Main Street
by Sinclair Lewis
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman
Return to Part 1 of 2

Bjornstam was "keeping company" with Bea. Every night
he was sitting on the back steps. Once when Carol appeared
he grumbled, "Hope you're going to give this burg one good
show. If you don't, reckon nobody ever will."

V

It was the great night; it was the night of the play. The
two dressing-rooms were swirling with actors, panting, twitchy
pale. Del Snafflin the barber, who was as much a professional
as Ella, having once gone on in a mob scene at a stock-
company performance in Minneapolis, was making them up,
and showing his scorn for amateurs with, "Stand still! For
the love o' Mike, how do you expect me to get your eyelids
dark if you keep a-wigglin'?" The actors were beseeching,
"Hey, Del, put some red in my nostrils--you put some in
Rita's--gee, you didn't hardly do anything to my face."

They were enormously theatric. They examined Del's makeup
box, they sniffed the scent of grease-paint, every minute
they ran out to peep through the hole in the curtain, they
came back to inspect their wigs and costumes, they read on
the whitewashed walls of the dressing-rooms the pencil
inscriptions: "The Flora Flanders Comedy Company," and
"This is a bum theater," and felt that they were companions
of these vanished troupers.

Carol, smart in maid's uniform, coaxed the temporary stage-
hands to finish setting the first act, wailed at Kennicott, the
electrician, "Now for heaven's sake remember the change in
cue for the ambers in Act Two," slipped out to ask Dave Dyer,
the ticket-taker, if he could get some more chairs, warned the
frightened Myrtle Cass to be sure to upset the waste-basket
when John Grimm called, "Here you, Reddy."

Del Snafflin's orchestra of piano, violin, and cornet began to
tune up and every one behind the magic line of the proscenic
arch was frightened into paralysis. Carol wavered to the
hole in the curtain. There were so many people out there,
staring so hard----

In the second row she saw Miles Bjornstam, not with Bea
but alone. He really wanted to see the play! It was a good
omen. Who could tell? Perhaps this evening would convert
Gopher Prairie to conscious beauty.

She darted into the women's dressing-room, roused Maud
Dyer from her fainting panic, pushed her to the wings, and
ordered the curtain up.

It rose doubtfully, it staggered and trembled, but it did get
up without catching--this time. Then she realized that
Kennicott had forgotten to turn off the houselights. Some
one out front was giggling.

She galloped round to the left wing, herself pulled the
switch, looked so ferociously at Kennicott that he quaked,
and fled back.

Mrs. Dyer was creeping out on the half-darkened stage.
The play was begun.

And with that instant Carol realized that it was a bad play
abominably acted.

Encouraging them with lying smiles, she watched her work
go to pieces. The settings seemed flimsy, the lighting
commonplace. She watched Guy Pollock stammer and twist his
mustache when he should have been a bullying magnate; Vida
Sherwin, as Grimm's timid wife, chatter at the audience as
though they were her class in high-school English; Juanita,
in the leading role, defy Mr. Grimm as though she were
repeating a list of things she had to buy at the grocery this
morning; Ella Stowbody remark "I'd like a cup of tea" as
though she were reciting "Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight";
and Dr. Gould, making love to Rita Simons, squeak, "My--
my--you--are--a--won'erful--girl ."

Myrtle Cass, as the office-boy, was so much pleased by the
applause of her relatives, then so much agitated by the
remarks of Cy Bogart, in the back row, in reference to her
wearing trousers, that she could hardly be got off the stage.
Only Raymie was so unsociable as to devote himself entirely
to acting.

That she was right in her opinion of the play Carol was
certain when Miles Bjornstam went out after the first act,
and did not come back.

VI

Between the second and third acts she called the company
together, and supplicated, "I want to know something, before
we have a chance to separate. Whether we're doing well or
badly tonight, it is a beginning. But will we take it as merely
a beginning? How many of you will pledge yourselves to
start in with me, right away, tomorrow, and plan for another
play, to be given in September?"

They stared at her; they nodded at Juanita's protest: "I
think one's enough for a while. It's going elegant tonight, but
another play---- Seems to me it'll be time enough to talk
about that next fall. Carol! I hope you don't mean to hint
and suggest we're not doing fine tonight? I'm sure the
applause shows the audience think it's just dandy!"

Then Carol knew how completely she had failed.

As the audience seeped out she heard B. J. Gougerling the
banker say to Howland the grocer, "Well, I think the folks
did splendid; just as good as professionals. But I don't care
much for these plays. What I like is a good movie, with
auto accidents and hold-ups, and some git to it, and not all
this talky-talk."

Then Carol knew how certain she was to fail again.

She wearily did not blame them, company nor audience.
Herself she blamed for trying to carve intaglios in good
wholesome jack-pine.

"It's the worst defeat of all. I'm beaten. By Main Street.
`I must go on.' But I can't!"

She was not vastly encouraged by the Gopher Prairie
Dauntless:

. . .would be impossible to distinguish among the actors when
all gave such fine account of themselves in difficult roles of this
well-known New York stage play. Guy Pollock as the old millionaire
could not have been bettered for his fine impersonation of
the gruff old millionaire; Mrs. Harry Haydock as the young lady
from the West who so easily showed the New York four-flushers
where they got off was a vision of loveliness and with fine stage
presence. Miss Vida Sherwin the ever popular teacher in our
high school pleased as Mrs. Grimm, Dr. Gould was well suited in
the role of young lover-girls you better look out, remember the
doc is a bachelor. The local Four Hundred also report that he
is a great hand at shaking the light fantastic tootsies in the
dance. As the stenographer Rita Simons was pretty as a picture,
and Miss Ella Stowbody's long and intensive study of the drama
and kindred arts in Eastern schools was seen in the fine finish
of her part.

. . .to no one is greater credit to be given than to Mrs. Will
Kennicott on whose capable shoulders fell the burden of directing.

"So kindly," Carol mused, "so well meant, so neighborly--
and so confoundedly untrue. Is it really my failure, or theirs?"

She sought to be sensible; she elaborately explained to
herself that it was hysterical to condemn Gopher Prairie because
it did not foam over the drama. Its justification was in its
service as a market-town for farmers. How bravely and generously
it did its work, forwarding the bread of the world, feeding
and healing the farmers!

Then, on the corner below her husband's office, she heard
a farmer holding forth:

"Sure. Course I was beaten. The shipper and the grocers
here wouldn't pay us a decent price for our potatoes, even
though folks in the cities were howling for 'em. So we says,
well, we'll get a truck and ship 'em right down to Minneapolis.
But the commission merchants there were in cahoots with the
local shipper here; they said they wouldn't pay us a cent
more than he would, not even if they was nearer to the
market. Well, we found we could get higher prices in Chicago,
but when we tried to get freight cars to ship there, the
railroads wouldn't let us have 'em--even though they had cars
standing empty right here in the yards. There you got it--
good market, and these towns keeping us from it. Gus, that's
the way these towns work all the time. They pay what they
want to for our wheat, but we pay what they want us to
for their clothes. Stowbody and Dawson foreclose every mortgage
they can, and put in tenant farmers. The Dauntless lies
to us about the Nonpartisan League, the lawyers sting us,
the machinery-dealers hate to carry us over bad years, and
then their daughters put on swell dresses and look at us as
if we were a bunch of hoboes. Man, I'd like to burn this
town!"

Kennicott observed, "There's that old crank Wes Brannigan
shooting off his mouth again. Gosh, but he loves to hear himself
talk! They ought to run that fellow out of town!"

VII

She felt old and detached through high-school commencement
week, which is the fete of youth in Gopher Prairie;
through baccalaureate sermon, senior Parade, junior
entertainment, commencement address by an Iowa clergyman who
asserted that he believed in the virtue of virtuousness, and
the procession of Decoration Day, when the few Civil War
veterans followed Champ Perry, in his rusty forage-cap, along
the spring-powdered road to the cemetery. She met Guy; she
found that she had nothing to say to him. Her head ached
in an aimless way. When Kennicott rejoiced, "We'll have a
great time this summer; move down to the lake early and
wear old clothes and act natural," she smiled, but her smile
creaked.

In the prairie heat she trudged along unchanging ways,
talked about nothing to tepid people, and reflected that she
might never escape from them.

She was startled to find that she was using the word
"escape."

Then, for three years which passed like one curt paragraph,
she ceased to find anything interesting save the Bjornstams
and her baby.

CHAPTER XIX

I

IN three years of exile from herself Carol had certain
experiences chronicled as important by the Dauntless, or discussed
by the Jolly Seventeen, but the event unchronicled, undiscussed,
and supremely controlling, was her slow admission of longing
to find her own people.

II

Bea and Miles Bjornstam were married in June, a month
after "The Girl from Kankakee." Miles had turned respectable.
He had renounced his criticisms of state and society;
he had given up roving as horse-trader, and wearing red
mackinaws in lumber-camps; he had gone to work as engineer
in Jackson Elder's planing-mill; he was to be seen upon the
streets endeavoring to be neighborly with suspicious men whom
he had taunted for years.

Carol was the patroness and manager of the wedding.
Juanita Haydock mocked, "You're a chump to let a good hired
girl like Bea go. Besides! How do you know it's a good
thing, her marrying a sassy bum like this awful Red Swede
person? Get wise! Chase the man off with a mop, and hold
onto your Svenska while the holding's good. Huh? Me go to
their Scandahoofian wedding? Not a chance!"

The other matrons echoed Juanita. Carol was dismayed by
the casualness of their cruelty, but she persisted. Miles had
exclaimed to her, "Jack Elder says maybe he'll come to the
wedding! Gee, it would be nice to have Bea meet the Boss
as a reg'lar married lady. Some day I'll be so well off that
Bea can play with Mrs. Elder--and you! Watch us!"

