Chapter: CHAPTER XXXII


I

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

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

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

"Another row with Cy," Carol inferred.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Huh?"

Kennicott was incredulous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


II


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erik? Possibly. He would sputter uneasy protest.

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


III


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


IV


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But you'll exonerate Fern?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He got Carol away before she was able to speak.

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

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

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

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

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

Fern left town that evening.

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

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

She walked up-town behind two strangers.

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

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

Carol turned off on a side-street.

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

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

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

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

 On the Sunday after the barn dance, Carol hears Mrs. Bogarts screeching voice. She presumes that she had a row with her son. Then she sees Fern Mullins carrying a suitcase, walking up the street with her head bent low. She hears Mrs. Bogart telling her not to show her face and contaminate her house. Carol watches her go from house to house. Mrs. Bogart reaches Kennicott's house at suppertime. She tells them that she considers it her duty to warn them but she doesn't expect to be thanked for it. After elaborating upon Fern's eating habits, she gives them a detailed account of what happened after the barn dance. According to Mrs. Bogart, Fern had given Cy a pint of whisky. But, according to Fern, Cy had stolen it from a farmer's pocket. He had got drunk and Fern had driven him home retching. Mrs. Bogart asserts that Cy never drank but when Kennicott grunts, she admits that he did drink sometimes. She informs them that Cy had confessed in the morning that Fern had dared him to take a drink. She also admits that Fern had denied doing that. But she goes on to elaborate on the number of lustful things that Fern might have done, which makes Carol feel too sick to interfere. Kennicott stops her to tell her that she had not shown them any proof of Fern's misconduct. Mrs. Bogart points out that Fern had admitted to having taken a sip of whisky because Cy had forced her to. Carol points out that a sip of whisky can not make her a bad woman because she herself had tasted whisky. Mrs. Bogart claims that a teacher drinking with her student was certainly wrong. She asserts that Fern would corrupt Cy. When Carol tells her that Cy was corrupted five years ago. Mrs. Bogart tries to defend him. She keeps repeating that she is not fit to be a teacher. She adds that she had already informed the school board. Carol feels shocked and frightened by the Fern episode. Maud phones to confirm the scandal. She hears voices analyzing and adding to the story. She wonders what connection her interest in Erik had with this affair and realizes that the scandalmongers are unable to hound her on account of her belonging to the elite class. She finds out that Fern is put up in Minnie Mashie house. She goes there and finds Fern cowed down and weeping. She tries to comfort Fern. Fern tells Carol that she had gone to the dance mainly because she wanted to escape Mrs. Bogart's moral comments and because Cy had promised to be good. She saw Cy steal a bottle from a farmer's coat pocket. Cy had forced her to take a sip. She tells Carol that she had a nice time dancing with a young, strong intelligent farmer but worried about Cy's condition. While she was talking to a girl who had taken the university agricultural course she saw Cy staggering towards her. She wanted to return home but Cy kissed her. A farmer helped her to harness the buggy. She drove him home. Cy kept trying to make love to her but she had strength enough to resist him because of her athletic training. When she reached home, Mrs. Bogart started yelling at her. Still she drove the buggy back to the stable and returned to the house. Even after she got into her room and closed the door, Mrs. Bogart kept shouting at her. She never cared to listen to her side of the story but turned her out of the house. Fern worries about how she would face her class. Carol goes to the Clarks and tells them Fern's side of the story. They believe Fern and feel sorry for her. Carol asks Sam to fight for Fern. Sam points out that half the board would support Mrs. Bogart and they will consider Fern to be unfit to teach in the school. Carol points out to Sam that a fine girl like Fern should not be sent out into the world with a stain. She begs Sam to make a minority report even if the others would not agree with him. Sam tells her that no reports are made in such cases and only a decision, unanimous or otherwise is announced. Carol asks Sam to threaten to resign if the board decides to fire Fern. Sam becomes uneasy and promises that he will do all that he can. She meets the superintendent of the school-George Edwin Mot, Ezra Stowbody and Rev. Mr. Zitterel and gets only the promise that they will do whatever they can.

