum with her breast and arms of a
milkmaid, and her loud delayed laugh which burst startlingly from
a sober face, was the daughter of old Dr. Westlake, and the wife of
Westlake's partner, Dr. McGanum. Kennicott asserted that Westlake and
McGanum and their contaminated families were tricky, but Carol had found
them gracious. She asked for friendliness by crying to Mrs. McGanum,
"How is the baby's throat now?" and she was attentive while Mrs. McGanum
rocked and knitted and placidly described symptoms.

Vida Sherwin came in after school, with Miss Ethel Villets, the
town librarian. Miss Sherwin's optimistic presence gave Carol more
confidence. She talked. She informed the circle "I drove almost down to
Wahkeenyan with Will, a few days ago. Isn't the country lovely! And I do
admire the Scandinavian farmers down there so: their big red barns and
silos and milking-machines and everything. Do you all know that lonely
Lutheran church, with the tin-covered spire, that stands out alone on
a hill? It's so bleak; somehow it seems so brave. I do think the
Scandinavians are the hardiest and best people----"

"Oh, do you THINK so?" protested Mrs. Jackson Elder. "My husband says
the Svenskas that work in the planing-mill are perfectly terrible--so
silent and cranky, and so selfish, the way they keep demanding raises.
If they had their way they'd simply ruin the business."

"Yes, and they're simply GHASTLY hired girls!" wailed Mrs. Dave Dyer.
"I swear, I work myself to skin and bone trying to please my hired
girls--when I can get them! I do everything in the world for them. They
can have their gentleman friends call on them in the kitchen any time,
and they get just the same to eat as we do, if there's, any left over,
and I practically never jump on them."

Juanita Haydock rattled, "They're ungrateful, all that class of people.
I do think the domestic problem is simply becoming awful. I don't know
what the country's coming to, with these Scandahoofian clodhoppers
demanding every cent you can save, and so ignorant and impertinent,
and on my word, demanding bath-tubs and everything--as if they weren't
mighty good and lucky at home if they got a bath in the wash-tub."

They were off, riding hard. Carol thought of Bea and waylaid them:

"But isn't it possibly the fault of the mistresses if the maids are
ungrateful? For generations we've given them the leavings of food, and
holes to live in. I don't want to boast, but I must say I don't have
much trouble with Bea. She's so friendly. The Scandinavians are sturdy
and honest----"

Mrs. Dave Dyer snapped, "Honest? Do you call it honest to hold us up for
every cent of pay they can get? I can't say that I've had any of them
steal anything (though you might call it stealing to eat so much that a
roast of beef hardly lasts three days), but just the same I don't intend
to let them think they can put anything over on ME! I always make them
pack and unpack their trunks down-stairs, right under my eyes, and then
I know they aren't being tempted to dishonesty by any slackness on MY
part!"

"How much do the maids get here?" Carol ventured.

Mrs. B. J. Gougerling, wife of the banker, stated in a shocked manner,
"Any place from three-fifty to five-fifty a week! I know positively that
Mrs. Clark, after swearing that she wouldn't weaken and encourage them
in their outrageous demands, went and paid five-fifty--think of it!
practically a dollar a day for unskilled work and, of course, her food
and room and a chance to do her own washing right in with the rest of
the wash. HOW MUCH DO YOU PAY, Mrs. KENNICOTT?"

"Yes! How much do you pay?" insisted half a dozen.

"W-why, I pay six a week," she feebly confessed.

They gasped. Juanita protested, "Don't you think it's hard on the rest
of us when you pay so much?" Juanita's demand was reinforced by the
universal glower.

Carol was angry. "I don't care! A maid has one of the hardest jobs on
earth. She works from ten to eighteen hours a day. She has to wash slimy
dishes and dirty clothes. She tends the children and runs to the door
with wet chapped hands and----"

Mrs. Dave Dyer broke into Carol's peroration with a furious, "That's all
very well, but believe me, I do those things myself when I'm without
a maid--and that's a good share of the time for a person that isn't
willing to yield and pay exorbitant wages!"

Carol was retorting, "But a maid does it for strangers, and all she gets
out of it is the pay----"

Their eyes were hostile. Four of them were talking at once. Vida
Sherwin's dictatorial voice cut through, took control of the revolution:

"Tut, tut, tut, tut! What angry passions--and what an idiotic
discussion! All of you getting too serious. Stop it! Carol Kennicott,
you're probably right, but you're too much ahead of the times. Juanita,
quit looking so belligerent. What is this, a card party or a hen fight?
Carol, you stop admiring yourself as the Joan of Arc of the hired girls,
or I'll spank you. You come over here and talk libraries with Ethel
Villets. Boooooo! If there's any more pecking, I'll take charge of the
hen roost myself!"

They all laughed artificially, and Carol obediently "talked libraries."

A small-town bungalow, the wives of a village doctor and a village
dry-goods merchant, a provincial teacher, a colloquial brawl over
paying a servant a dollar more a week. Yet this insignificance echoed
cellar-plots and cabinet meetings and labor conferences in Persia
and Prussia, Rome and Boston, and the orators who deemed themselves
international leaders were but the raised voices of a billion Juanitas
denouncing a million Carols, with a hundred thousand Vida Sherwins
trying to shoo away the storm.

Carol felt guilty. She devoted herself to admiring the spinsterish Miss
Villets--and immediately committed another offense against the laws of
decency.

"We haven't seen you at the library yet," Miss Villets reproved.