There was an uneasy knot of only nine guests at the service
in the unpainted Lutheran Church--Carol, Kennicott, Guy
Pollock, and the Champ Perrys, all brought by Carol; Bea's
frightened rustic parents, her cousin Tina, and Pete, Miles's
ex-partner in horse-trading, a surly, hairy man who had bought
a black suit and come twelve hundred miles from Spokane for
the event.

Miles continuously glanced back at the church door. Jackson
Elder did not appear. The door did not once open after
the awkward entrance of the first guests. Miles's hand closed
on Bea's arm.

He had, with Carol's help, made his shanty over into a
cottage with white curtains and a canary and a chintz chair.

Carol coaxed the powerful matrons to call on Bea.
They half scoffed, half promised to go.

Bea's successor was the oldish, broad, silent Oscarina, who
was suspicious of her frivolous mistress for a month, so that
Juanita Haydock was able to crow, "There, smarty, I told you
you'd run into the Domestic Problem!" But Oscarina adopted
Carol as a daughter, and with her as faithful to the kitchen as
Bea had been, there was nothing changed in Carol's life.

III

She was unexpectedly appointed to the town library-board
by Ole Jenson, the new mayor. The other members were
Dr. Westlake, Lyman Cass, Julius Flickerbaugh the attorney,
Guy Pollock, and Martin Mahoney, former livery-stable keeper
and now owner of a garage. She was delighted. She went to
the first meeting rather condescendingly, regarding herself as
the only one besides Guy who knew anything about books
or library methods. She was planning to revolutionize the
whole system.

Her condescension was ruined and her humility wholesomely
increased when she found the board, in the shabby room on the
second floor of the house which had been converted into the
library, not discussing the weather and longing to play checkers,
but talking about books. She discovered that amiable old
Dr. Westlake read everything in verse and "light fiction";
that Lyman Cass, the veal-faced, bristly-bearded owner of the
mill, had tramped through Gibbon, Hume, Grote, Prescott,
and the other thick historians; that he could repeat pages
from them--and did. When Dr. Westlake whispered to her,
"Yes, Lym is a very well-informed man, but he's modest about
it," she felt uninformed and immodest, and scolded at herself
that she had missed the human potentialities in this vast
Gopher Prairie. When Dr. Westlake quoted the "Paradiso,"
"Don Quixote," "Wilhelm Meister," and the Koran, she
reflected that no one she knew, not even her father, had read
all four.

She came diffidently to the second meeting of the board. She
did not plan to revolutionize anything. She hoped that the
wise elders might be so tolerant as to listen to her suggestions
about changing the shelving of the juveniles.

Yet after four sessions of the library-board she was where
she had been before the first session. She had found that for
all their pride in being reading men, Westlake and Cass and
even Guy had no conception of making the library familiar
to the whole town. They used it, they passed resolutions
about it, and they left it as dead as Moses. Only the Henty
books and the Elsie books and the latest optimisms by moral
female novelists and virile clergymen were in general demand,
and the board themselves were interested only in old, stilted
volumes. They had no tenderness for the noisiness of youth
discovering great literature.

If she was egotistic about her tiny learning, they were at
least as much so regarding theirs. And for all their talk of
the need of additional library-tax none of them was willing
to risk censure by battling for it, though they now had so
small a fund that, after paying for rent, heat, light, and Miss
Villets's salary, they had only a hundred dollars a year for the
purchase of books.

The Incident of the Seventeen Cents killed her none too
enduring interest.

She had come to the board-meeting singing with a plan.
She had made a list of thirty European novels of the past ten
years, with twenty important books on psychology, education,
and economics which the library lacked. She had made
Kennicott promise to give fifteen dollars. If each of the
board would contribute the same, they could have the books.

Lym Cass looked alarmed, scratched himself, and protested,
"I think it would be a bad precedent for the board-members
to contribute money--uh--not that I mind, but it wouldn't be
fair--establish precedent. Gracious! They don't pay us a
cent for our services! Certainly can't expect us to pay for the
privilege of serving!"

Only Guy looked sympathetic, and he stroked the pine table
and said nothing.

The rest of the meeting they gave to a bellicose investigation
of the fact that there was seventeen cents less than there should
be in the Fund. Miss Villets was summoned; she spent half
an hour in explosively defending herself; the seventeen cents
were gnawed over, penny by penny; and Carol, glancing at
the carefully inscribed list which had been so lovely and exciting
an hour before, was silent, and sorry for Miss Villets, and
sorrier for herself.

She was reasonably regular in attendance till her two years
were up and Vida Sherwin was appointed to the board in her
place, but she did not try to be revolutionary. In the plodding
course of her life there was nothing changed, and nothing
new.

IV

Kennicott made an excellent land-deal, but as he told her
none of the details, she was not greatly exalted or agitated.
What did agitate her was his announcement, half whispered and
half blurted, half tender and half coldly medical, that they
"ought to have a baby, now they could afford it." They had
so long agreed that "perhaps it would be just as well not to
have any children for a while yet," that childlessness had come
to be natural. Now, she feared and longed and did not know;
she hesitatingly assented, and wished that she had not assented.

As there appeared no change in their drowsy relations, she
forgot all about it, and life was planless.

V

Idling on the porch of their summer cottage at the lake,
on afternoons when Kennicott was in town, when the water
was glazed and the whole air languid, she pictured a hundred
escapes: Fifth Avenue in a snow-storm, with limousines,
golden shops, a cathedral spire. A reed hut on fantastic piles
above the mud of a jungle river. A suite in Paris, immense
high grave rooms, with lambrequins and a balcony. The
Enchanted Mesa. An ancient stone mill in Maryland, at the turn
of the road, between rocky brook and abrupt hills. An upland
moor of sheep and flitting cool sunlight. A clanging dock where
steel cranes unloaded steamers from Buenos Ayres and Tsing-
tao. A Munich concert-hall, and a famous 'cellist playing--
playing to her.

One scene had a persistent witchery:

She stood on a terrace overlooking a boulevard by the warm
sea. She was certain, though she had no reason for it, that the
place was Mentone. Along the drive below her swept barouches,
with a mechanical tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, and great cars
with polished black hoods and engines quiet as the sigh of an
old man. In them were women erect, slender, enameled, and
expressionless as marionettes, their small hands upon parasols,
their unchanging eyes always forward, ignoring the men beside
them, tall men with gray hair and distinguished faces. Beyond
the drive were painted sea and painted sands, and blue
and yellow pavilions. Nothing moved except the gliding
carriages, and the people were small and wooden, spots in a
picture drenched with gold and hard bright blues. There was
no sound of sea or winds; no softness of whispers nor of
falling petals; nothing but yellow and cobalt and staring light,
and the never-changing tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot----

She startled. She whimpered. It was the rapid ticking of
the clock which had hypnotized her into hearing the steady
hoofs. No aching color of the sea and pride of supercilious
people, but the reality of a round-bellied nickel alarm-clock on
a shelf against a fuzzy unplaned pine wall, with a stiff
gray wash-rag hanging above it and a kerosene-stove standing
below.

A thousand dreams governed by the fiction she had read,
drawn from the pictures she had envied, absorbed her drowsy
lake afternoons, but always in the midst of them Kennicott
came out from town, drew on khaki trousers which were
plastered with dry fish-scales, asked, "Enjoying yourself?"
and did not listen to her answer.

And nothing was changed, and there was no reason to believe
that there ever would be change.

VI

Trains!

At the lake cottage she missed the passing of the trains. She
realized that in town she had depended upon them for assurance
that there remained a world beyond.

The railroad was more than a means of transportation to
Gopher Prairie. It was a new god; a monster of steel limbs,
oak ribs, flesh of gravel, and a stupendous hunger for freight;
a deity created by man that he might keep himself respectful to
Property, as elsewhere he had elevated and served as tribal
gods the mines, cotton-mills, motor-factories, colleges, army.

The East remembered generations when there had been no
railroad, and had no awe of it; but here the railroads had
been before time was. The towns had been staked out on barren
prairie as convenient points for future train-halts; and back
in 1860 and 1870 there had been much profit, much opportunity
to found aristocratic families, in the possession of advance
knowledge as to where the towns would arise.

If a town was in disfavor, the railroad could ignore it, cut
it off from commerce, slay it. To Gopher Prairie the
tracks were eternal verities, and boards of railroad directors
an omnipotence. The smallest boy or the most secluded
grandam could tell you whether No. 32 had a hot-box last
Tuesday, whether No. 7 was going to put on an extra day-
coach; and the name of the president of the road was familiar
to every breakfast table.

Even in this new era of motors the citizens went down to
the station to see the trains go through. It was their
romance; their only mystery besides mass at the Catholic
Church; and from the trains came lords of the outer world--
traveling salesmen with piping on their waistcoats, and visiting
cousins from Milwaukee.

Gopher Prairie had once been a "division-point." The
roundhouse and repair-shops were gone, but two conductors
still retained residence, and they were persons of distinction,
men who traveled and talked to strangers, who wore uniforms
with brass buttons, and knew all about these crooked games
of con-men. They were a special caste, neither above nor below
the Haydocks, but apart, artists and adventurers.

The night telegraph-operator at the railroad station was the
most melodramatic figure in town: awake at three in the
morning, alone in a room hectic with clatter of the telegraph
key. All night he "talked" to operators twenty, fifty, a
hundred miles away. It was always to be expected that he would
be held up by robbers. He never was, but round him was a
suggestion of masked faces at the window, revolvers, cords
binding him to a chair, his struggle to crawl to the key before
he fainted.

During blizzards everything about the railroad was
melodramatic. There were days when the town was completely
shut off, when they had no mail, no express, no fresh meat,
no newspapers. At last the rotary snow-plow came through,
bucking the drifts, sending up a geyser, and the way to the
Outside was open again. The brakemen, in mufflers and fur
caps, running along the tops of ice-coated freight-cars; the
engineers scratching frost from the cab windows and looking
out, inscrutable, self-contained, pilots of the prairie sea--they
were heroism, they were to Carol the daring of the quest in a
world of groceries and sermons.

To the small boys the railroad was a familiar playground.
They climbed the iron ladders on the sides of the box-cars;
built fires behind piles of old ties; waved to favorite brakemen.
But to Carol it was magic.

She was motoring with Kennicott, the car lumping through
darkness, the lights showing mud-puddles and ragged weeds
by the road. A train coming! A rapid chuck-a-chuck, chuck-
a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck. It was hurling past--the Pacific
Flyer, an arrow of golden flame. Light from the fire-box
splashed the under side of the trailing smoke. Instantly the
vision was gone; Carol was back in the long darkness; and
Kennicott was giving his version of that fire and wonder:
"No. 19. Must be 'bout ten minutes late."

In town, she listened from bed to the express whistling in
the cut a mile north. Uuuuuuu!--faint, nervous, distrait,
horn of the free night riders journeying to the tall towns where
were laughter and banners and the sound of bells--Uuuuu!
Uuuuu!--the world going by--Uuuuuuu!--fainter, more wistful, gone.

Down here there were no trains. The stillness was very
great. The prairie encircled the lake, lay round her, raw,
dusty, thick. Only the train could cut it. Some day she would
take a train; and that would be a great taking.

VII

She turned to the Chautauqua as she had turned to the
dramatic association, to the library-board.

Besides the permanent Mother Chautauqua, in New York,
there are, all over these States, commercial Chautauqua
companies which send out to every smallest town troupes of
lecturers and "entertainers" to give a week of culture under
canvas. Living in Minneapolis, Carol had never encountered
the ambulant Chautauqua, and the announcement of its com-
ing to Gopher Prairie gave her hope that others might be
doing the vague things which she had attempted. She pictured
a condensed university course brought to the people.
Mornings when she came in from the lake with Kennicott she
saw placards in every shop-window, and strung on a cord
across Main Street, a line of pennants alternately worded
"The Boland Chautauqua COMING!" and "A solid week
of inspiration and enjoyment!" But she was disappointed
when she saw the program. It did not seem to be a tabloid
university; it did not seem to be any kind of a university; it
seemed to be a combination of vaudeville performance Y. M. C. A.
lecture, and the graduation exercises of an elocution class.

She took her doubt to Kennicott. He insisted, "Well, maybe
it won't be so awful darn intellectual, the way you and I
might like it, but it's a whole lot better than nothing." Vida
Sherwin added, "They have some splendid speakers. If the
people don't carry off so much actual information, they do get
a lot of new ideas, and that's what counts."

During the Chautauqua Carol attended three evening
meetings, two afternoon meetings, and one in the morning. She was
impressed by the audience: the sallow women in skirts and
blouses, eager to be made to think, the men in vests and shirt-
sleeves, eager to be allowed to laugh, and the wriggling children,
eager to sneak away. She liked the plain benches, the portable
stage under its red marquee, the great tent over all, shadowy
above strings of incandescent bulbs at night and by day casting
an amber radiance on the patient crowd. The scent of dust
and trampled grass and sun-baked wood gave her an illusion
of Syrian caravans; she forgot the speakers while she listened
to noises outside the tent: two farmers talking hoarsely, a
wagon creaking down Main Street, the crow of a rooster. She
was content. But it was the contentment of the lost hunter
stopping to rest.

For from the Chautauqua itself she got nothing but wind
and chaff and heavy laughter, the laughter of yokels at old
jokes, a mirthless and primitive sound like the cries of beasts
on a farm.

These were the several instructors in the condensed
university's seven-day course:

Nine lecturers, four of them ex-ministers, and one an ex-
congressman, all of them delivering "inspirational addresses."
The only facts or opinions which Carol derived from them
were: Lincoln was a celebrated president of the United States,
but in his youth extremely poor. James J. Hill was the best-
known railroad-man of the West, and in his youth extremely
poor. Honesty and courtesy in business are preferable to
boorishness and exposed trickery, but this is not to be taken
personally, since all persons in Gopher Prairie are known to
be honest and courteous. London is a large city. A
distinguished statesman once taught Sunday School.

Four "entertainers" who told Jewish stories, Irish stories,
German stories, Chinese stories, and Tennessee mountaineer
stories, most of which Carol had heard.

A "lady elocutionist" who recited Kipling and imitated
children.

A lecturer with motion-pictures of an Andean exploration;
excellent pictures and a halting narrative.

Three brass-bands, a company of six opera-singers, a
Hawaiian sextette, and four youths who played saxophones and
guitars disguised as wash-boards. The most applauded pieces
were those, such as the "Lucia" inevitability, which the
audience had heard most often.

The local superintendent, who remained through the week
while the other enlighteners went to other Chautauquas for
their daily performances. The superintendent was a bookish,
underfed man who worked hard at rousing artificial enthusiasm,
at trying to make the audience cheer by dividing them into
competitive squads and telling them that they were intelligent
and made splendid communal noises. He gave most of the
morning lectures, droning with equal unhappy facility about
poetry, the Holy Land, and the injustice to employers in any
system of profit-sharing.

The final item was a man who neither lectured, inspired, nor
entertained; a plain little man with his hands in his pockets.
All the other speakers had confessed, "I cannot keep from
telling the citizens of your beautiful city that none of the
talent on this circuit have found a more charming spot or
more enterprising and hospitable people." But the little man
suggested that the architecture of Gopher Prairie was haphazard,
and that it was sottish to let the lake-front be monopolized
by the cinder-heaped wall of the railroad embankment.
Afterward the audience grumbled, "Maybe that guy's got the
right dope, but what's the use of looking on the dark side of
things all the time? New ideas are first-rate, but not all this
criticism. Enough trouble in life without looking for it!"

Thus the Chautauqua, as Carol saw it. After it, the town
felt proud and educated.

VIII

Two weeks later the Great War smote Europe.

For a month Gopher Prairie had the delight of shuddering,
then, as the war settled down to a business of trench-fighting,
they forgot.

When Carol talked about the Balkans, and the possibility
of a German revolution, Kennicott yawned, "Oh yes, it's a
great old scrap, but it's none of our business. Folks out here
are too busy growing corn to monkey with any fool war that
those foreigners want to get themselves into."

It was Miles Bjornstam who said, "I can't figure it out. I'm
opposed to wars, but still, seems like Germany has got to be
licked because them Junkers stands in the way of progress."

She was calling on Miles and Bea, early in autumn. They
had received her with cries, with dusting of chairs, and a
running to fetch water for coffee. Miles stood and beamed at
her. He fell often and joyously into his old irreverence about
the lords of Gopher Prairie, but always--with a certain
difficulty--he added something decorous and appreciative.

"Lots of people have come to see you, haven't they?" Carol hinted.

"Why, Bea's cousin Tina comes in right along, and the
foreman at the mill, and---- Oh, we have good times. Say,
take a look at that Bea! Wouldn't you think she was a
canary-bird, to listen to her, and to see that Scandahoofian tow-
head of hers? But say, know what she is? She's a mother
hen! Way she fusses over me--way she makes old Miles wear
a necktie! Hate to spoil her by letting her hear it, but she's
one pretty darn nice--nice---- Hell! What do we care if
none of the dirty snobs come and call? We've got each other."

Carol worried about their struggle, but she forgot it in the
stress of sickness and fear. For that autumn she knew that
a baby was coming, that at last life promised to be interesting
in the peril of the great change.

CHAPTER XX

I

THE baby was coming. Each morning she was nauseated,
chilly, bedraggled, and certain that she would never again be
attractive; each twilight she was afraid. She did not feel
exalted, but unkempt and furious. The period of daily sickness
crawled into an endless time of boredom. It became
difficult for her to move about, and she raged that she, who
had been slim and light-footed, should have to lean on a
stick, and be heartily commented upon by street gossips. She
was encircled by greasy eyes. Every matron hinted, "Now
that you're going to be a mother, dearie, you'll get over all
these ideas of yours and settle down." She felt that willy-nilly
she was being initiated into the assembly of housekeepers; with
the baby for hostage, she would never escape; presently she
would be drinking coffee and rocking and talking about
diapers.

"I could stand fighting them. I'm used to that. But this
being taken in, being taken as a matter of course, I can't
stand it--and I must stand it!"

She alternately detested herself for not appreciating the
kindly women, and detested them for their advice: lugubrious
hints as to how much she would suffer in labor, details of
baby-hygiene based on long experience and total misunderstanding,
superstitious cautions about the things she must eat
and read and look at in prenatal care for the baby's soul, and
always a pest of simpering baby-talk. Mrs. Champ Perry
bustled in to lend "Ben Hur," as a preventive of future infant
immorality. The Widow Bogart appeared trailing pinkish
exclamations, "And how is our lovely 'ittle muzzy today! My,
ain't it just like they always say: being in a Family Way does
make the girlie so lovely, just like a Madonna. Tell me--"
Her whisper was tinged with salaciousness--"does oo feel the
dear itsy one stirring, the pledge of love? I remember with
Cy, of course he was so big----"

"I do not look lovely, Mrs. Bogart. My complexion is
rotten, and my hair is coming out, and I look like a potato-bag,
and I think my arches are falling, and he isn't a pledge of
love, and I'm afraid he WILL look like us, and I don't believe
in mother-devotion, and the whole business is a confounded
nuisance of a biological process," remarked Carol.