"I've wanted to run in so much but I've been getting settled and----I'll
probably come in so often you'll get tired of me! I hear you have such a
nice library."

"There are many who like it. We have two thousand more books than
Wakamin."

"Isn't that fine. I'm sure you are largely responsible. I've had some
experience, in St. Paul."

"So I have been informed. Not that I entirely approve of library methods
in these large cities. So careless, letting tramps and all sorts of
dirty persons practically sleep in the reading-rooms."

"I know, but the poor souls----Well, I'm sure you will agree with me in
one thing: The chief task of a librarian is to get people to read."

"You feel so? My feeling, Mrs. Kennicott, and I am merely quoting
the librarian of a very large college, is that the first duty of the
CONSCIENTIOUS librarian is to preserve the books."

"Oh!" Carol repented her "Oh." Miss Villets stiffened, and attacked:

"It may be all very well in cities, where they have unlimited funds, to
let nasty children ruin books and just deliberately tear them up, and
fresh young men take more books out than they are entitled to by the
regulations, but I'm never going to permit it in this library!"

"What if some children are destructive? They learn to read. Books are
cheaper than minds."

"Nothing is cheaper than the minds of some of these children that come
in and bother me simply because their mothers don't keep them home where
they belong. Some librarians may choose to be so wishy-washy and turn
their libraries into nursing-homes and kindergartens, but as long as I'm
in charge, the Gopher Prairie library is going to be quiet and decent,
and the books well kept!"

Carol saw that the others were listening, waiting for her to be
objectionable. She flinched before their dislike. She hastened to smile
in agreement with Miss Villets, to glance publicly at her wrist-watch,
to warble that it was "so late--have to hurry home--husband--such nice
party--maybe you were right about maids, prejudiced because Bea so
nice--such perfectly divine angel's-food, Mrs. Haydock must give me the
recipe--good-by, such happy party----"

She walked home. She reflected, "It was my fault. I was touchy. And I
opposed them so much. Only----I can't! I can't be one of them if I must
damn all the maids toiling in filthy kitchens, all the ragged hungry
children. And these women are to be my arbiters, the rest of my life!"

She ignored Bea's call from the kitchen; she ran up-stairs to the
unfrequented guest-room; she wept in terror, her body a pale arc as
she knelt beside a cumbrous black-walnut bed, beside a puffy mattress
covered with a red quilt, in a shuttered and airless room.

 Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott spend a whole day hunting prairie chickens and squirrels with his new hammerless shotgun. Though the rough terrain hurts her feet and the sport is new to her, Carol enjoys the day, especially the contact with Mr. and Mrs. Rustad and her visit to their farm. At Mrs. Gurrey's boarding house, Carol becomes acquainted with "Raymie" Wutherspoon, a clerk in the shoe department of the Bon Ton Store and a believer in purity of art and fiction. He considers Balzac a disgusting writer, who uses English that is "real poor" and believes that only "improving" books are worth reading. Though both Dr. Kennicott and the traveling salesman try to discourage Raymie, Carol finds him somewhat diverting. This take-off on small-town journalism contains as many cliches as possible in its account of the party at the Clarks. Examples are "handsome new residence," "prominent citizens," "charms of the bride," "past several years," "delightful surprise," and "will reside." Gradually Carol becomes better adjusted and is happy in her first home. With Bea Sorenson as her maid, she manages the housekeeping and shopping with comparative ease and loses sight of much of the drabness of Gopher Prairie while concentrating on its better aspects and more interesting people. Two of the people who Carol finds relief in are Vida Sherwin, a high-school teacher, and Guy Pollock, a lawyer of thirty-eight, who reads Sir Thomas Browne, Agnes Repplier, and Charles Flandrau. With Carol as a leader, the three plan to organize a dramatic club. When November comes, Carol begins refurnishing and redecorating the parlor of her home in yellow and deep blue. Her husband approves of the changes, though some of the neighbors do not. Mrs. Bogart, curious and conservative, keeps an eye on the house from her side window and comes, uninvited, to call. She feels that people are wasting their money on bathtubs and telephones and their time going automobiling on Sunday. Carol has difficulty extracting money from her husband for household expenses. He is contrite, gives her fifty dollars, and promises to do better, though he does not regularly give her a stated amount. An unusual party is planned and carried out. Instead of stunts, and conversation about personalities, Carol manages an old-fashioned square dance, a solo by Raymie Wutherspoon, and a rough-and-tumble game involving wolves and shepherds, the guests' shoes being sheep. The grand climax of the evening is the donning of paper Chinese masquerade costumes for a Chinese concert, with tabouret and combs for drums and fifes. The Weekly Dauntless compliments the party profusely, and so does Dr. Kennicott; but at the Chet Dashaways' party the week after, the group reverts to stunts and dull conversation. Winter comes to Gopher Prairie. It snows daily, and the temperature sometimes drops to twenty or thirty below zero. Carol tries to organize skating and skiing parties with scant success. She can go rabbit hunting with her husband, but the women of Gopher Prairie are more interested in bridge-whist than in outdoor sports. Suddenly she realizes that she has nothing to do, a woman with a working brain and no work. She recalls her plans, now indistinct, of reforming the town. Yet she feels self-conscious and has a sense of not being well liked. The Jolly Seventeen is the social pivot of Gopher Prairie. Carol had early been accepted into this group of young married women. At one of the afternoon bridge sessions, Carol offends the other women by disagreeing with them about the wages of servants and the care of library books. She goes home and weeps in terror.