Then the baby was born, without unusual difficulty: a boy
with straight back and strong legs. The first day she hated
him for the tides of pain and hopeless fear he had caused;
she resented his raw ugliness. After that she loved him with
all the devotion and instinct at which she had scoffed. She
marveled at the perfection of the miniature hands as noisily as
did Kennicott, she was overwhelmed by the trust with which
the baby turned to her; passion for him grew with each
unpoetic irritating thing she had to do for him.

He was named Hugh, for her father.

Hugh developed into a thin healthy child with a large head
and straight delicate hair of a faint brown. He was thoughtful
and casual--a Kennicott.

For two years nothing else existed. She did not, as the
cynical matrons had prophesied, "give up worrying about the
world and other folks' babies soon as she got one of her own
to fight for." The barbarity of that willingness to sacrifice other
children so that one child might have too much was impossible
to her. But she would sacrifice herself. She understood
consecration--she who answered Kennicott's hints about having
Hugh christened: "I refuse to insult my baby and myself by
asking an ignorant young man in a frock coat to sanction him,
to permit me to have him! I refuse to subject him to any
devil-chasing rites! If I didn't give my baby--MY BABY--
enough sanctification in those nine hours of hell, then he
can't get any more out of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel!"

"Well, Baptists hardly ever christen kids. I was kind of
thinking more about Reverend Warren," said Kennicott.

Hugh was her reason for living, promise of accomplishment
in the future, shrine of adoration--and a diverting toy. "I
thought I'd be a dilettante mother, but I'm as dismayingly
natural as Mrs. Bogart," she boasted.

For two--years Carol was a part of the town; as much one
of Our Young Mothers as Mrs. McGanum. Her opinionation
seemed dead; she had no apparent desire for escape; her brooding
centered on Hugh. While she wondered at the pearl texture
of his ear she exulted, "I feel like an old woman, with a skin
like sandpaper, beside him, and I'm glad of it! He is perfect.
He shall have everything. He sha'n't always stay here in
Gopher Prairie. . . . I wonder which is really the best,
Harvard or Yale or Oxford?"

II

The people who hemmed her in had been brilliantly
reinforced by Mr. and Mrs. Whittier N. Smail--Kennicott's Uncle
Whittier and Aunt Bessie.

The true Main Streetite defines a relative as a person to
whose house you go uninvited, to stay as long as you like. If
you hear that Lym Cass on his journey East has spent all
his time "visiting" in Oyster Center, it does not mean that he
prefers that village to the rest of New England, but that he
has relatives there. It does not mean that he has written to
the relatives these many years, nor that they have ever given
signs of a desire to look upon him. But "you wouldn't expect
a man to go and spend good money at a hotel in Boston,
when his own third cousins live right in the same state, would you?"

When the Smails sold their creamery in North Dakota they
visited Mr. Smail's sister, Kennicott's mother, at Lac-qui-
Meurt, then plodded on to Gopher Prairie to stay with their
nephew. They appeared unannounced, before the baby was
born, took their welcome for granted, and immediately began
to complain of the fact that their room faced north.

Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie assumed that it was their
privilege as relatives to laugh at Carol, and their duty as
Christians to let her know how absurd her "notions" were.
They objected to the food, to Oscarina's lack of friendliness,
to the wind, the rain, and the immodesty of Carol's maternity
gowns. They were strong and enduring; for an hour at a
time they could go on heaving questions about her father's
income, about her theology, and about the reason why she had
not put on her rubbers when she had gone across the street.
For fussy discussion they had a rich, full genius, and their
example developed in Kennicott a tendency to the same form
of affectionate flaying.

If Carol was so indiscreet as to murmur that she had a
small headache, instantly the two Smails and Kennicott were
at it. Every five minutes, every time she sat down or rose or
spoke to Oscarina, they twanged, "Is your head better now?
Where does it hurt? Don't you keep hartshorn in the house?
Didn't you walk too far today? Have you tried hartshorn?
Don't you keep some in the house so it will be handy? Does
it feel better now? How does it feel? Do your eyes hurt,
too? What time do you usually get to bed? As late as THAT?
Well! How does it feel now?"

In her presence Uncle Whittier snorted at Kennicott, "Carol
get these headaches often? Huh? Be better for her if she
didn't go gadding around to all these bridge-whist parties, and
took some care of herself once in a while!"

They kept it up, commenting, questioning, commenting,
questioning, till her determination broke and she bleated, "For
heaven's SAKE, don't dis-CUSS it! My head 's all RIGHT!"

She listened to the Smails and Kennicott trying to determine
by dialectics whether the copy of the Dauntless, which
Aunt Bessie wanted to send to her sister in Alberta, ought to
have two or four cents postage on it. Carol would have taken
it to the drug store and weighed it, but then she was a
dreamer, while they were practical people (as they frequently
admitted). So they sought to evolve the postal rate from their
inner consciousnesses, which, combined with entire frankness
in thinking aloud, was their method of settling all problems.

The Smails did not "believe in all this nonsense" about
privacy and reticence. When Carol left a letter from her
sister on the table, she was astounded to hear from Uncle
Whittier, "I see your sister says her husband is doing fine.
You ought to go see her oftener. I asked Will and he says
you don't go see her very often. My! You ought to go see
her oftener!"

If Carol was writing a letter to a classmate, or planning the
week's menus, she could be certain that Aunt Bessie would
pop in and titter, "Now don't let me disturb you, I just
wanted to see where you were, don't stop, I'm not going to stay
only a second. I just wondered if you could possibly have
thought that I didn't eat the onions this noon because I didn't
think they were properly cooked, but that wasn't the reason
at all, it wasn't because I didn't think they were well cooked,
I'm sure that everything in your house is always very dainty
and nice, though I do think that Oscarina is careless about
some things, she doesn't appreciate the big wages you pay her,
and she is so cranky, all these Swedes are so cranky, I don't
really see why you have a Swede, but---- But that wasn't
it, I didn't eat them not because I didn't think they weren't
cooked proper, it was just--I find that onions don't agree with
me, it's very strange, ever since I had an attack of biliousness
one time, I have found that onions, either fried onions or
raw ones, and Whittier does love raw onions with vinegar
and sugar on them----"

It was pure affection.

Carol was discovering that the one thing that can be more
disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.

She supposed that she was being gracefully dull and
standardized in the Smails' presence, but they scented the heretic,
and with forward-stooping delight they sat and tried to drag
out her ludicrous concepts for their amusement. They were
like the Sunday-afternoon mob starting at monkeys in the
Zoo, poking fingers arid making faces and giggling at the
resentment of the more dignified race.

With a loose-lipped, superior, village smile Uncle Whittier
hinted, "What's this I hear about your thinking Gopher
Prairie ought to be all tore down and rebuilt, Carrie? I don't
know where folks get these new-fangled ideas. Lots of farmers
in Dakota getting 'em these days. About co-operation. Think
they can run stores better 'n storekeepers! Huh!"

"Whit and I didn't need no co-operation as long as we was
farming!" triumphed Aunt Bessie. "Carrie, tell your old
auntie now: don't you ever go to church on Sunday? You do
go sometimes? But you ought to go every Sunday! When you're
as old as I am, you'll learn that no matter how smart folks
think they are, God knows a whole lot more than they do, and then
you'll realize and be glad to go and listen to your pastor!"

In the manner of one who has just beheld a two-headed calf
they repeated that they had "never HEARD such funny ideas!"
They were staggered to learn that a real tangible person,
living in Minnesota, and married to their own flesh-and-blood
relation, could apparently believe that divorce may not
always be immoral; that illegitimate children do not
bear any special and guaranteed form of curse; that there
are ethical authorities outside of the Hebrew Bible; that men
have drunk wine yet not died in the gutter; that the capitalistic
system of distribution and the Baptist wedding-ceremony
were not known in the Garden of Eden; that mushrooms are
as edible as corn-beef hash; that the word "dude" is no
longer frequently used; that there are Ministers of the Gospel
who accept evolution; that some persons of apparent intelligence
and business ability do not always vote the Republican ticket
straight; that it is not a universal custom to wear scratchy
flannels next the skin in winter; that a violin is not inherently
more immoral than a chapel organ; that some poets do not have
long hair; and that Jews are not always pedlers or pants-
makers.

"Where does she get all them the'ries?" marveled Uncle
Whittier Smail; while Aunt Bessie inquired, "Do you suppose
there's many folks got notions like hers? My! If there are,"
and her tone settled the fact that there were not, "I just don't
know what the world's coming to!"

Patiently--more or less--Carol awaited the exquisite day
when they would announce departure. After three weeks Uncle
Whittier remarked, "We kinda like Gopher Prairie. Guess
maybe we'll stay here. We'd been wondering what we'd do,
now we've sold the creamery and my farms. So I had a talk
with Ole Jenson about his grocery, and I guess I'll buy him out
and storekeep for a while."

He did.

Carol rebelled. Kennicott soothed her: "Oh, we won't see
much of them. They'll have their own house."

She resolved to be so chilly that they would stay away. But
she had no talent for conscious insolence. They found a house,
but Carol was never safe from their appearance with a hearty,
"Thought we'd drop in this evening and keep you from being
lonely. Why, you ain't had them curtains washed yet!"
Invariably, whenever she was touched by the realization that
it was they who were lonely, they wrecked her pitying affection
by comments--questions--comments--advice.

They immediately became friendly with all of their own
race, with the Luke Dawsons, the Deacon Piersons, and Mrs.
Bogart; and brought them along in the evening. Aunt Bessie
was a bridge over whom the older women, bearing gifts of
counsel and the ignorance of experience, poured into Carol's
island of reserve. Aunt Bessie urged the good Widow Bogart,
"Drop in and see Carrie real often. Young folks today don't
understand housekeeping like we do."

Mrs. Bogart showed herself perfectly willing to be an
associate relative.

Carol was thinking up protective insults when Kennicott's
mother came down to stay with Brother Whittier for two
months. Carol was fond of Mrs. Kennicott. She could not
carry out her insults.

She felt trapped.

She had been kidnaped by the town. She was Aunt Bessie's
niece, and she was to be a mother. She was expected, she
almost expected herself, to sit forever talking of babies, cooks,
embroidery stitches, the price of potatoes, and the tastes of
husbands in the matter of spinach.

She found a refuge in the Jolly Seventeen. She suddenly
understood that they could be depended upon to laugh with
her at Mrs. Bogart, and she now saw Juanita Haydock's gossip
not as vulgarity but as gaiety and remarkable analysis.

Her life had changed, even before Hugh appeared. She
looked forward to the next bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, and
the security of whispering with her dear friends Maud Dyer
and Juanita and Mrs. McGanum.

She was part of the town. Its philosophy and its feuds
dominated her.

III

She was no longer irritated by the cooing of the matrons,
nor by their opinion that diet didn't matter so long as the
Little Ones had plenty of lace and moist kisses, but she
concluded that in the care of babies as in politics, intelligence
was superior to quotations about pansies. She liked best to
talk about Hugh to Kennicott, Vida, and the Bjornstams. She
was happily domestic when Kennicott sat by her on the floor,
to watch baby make faces. She was delighted when Miles,
speaking as one man to another, admonished Hugh, "I wouldn't
stand them skirts if I was you. Come on. Join the union
and strike. Make 'em give you pants."

As a parent, Kennicott was moved to establish the first
child-welfare week held in Gopher Prairie. Carol helped him
weigh babies and examine their throats, and she wrote out
the diets for mute German and Scandinavian mothers.

The aristocracy of Gopher Prairie, even the wives of the
rival doctors, took part, and for several days there was
community spirit and much uplift. But this reign of love was
overthrown when the prize for Best Baby was awarded not to
decent parents but to Bea and Miles Bjornstam! The good
matrons glared at Olaf Bjornstam, with his blue eyes, his
honey-colored hair, and magnificent back, and they remarked,
"Well, Mrs. Kennicott, maybe that Swede brat is as healthy as
your husband says he is, but let me tell you I hate to think
of the future that awaits any boy with a hired girl for a
mother and an awful irreligious socialist for a pa!"

She raged, but so violent was the current of their
respectability, so persistent was Aunt Bessie in running to her with
their blabber, that she was embarrassed when she took Hugh
to play with Olaf. She hated herself for it, but she hoped
that no one saw her go into the Bjornstam shanty. She hated
herself and the town's indifferent cruelty when she saw Bea's
radiant devotion to both babies alike; when she saw Miles
staring at them wistfully.

He had saved money, had quit Elder's planing-mill and
started a dairy on a vacant lot near his shack. He was
proud of his three cows and sixty chickens, and got up nights
to nurse them.

"I'll be a big farmer before you can bat an eye! I tell
you that young fellow Olaf is going to go East to college along
with the Haydock kids. Uh---- Lots of folks dropping in to
chin with Bea and me now. Say! Ma Bogart come in one
day! She was---- I liked the old lady fine. And the mill
foreman comes in right along. Oh, we got lots of friends.
You bet!"

IV

Though the town seemed to Carol to change no more than the
surrounding fields, there was a constant shifting, these three
years. The citizen of the prairie drifts always westward. It
may be because he is the heir of ancient migrations--and it
may be because he finds within his own spirit so little
adventure that he is driven to seek it by changing his horizon.
The towns remain unvaried, yet the individual faces alter
like classes in college. The Gopher Prairie jeweler sells out,
for no discernible reason, and moves on to Alberta or the
state of Washington, to open a shop precisely like his former
one, in a town precisely like the one he has left. There is,
except among professional men and the wealthy, small
permanence either of residence or occupation. A man becomes
farmer, grocer, town policeman, garageman, restaurant-owner,
postmaster, insurance-agent, and farmer all over again, and the
community more or less patiently suffers from his lack of
knowledge in each of his experiments.

Ole Jenson the grocer and Dahl the butcher moved on to
South Dakota and Idaho. Luke and Mrs. Dawson picked up
ten thousand acres of prairie soil, in the magic portable form
of a small check book, and went to Pasadena, to a bungalow
and sunshine and cafeterias. Chet Dashaway sold his furniture
and undertaking business and wandered to Los Angeles, where,
the Dauntless reported, "Our good friend Chester has accepted
a fine position with a real-estate firm, and his wife has in the
charming social circles of the Queen City of the Southwestland
that same popularity which she enjoyed in our own society
sets."

Rita Simons was married to Terry Gould, and rivaled Juanita
Haydock as the gayest of the Young Married Set. But Juanita
also acquired merit. Harry's father died, Harry became senior
partner in the Bon Ton Store, and Juanita was more acidulous
and shrewd and cackling than ever. She bought an evening
frock, and exposed her collar-bone to the wonder of the Jolly
Seventeen, and talked of moving to Minneapolis.

To defend her position against the new Mrs. Terry Gould
she sought to attach Carol to her faction by giggling that
"SOME folks might call Rita innocent, but I've got a hunch
that she isn't half as ignorant of things as brides are supposed
to be--and of course Terry isn't one-two-three as a doctor
alongside of your husband."

Carol herself would gladly have followed Mr. Ole Jenson,
and migrated even to another Main Street; flight from familiar
tedium to new tedium would have for a time the outer look
and promise of adventure. She hinted to Kennicott of the
probable medical advantages of Montana and Oregon. She
knew that he was satisfied with Gopher Prairie, but it gave
her vicarious hope to think of going, to ask for railroad folders
at the station, to trace the maps with a restless forefinger.

Yet to the casual eye she was not discontented, she was
not an abnormal and distressing traitor to the faith of Main
Street.

The settled citizen believes that the rebel is constantly in a
stew of complaining and, hearing of a Carol Kennicott, he
gasps, "What an awful person! She must be a Holy Terror
to live with! Glad MY folks are satisfied with things way
they are!" Actually, it was not so much as five minutes a
day that Carol devoted to lonely desires. It is probable that
the agitated citizen has within his circle at least one inarticulate
rebel with aspirations as wayward as Carol's.

The presence of the baby had made her take Gopher Prairie
and the brown house seriously, as natural places of residence.
She pleased Kennicott by being friendly with the complacent
maturity of Mrs. Clark and Mrs. Elder, and when she had
often enough been in conference upon the Elders' new Cadillac
car, or the job which the oldest Clark boy had taken in the
office of the flour-mill, these topics became important, things
to follow up day by day.

With nine-tenths of her emotion concentrated upon Hugh,
she did not criticize shops, streets, acquaintances. . .
this year or two. She hurried to Uncle Whittier's store for
a package of corn-flakes, she abstractedly listened to Uncle
Whittier's denunciation of Martin Mahoney for asserting that
the wind last Tuesday had been south and not southwest, she
came back along streets that held no surprises nor the startling
faces of strangers. Thinking of Hugh's teething all the
way, she did not reflect that this store, these drab blocks, made
up all her background. She did her work, and she triumphed
over winning from the Clarks at five hundred.

The most considerable event of the two years after the
birth of Hugh occurred when Vida Sherwin resigned from the
high school and was married. Carol was her attendant, and
as the wedding was at the Episcopal Church, all the women
wore new kid slippers and long white kid gloves, and looked
refined.

For years Carol had been little sister to Vida, and had never
in the least known to what degree Vida loved her and hated
her and in curious strained ways was bound to her.

CHAPTER XXI

I

GRAY steel that seems unmoving because it spins so fast in the
balanced fly-wheel, gray snow in an avenue of elms, gray dawn
with the sun behind it--this was the gray of Vida Sherwin's
life at thirty-six.

She was small and active and sallow; her yellow hair was
faded, and looked dry; her blue silk blouses and modest
lace collars and high black shoes and sailor hats were as literal
and uncharming as a schoolroom desk; but her eyes determined
her appearance, revealed her as a personage and a force,
indicated her faith in the goodness and purpose of everything.
They were blue, and they were never still; they expressed
amusement, pity, enthusiasm. If she had been seen in sleep,
with the wrinkles beside her eyes stilled and the creased lids
hiding the radiant irises, she would have lost her potency.

She was born in a hill-smothered Wisconsin village where
her father was a prosy minister; she labored through a
sanctimonious college; she taught for two years in an iron-range
town of blurry-faced Tatars and Montenegrins, and wastes of
ore, and when she came to Gopher Prairie, its trees and the
shining spaciousness of the wheat prairie made her certain
that she was in paradise.

She admitted to her fellow-teachers that the schoolbuilding
was slightly damp, but she insisted that the rooms were
"arranged so conveniently--and then that bust of President
McKinley at the head of the stairs, it's a lovely art-work, and
isn't it an inspiration to have the brave, honest, martyr
president to think about!" She taught French, English, and
history, and the Sophomore Latin class, which dealt in matters
of a metaphysical nature called Indirect Discourse and the
Ablative Absolute. Each year she was reconvinced that the
pupils were beginning to learn more quickly. She spent four
winters in building up the Debating Society, and when the
debate really was lively one Friday afternoon, and the speakers
of pieces did not forget their lines, she felt rewarded.

She lived an engrossed useful life, and seemed as cool and
simple as an apple. But secretly she was creeping among fears,
longing, and guilt. She knew what it was, but she dared not
name it. She hated even the sound of the word "sex." When
she dreamed of being a woman of the harem, with great white
warm limbs, she awoke to shudder, defenseless in the dusk of
her room. She prayed to Jesus, always to the Son of God,
offering him the terrible power of her adoration, addressing him
as the eternal lover, growing passionate, exalted, large, as she
contemplated his splendor. Thus she mounted to endurance
and surcease.

By day, rattling about in many activities, she was able to
ridicule her blazing nights of darkness. With spurious
cheerfulness she announced everywhere, "I guess I'm a born
spinster," and "No one will ever marry a plain schoolma'am like
me," and "You men, great big noisy bothersome creatures,
we women wouldn't have you round the place, dirtying up nice
clean rooms, if it wasn't that you have to be petted and
guided. We just ought to say `Scat!' to all of you!"

But when a man held her close at a dance, even when
"Professor" George Edwin Mott patted her hand paternally
as they considered the naughtinesses of Cy Bogart, she quivered,
and reflected how superior she was to have kept her
virginity.

In the autumn of 1911, a year before Dr. Will Kennicott
was married, Vida was his partner at a five-hundred tournament.
She was thirty-four then; Kennicott about thirty-six.
To her he was a superb, boyish, diverting creature; all the
heroic qualities in a manly magnificent body. They had
been helping the hostess to serve the Waldorf salad and coffee
and gingerbread. They were in the kitchen, side by side on
a bench, while the others ponderously supped in the room
beyond.

Kennicott was masculine and experimental. He stroked
Vida's hand, he put his arm carelessly about her shoulder.

"Don't!" she said sharply.

"You're a cunning thing," he offered, patting the back of
her shoulder in an exploratory manner.

While she strained away, she longed to move nearer to him.
He bent over, looked at her knowingly. She glanced down at
his left hand as it touched her knee. She sprang up, started
noisily and needlessly to wash the dishes. He helped her. He
was too lazy to adventure further--and too used to women in
his profession. She was grateful for the impersonality of his
talk. It enabled her to gain control. She knew that she had
skirted wild thoughts.

A month after, on a sleighing-party, under the buffalo robes
in the bob-sled, he whispered, "You pretend to be a grown-up
schoolteacher, but you're nothing but a kiddie." His arm
was about her. She resisted.

"Don't you like the poor lonely bachelor?" he yammered in
a fatuous way.

"No, I don't! You don't care for me in the least. You're
just practising on me."

"You're so mean! I'm terribly fond of you."

"I'm not of you. And I'm not going to let myself be fond
of you, either."

He persistently drew her toward him. She clutched his arm.
Then she threw off the robe, climbed out of the sled, raced after
it with Harry Haydock. At the dance which followed the
sleigh-ride Kennicott was devoted to the watery prettiness of
Maud Dyer, and Vida was noisily interested in getting up a
Virginia Reel. Without seeming to watch Kennicott, she knew
that he did not once look at her.

That was all of her first love-affair.

He gave no sign of remembering that he was "terribly fond."
She waited for him; she reveled in longing, and in a sense of
guilt because she longed. She told herself that she did not
want part of him; unless he gave her all his devotion she would
never let him touch her; and when she found that she was
probably lying, she burned with scorn. She fought it out in
prayer. She knelt in a pink flannel nightgown, her thin
hair down her back, her forehead as full of horror as a mask
of tragedy, while she identified her love for the Son of God
with her love for a mortal, and wondered if any other woman
had ever been so sacrilegious. She wanted to be a nun
and observe perpetual adoration. She bought a rosary, but
she had been so bitterly reared as a Protestant that she could
not bring herself to use it.

Yet none of her intimates in the school and in the boarding-
house knew of her abyss of passion. They said she was "so
optimistic."

When she heard that Kennicott was to marry a girl, pretty,
young, and imposingly from the Cities, Vida despaired. She
congratulated Kennicott; carelessly ascertained from him the
hour of marriage. At that hour, sitting in her room, Vida
pictured the wedding in St. Paul. Full of an ecstasy which
horrified her, she followed Kennicott and the girl who had stolen
her place, followed them to the train, through the evening,
the night.

She was relieved when she had worked out a belief that she
wasn't really shameful, that there was a mystical relation
between herself and Carol, so that she was vicariously yet
veritably with Kennicott, and had the right to be.

She saw Carol during the first five minutes in Gopher Prairie.
She stared at the passing motor, at Kennicott and the girl
beside him. In that fog world of transference of emotion Vida
had no normal jealousy but a conviction that, since through
Carol she had received Kennicott's love, then Carol was a part
of her, an astral self, a heightened and more beloved self.
She was glad of the girl's charm, of the smooth black hair,
the airy head and young shoulders. But she was suddenly
angry. Carol glanced at her for a quarter-second, but looked
past her, at an old roadside barn. If she had made the great
sacrifice, at least she expected gratitude and recognition, Vida
raged, while her conscious schoolroom mind fussily begged
her to control this insanity.

During her first call half of her wanted to welcome a fellow
reader of books; the other half itched to find out whether
Carol knew anything about Kennicott's former interest in
herself. She discovered that Carol was not aware that he had
ever touched another woman's hand. Carol was an amusing,
naive, curiously learned child. While Vida was most actively
describing the glories of the Thanatopsis, and complimenting
this librarian on her training as a worker, she was fancying
that this girl was the child born of herself and Kennicott; and
out of that symbolizing she had a comfort she had not known
for months.

When she came home, after supper with the Kennicotts and
Guy Pollock, she had a sudden and rather pleasant backsliding
from devotion. She bustled into her room, she slammed her
hat on the bed, and chattered, "I don't CARE! I'm a lot like
her--except a few years older. I'm light and quick, too, and
I can talk just as well as she can, and I'm sure---- Men are
such fools. I'd be ten times as sweet to make love to as that
dreamy baby. And I AM as good-looking!"

But as she sat on the bed and stared at her thin thighs,
defiance oozed away. She mourned:

"No. I'm not. Dear God, how we fool ourselves! I pretend
I'm `spiritual.' I pretend my legs are graceful. They
aren't. They're skinny. Old-maidish. I hate it! I hate that
impertinent young woman! A selfish cat, taking his love
for granted. . . . No, she's adorable. . . . I don't
think she ought to be so friendly with Guy Pollock."

For a year Vida loved Carol, longed to and did not pry into
the details of her relations with Kennicotts enjoyed her spirit
of play as expressed in childish tea-parties, and, with the
mystic bond between them forgotten, was healthily vexed by
Carol's assumption that she was a sociological messiah come
to save Gopher Prairie. This last facet of Vida's thought was
the one which, after a year, was most often turned to the
light. In a testy way she brooded, "These people that want
to change everything all of a sudden without doing any work,
make me tired! Here I have to go and work for four years,
picking out the pupils for debates, and drilling them, and
nagging at them to get them to look up references, and begging
them to choose their own subjects--four years, to get up a
couple of good debates! And she comes rushing in, and expects
in one year to change the whole town into a lollypop paradise
with everybody stopping everything else to grow tulips and
drink tea. And it's a comfy homey old town, too!"

She had such an outburst after each of Carol's campaigns--
for better Thanatopsis programs, for Shavian plays, for more
human schools--but she never betrayed herself, and always she
was penitent.

Vida was, and always would be, a reformer, a liberal. She
believed that details could excitingly be altered, but that
things-in-general were comely and kind and immutable. Carol
was, without understanding or accepting it, a revolutionist, a
radical, and therefore possessed of "constructive ideas," which
only the destroyer can have, since the reformer believes that
all the essential constructing has already been done. After
years of intimacy it was this unexpressed opposition more than
the fancied loss of Kennicott's love which held Vida irritably
fascinated.

But the birth of Hugh revived the transcendental emotion.
She was indignant that Carol should not be utterly fulfilled in
having borne Kennicott's child. She admitted that Carol
seemed to have affection and immaculate care for the baby,
but she began to identify herself now with Kennicott, and in
this phase to feel that she had endured quite too much from
Carol's instability.

She recalled certain other women who had come from
the Outside and had not appreciated Gopher Prairie. She
remembered the rector's wife who had been chilly to callers
and who was rumored throughout the town to have said,
"Re-ah-ly I cawn't endure this bucolic heartiness in the
responses." The woman was positively known to have worn
handkerchiefs in her bodice as padding--oh, the town had
simply roared at her. Of course the rector and she were
got rid of in a few months.

Then there was the mysterious woman with the dyed hair
and penciled eyebrows, who wore tight English dresses, like
basques, who smelled of stale musk, who flirted with the men
and got them to advance money for her expenses in a lawsuit,
who laughed at Vida's reading at a school-entertainment,
and went off owing a hotel-bill and the three hundred dollars
she had borrowed.

Vida insisted that she loved Carol, but with some satisfaction
she compared her to these traducers of the town.

II

Vida had enjoyed Raymie Wutherspoon's singing in the
Episcopal choir; she had thoroughly reviewed the weather with
him at Methodist sociables and in the Bon Ton. But she did
not really know him till she moved to Mrs. Gurrey's boarding-
house. It was five years after her affair with Kennicott. She
was thirty-nine, Raymie perhaps a year younger.

She said to him, and sincerely, "My! You can do anything,
with your brains and tact and that heavenly voice. You were
so good in `The Girl from Kankakee.' You made me feel
terribly stupid. If you'd gone on the stage, I believe you'd
be just as good as anybody in Minneapolis. But still, I'm not
sorry you stuck to business. It's such a constructive career."

"Do you really think so?" yearned Raymie, across the
apple-sauce.

It was the first time that either of them had found a
dependable intellectual companionship. They looked down on
Willis Woodford the bank-clerk, and his anxious babycentric
wife, the silent Lyman Casses, the slangy traveling man, and
the rest of Mrs. Gurrey's unenlightened guests. They sat
opposite, and they sat late. They were exhilarated to find that
they agreed in confession of faith:

"People like Sam Clark and Harry Haydock aren't earnest
about music and pictures and eloquent sermons and really
refined movies, but then, on the other hand, people like Carol
Kennicott put too much stress on all this art. Folks ought
to appreciate lovely things, but just the same, they got to be
practical and--they got to look at things in a practical way."

Smiling, passing each other the pressed-glass pickle-dish,
seeing Mrs. Gurrey's linty supper-cloth irradiated by the light
of intimacy, Vida and Raymie talked about Carol's rose-colored
turban, Carol's sweetness, Carol's new low shoes, Carol's erroneous
theory that there was no need of strict discipline in school,
Carol's amiability in the Bon Ton, Carol's flow of wild ideas,
which, honestly, just simply made you nervous trying to keep
track of them;

About the lovely display of gents' shirts in the Bon Ton
window as dressed by Raymie, about Raymie's offertory last
Sunday, the fact that there weren't any of these new solos as
nice as "Jerusalem the Golden," and the way Raymie stood
up to Juanita Haydock when she came into the store and
tried to run things and he as much as told her that she was
so anxious to have folks think she was smart and bright that
she said things she didn't mean, and anyway, Raymie was
running the shoe-department, and if Juanita, or Harry either,
didn't like the way he ran things, they could go get another
man;

About Vida's new jabot which made her look thirty-two
(Vida's estimate) or twenty-two (Raymie's estimate), Vida's
plan to have the high-school Debating Society give a playlet,
and the difficulty of keeping the younger boys well behaved
on the playground when a big lubber like Cy Bogart acted
up so;

About the picture post-card which Mrs. Dawson had sent to
Mrs. Cass from Pasadena, showing roses growing right outdoors
in February, the change in time on No. 4, the reckless
way Dr. Gould always drove his auto, the reckless way almost
all these people drove their autos, the fallacy of supposing
that these socialists could carry on a government for as much
as six months if they ever did have a chance to try out their
theories, and the crazy way in which Carol jumped from
subject to subject.

Vida had once beheld Raymie as a thin man with spectacles,
mournful drawn-out face, and colorless stiff hair. Now she
noted that his jaw was square, that his long hands moved
quickly and were bleached in a refined manner, and that his
trusting eyes indicated that he had "led a clean life." She
began to call him "Ray," and to bounce in defense of his
unselfishness and thoughtfulness every time Juanita Haydock
or Rita Gould giggled about him at the Jolly Seventeen.

On a Sunday afternoon of late autumn they walked down
to Lake Minniemashie. Ray said that he would like to see
the ocean; it must be a grand sight; it must be much grander
than a lake, even a great big lake. Vida had seen it, she
stated modestly; she had seen it on a summer trip to Cape
Cod.

"Have you been clear to Cape Cod? Massachusetts? I
knew you'd traveled, but I never realized you'd been that
far!"

Made taller and younger by his interest she poured out, "Oh
my yes. It was a wonderful trip. So many points of interest
through Massachusetts--historical. There's Lexington where
we turned back the redcoats, and Longfellow's home at
Cambridge, and Cape Cod--just everything--fishermen and whale-
ships and sand-dunes and everything."

She wished that she had a little cane to carry. He broke
off a willow branch.

"My, you're strong!" she said.

"No, not very. I wish there was a Y. M. C. A. here, so I
could take up regular exercise. I used to think I could do
pretty good acrobatics, if I had a chance."

"I'm sure you could. You're unusually lithe, for a large man."

"Oh no, not so very. But I wish we had a Y. M. It would
be dandy to have lectures and everything, and I'd like to take
a class in improving the memory--I believe a fellow ought
to go on educating himself and improving his mind even if he is
in business, don't you, Vida--I guess I'm kind of fresh to call
you `Vida'!"

"I've been calling you `Ray' for weeks!"

He wondered why she sounded tart.

He helped her down the bank to the edge of the lake but
dropped her hand abruptly, and as they sat on a willow log
and he brushed her sleeve, he delicately moved over and
murmured, "Oh, excuse me--accident."

She stared at the mud-browned chilly water, the floating
gray reeds.

"You look so thoughtful," he said.

She threw out her hands. "I am! Will you kindly tell
me what's the use of--anything! Oh, don't mind me. I'm
a moody old hen. Tell me about your plan for getting a
partnership in the Bon Ton. I do think you're right: Harry
Haydock and that mean old Simons ought to give you one."

He hymned the old unhappy wars in which he had been
Achilles and the mellifluous Nestor, yet gone his righteous ways
unheeded by the cruel kings. . . . "Why, if I've told
'em once, I've told 'em a dozen times to get in a side-line of
light-weight pants for gents' summer wear, and of course here
they go and let a cheap kike like Rifkin beat them to it
and grab the trade right off 'em, and then Harry said--
you know how Harry is, maybe he don't mean to be grouchy,
but he's such a sore-head----"

He gave her a hand to rise. "If you don't MIND. I think
a fellow is awful if a lady goes on a walk with him and she
can't trust him and he tries to flirt with her and all."

"I'm sure you're highly trustworthy!" she snapped, and
she sprang up without his aid. Then, smiling excessively,
"Uh--don't you think Carol sometimes fails to appreciate Dr.
Will's ability?"

III

Ray habitually asked her about his window-trimming, the
display of the new shoes, the best music for the entertainment
at the Eastern Star, and (though he was recognized as a
professional authority on what the town called "gents'
furnishings") about his own clothes. She persuaded him not to wear
the small bow ties which made him look like an elongated
Sunday School scholar. Once she burst out:

"Ray, I could shake you! Do you know you're too
apologetic? You always appreciate other people too much. You
fuss over Carol Kennicott when she has some crazy theory that
we all ought to turn anarchists or live on figs and nuts or
something. And you listen when Harry Haydock tries to show
off and talk about turnovers and credits and things you know
lots better than he does. Look folks in the eye! Glare at
'em! Talk deep! You're the smartest man in town, if you
only knew it. You ARE!"

He could not believe it. He kept coming back to her for
confirmation. He practised glaring and talking deep, but he
circuitously hinted to Vida that when he had tried to look
Harry Haydock in the eye, Harry had inquired, "What's the
matter with you, Raymie? Got a pain?" But afterward
Harry had asked about Kantbeatum socks in a manner which,
Ray felt, was somehow different from his former condescension.

They were sitting on the squat yellow satin settee in the
boarding-house parlor. As Ray reannounced that he simply
wouldn't stand it many more years if Harry didn't give him a
partnership, his gesticulating hand touched Vida's shoulders.

"Oh, excuse me!" he pleaded.

"It's all right. Well, I think I must be running up to my
room. Headache," she said briefly.

IV

Ray and she had stopped in at Dyer's for a hot chocolate
on their way home from the movies, that March evening. Vida
speculated, "Do you know that I may not be here next year?"

"What do you mean?"

With her fragile narrow nails she smoothed the glass slab
which formed the top of the round table at which they sat.
She peeped through the glass at the perfume-boxes of black and
gold and citron in the hollow table. She looked about at
shelves of red rubber water-bottles, pale yellow sponges, wash-
rags with blue borders, hair-brushes of polished cherry backs.
She shook her head like a nervous medium coming out of a
trance, stared at him unhappily, demanded:

"Why should I stay here? And I must make up my mind.
Now. Time to renew our teaching-contracts for next year.
I think I'll go teach in some other town. Everybody here is
tired of me. I might as well go. Before folks come out and
SAY they're tired of me. I have to decide tonight. I might as
well---- Oh, no matter. Come. Let's skip. It's late."

She sprang up, ignoring his wail of "Vida! Wait! Sit
down! Gosh! I'm flabbergasted! Gee! Vida!" She
marched out. While he was paying his check she got ahead.
He ran after her, blubbering, "Vida! Wait!" In the shade
of the lilacs in front of the Gougerling house he came up with
her, stayed her flight by a hand on her shoulder.

"Oh, don't! Don't! What does it matter?" she begged.
She was sobbing, her soft wrinkly lids soaked with tears.
"Who cares for my affection or help? I might as well drift
on, forgotten. O Ray, please don't hold me. Let me go.
I'll just decide not to renew my contract here, and--and
drift--way off----"

His hand was steady on her shoulder. She dropped her
head, rubbed the back of his hand with her cheek.

They were married in June.

V

They took the Ole Jenson house. "It's small," said Vida,
"but it's got the dearest vegetable garden, and I love having
time to get near to Nature for once."

Though she became Vida Wutherspoon technically, and
though she certainly had no ideals about the independence of
keeping her name, she continued to be known as Vida Sherwin.

She had resigned from the school, but she kept up one class
in English. She bustled about on every committee of the
Thanatopsis; she was always popping into the rest-room to
make Mrs. Nodelquist sweep the floor; she was appointed to
the library-board to succeed Carol; she taught the Senior
Girls' Class in the Episcopal Sunday School, and tried to revive
the King's Daughters. She exploded into self-confidence and
happiness; her draining thoughts were by marriage turned
into energy. She became daily and visibly more plump, and
though she chattered as eagerly, she was less obviously admiring
of marital bliss, less sentimental about babies, sharper in
demanding that the entire town share her reforms--the purchase
of a park, the compulsory cleaning of back-yards.

She penned Harry Haydock at his desk in the Bon Ton;
she interrupted his joking; she told him that it was Ray who
had built up the shoe-department and men's department; she
demanded that he be made a partner. Before Harry could
answer she threatened that Ray and she would start a rival
shop. "I'll clerk behind the counter myself, and a Certain
Party is all ready to put up the money."

She rather wondered who the Certain Party was.

Ray was made a one-sixth partner.

He became a glorified floor-walker, greeting the men with
new poise, no longer coyly subservient to pretty women.
When he was not affectionately coercing people into buying
things they did not need, he stood at the back of the store,
glowing, abstracted, feeling masculine as he recalled the
tempestuous surprises of love revealed by Vida.

The only remnant of Vida's identification of herself with
Carol was a jealousy when she saw Kennicott and Ray together,
and reflected that some people might suppose that
Kennicott was his superior. She was sure that Carol thought
so, and she wanted to shriek, "You needn't try to gloat! I
wouldn't have your pokey old husband. He hasn't one single
bit of Ray's spiritual nobility."

CHAPTER XXII

I

THE greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction
to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put
in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the long-
shoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.
It was this which puzzled Carol in regard to the married Vida.
Carol herself had the baby, a larger house to care for, all the
telephone calls for Kennicott when he was away; and she
read everything, while Vida was satisfied with newspaper headlines.

But after detached brown years in boarding-houses, Vida
was hungry for housework, for the most pottering detail of it.
She had no maid, nor wanted one. She cooked, baked, swept,
washed supper-cloths, with the triumph of a chemist in a new
laboratory. To her the hearth was veritably the altar. When
she went shopping she hugged the cans of soup, and she
bought a mop or a side of bacon as though she were preparing
for a reception. She knelt beside a bean sprout and crooned,
"I raised this with my own hands--I brought this new life
into the world."

"I love her for being so happy," Carol brooded. "I ought
to be that way. I worship the baby, but the housework----
Oh, I suppose I'm fortunate; so much better off than farm-
women on a new clearing, or people in a slum."

It has not yet been recorded that any human being has
gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation
upon the fact that he is better off than others.

In Carol's own twenty-four hours a day she got up, dressed
the baby, had breakfast, talked to Oscarina about the day's
shopping, put the baby on the porch to play, went. to the
butcher's to choose between steak and pork chops, bathed the
baby, nailed up a shelf, had dinner, put the baby to bed for a
nap, paid the iceman, read for an hour, took the baby
out for a walk, called on Vida, had supper, put the baby to
bed, darned socks, listened to Kennicott's yawning comment
on what a fool Dr. McGanum was to try to use that cheap
X-ray outfit of his on an epithelioma, repaired a frock, drowsily
heard Kennicott stoke the furnace, tried to read a page of
Thorstein Veblen--and the day was gone.

Except when Hugh was vigorously naughty, or whiney, or
laughing, or saying "I like my chair" with thrilling
maturity, she was always enfeebled by loneliness. She no longer
felt superior about that misfortune. She would gladly have
been converted to Vida's satisfaction in Gopher Prairie and
mopping the floor.

II

Carol drove through an astonishing number of books from
the public library and from city shops. Kennicott was at
first uncomfortable over her disconcerting habit of buying
them. A book was a book, and if you had several thousand
of them right here in the library, free, why the dickens should
you spend your good money? After worrying about it for
two or three years, he decided that this was one of the Funny
Ideas which she had caught as a librarian and from which
she would never entirely recover.

The authors whom she read were most of them frightfully
annoyed by the Vida Sherwins. They were young American
sociologists, young English realists, Russian horrorists; Anatole
France, Rolland, Nexo, Wells, Shaw, Key, Edgar Lee Masters,
Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Henry Mencken, and
all the other subversive philosophers and artists whom women
were consulting everywhere, in batik-curtained studios in
New York, in Kansas farmhouses, San Francisco drawing-
rooms, Alabama schools for negroes. From them she got
the same confused desire which the million other women
felt; the same determination to be class-conscious without
discovering the class of which she was to be conscious.

Certainly her reading precipitated her observations of Main
Street, of Gopher Prairie and of the several adjacent Gopher
Prairies which she had seen on drives with Kennicott. In
her fluid thought certain convictions appeared, jaggedly, a
fragment of an impression at a time, while she was going to
sleep, or manicuring her nails, or waiting for Kennicott.

These convictions she presented to Vida Sherwin--Vida
Wutherspoon--beside a radiator, over a bowl of not very good
walnuts and pecans from Uncle Whittier's grocery, on an
evening when both Kennicott and Raymie had gone out of
town with the other officers of the Ancient and Affiliated Order
of Spartans, to inaugurate a new chapter at Wakamin. Vida
had come to the house for the night. She helped in putting
Hugh to bed, sputtering the while about his soft skin. Then
they talked till midnight.

What Carol said that evening, what she was passionately
thinking, was also emerging in the minds of women in ten
thousand Gopher Prairies. Her formulations were not pat
solutions but visions of a tragic futility. She did not utter
them so compactly that they can be given in her words; they
were roughened with "Well, you see" and "if you get what
I mean" and "I don't know that I'm making myself clear."
But they were definite enough, and indignant enough.

III

In reading popular stories and seeing plays, asserted Carol,
she had found only two traditions of the American small town.
The first tradition, repeated in scores of magazines every month,
is that the American village remains the one sure abode of
friendship, honesty, and clean sweet marriageable girls. Therefore
all men who succeed in painting in Paris or in finance in
New York at last become weary of smart women, return
to their native towns, assert that cities are vicious, marry
their childhood sweethearts and, presumably, joyously abide
in those towns until death.

The other tradition is that the significant features of all
villages are whiskers, iron dogs upon lawns, gold bricks,
checkers, jars of gilded cat-tails, and shrewd comic old men
who are known as "hicks" and who ejaculate "Waal I swan."
This altogether admirable tradition rules the vaudeville stage,
facetious illustrators, and syndicated newspaper humor, but
out of actual life it passed forty years ago. Carol's small
town thinks not in hoss-swapping but in cheap motor cars,
telephones, ready-made clothes, silos, alfalfa, kodaks, phonographs,
leather-upholstered Morris chairs, bridge-prizes, oil-
stocks, motion-pictures, land-deals, unread sets of Mark
Twain, and a chaste version of national politics.

With such a small-town life a Kennicott or a Champ Perry
is content, but there are also hundreds of thousands, par-
ticularly women and young men, who are not at all content.
The more intelligent young people (and the fortunate widows!)
flee to the cities with agility and, despite the fictional
tradition, resolutely stay there, seldom returning even for
holidays. The most protesting patriots of the towns leave them
in old age, if they can afford it, and go to live in California
or in the cities.

The reason, Carol insisted, is not a whiskered rusticity. It
is nothing so amusing!

It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a
sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit
by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment. . .
the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the
living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized
as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness.
It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness
made God.

A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting
afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with
inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying
mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and
viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.

IV

She had inquired as to the effect of this dominating
dullness upon foreigners. She remembered the feeble exotic
quality to be found in the first-generation Scandinavians; she
recalled the Norwegian Fair at the Lutheran Church, to
which Bea had taken her. There, in the bondestue, the replica
of a Norse farm kitchen, pale women in scarlet jackets
embroidered with gold thread and colored beads, in black skirts
with a line of blue, green-striped aprons, and ridged caps very
pretty to set off a fresh face, had served rommegrod og lefse--
sweet cakes and sour milk pudding spiced with cinnamon.
For the first time in Gopher Prairie Carol had found novelty.
She had reveled in the mild foreignness of it.

But she saw these Scandinavian women zealously exchanging
their spiced puddings and red jackets for fried pork chops
and congealed white blouses, trading the ancient Christmas
hymns of the fjords for "She's My Jazzland Cutie," being
Americanized into uniformity, and in less than a generation
losing in the grayness whatever pleasant new customs they
might have added to the life of the town. Their sons finished
the process. In ready-made clothes and ready-made high-
school phrases they sank into propriety, and the sound American
customs had absorbed without one trace of pollution
another alien invasion.

And along with these foreigners, she felt herself being ironed
into glossy mediocrity, and she rebelled, in fear.

The respectability of the Gopher Prairies, said Carol, is
reinforced by vows of poverty and chastity in the matter of
knowledge. Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens
are proud of that achievement of ignorance which it is so easy
to come by. To be "intellectual" or "artistic" or, in their
own word, to be "highbrow," is to be priggish and of dubious
virtue.

Large experiments in politics and in co-operative distribution,
ventures requiring knowledge, courage, and imagination, do
originate in the West and Middlewest, but they are not of
the towns, they are of the farmers. If these heresies are
supported by the townsmen it is only by occasional teachers
doctors, lawyers, the labor unions, and workmen like Miles
Bjornstam, who are punished by being mocked as "cranks,"
as "half-baked parlor socialists." The editor and the rector
preach at them. The cloud of serene ignorance submerges
them in unhappiness and futility.

V

Here Vida observed, "Yes--well---- Do you know, I've
always thought that Ray would have made a wonderful rector.
He has what I call an essentially religious soul. My! He'd
have read the service beautifully! I suppose it's too late now,
but as I tell him, he can also serve the world by selling shoes
and---- I wonder if we oughtn't to have family-prayers?"

VI

Doubtless all small towns, in all countries, in all ages,
Carol admitted, have a tendency to be not only dull but
mean, bitter, infested with curiosity. In France or Tibet quite
as much as in Wyoming or Indiana these timidities are
inherent in isolation.

But a village in a country which is taking pains to become
altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed
Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no
longer merely provinci