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Title: The Garotters

Author: William D. Howells

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To James Branch Cabell
and Joseph Hergesheimer



This is America--a town of a few thousand,
in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves.

The town is,
in our tale,
called
"Gopher Prairie,
Minnesota."

But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere.

The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana,
in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois,
and not very differently would it be told Up York State or in the Carolina hills.

Main Street is the climax of civilization.

That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store,
Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters.

What Ole Jenson the grocer says
to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law
for London,
Prague,
and the unprofitable isles of the sea;
whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction,
that thing is heresy,
worthless
for knowing and wicked
to consider.

Our railway station is the final aspiration of architecture.

Sam Clark's annual hardware turnover is the envy of the four counties which constitute God's Country.

In the sensitive art of the Rosebud Movie Palace there is a Message,
and humor strictly moral.

Such is our comfortable tradition and sure faith.

Would he not betray himself an alien cynic who should otherwise portray Main Street,
or distress the citizens by speculating whether there may not be other faiths?

CHAPTER I I ON a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago,
a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky.

She saw no Indians now;
she saw flour- mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Nor was she thinking of squaws and portages,
and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her.

She was meditating upon walnut fudge,
the plays of Brieux,
the reasons why heels run over,
and the fact that the chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears.

A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful,
so full of animation and moving beauty,
that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened
to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom.

She lifted her arms,
she leaned back against the wind,
her skirt dipped and flared,
a lock blew wild.

A girl on a hilltop;
credulous,
plastic,
young;
drinking the air as she longed
to drink life.

The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth.

It is Carol Milford,
fleeing
for an hour from Blodgett College.

The days of pioneering,
of lassies in sunbonnets,
and bears killed
with axes in piney clearings,
are deader now than Camelot;
and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest.

II Blodgett College is on the edge of Minneapolis.

It is a bulwark of sound religion.

It is still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire,
Darwin,
and Robert Ingersoll.

Pious families in Minnesota,
Iowa,
Wisconsin,
the Dakotas send their children thither,
and Blodgett protects them from the wickedness of the universities.

But it secretes friendly girls,
young men who sing,
and one lady instructress who really likes Milton and Carlyle.

So the four years which Carol spent at Blodgett were not altogether wasted.

The smallness of the school,
the fewness of rivals,
permitted her
to experiment
with her perilous versatility.

She played tennis,
gave chafing-dish parties,
took a graduate seminar in the drama,
went
"twosing,"
and joined half a dozen societies
for the practise of the arts or the tense stalking of a thing called General Culture.

In her class there were two or three prettier girls,
but none more eager.

She was noticeable equally in the classroom grind and at dances,
though out of the three hundred students of Blodgett,
scores recited more accurately and dozens Bostoned more smoothly.

Every cell of her body was alive--thin wrists,
quince-blossom skin,
ingenue eyes,
black hair.

The other girls in her dormitory marveled at the slightness of her body when they saw her in sheer negligee,
or darting out wet from a shower-bath.

She seemed then but half as large as they had supposed;
a fragile child who must be cloaked
with understanding kindness.

"Psychic,"
the girls whispered,
and
"spiritual."

Yet so radioactive were her nerves,
so adventurous her trust in rather vaguely conceived sweetness and light,
that she was more energetic than any of the hulking young women who,
with calves bulging in heavy-ribbed woolen stockings beneath decorous blue serge bloomers,
thuddingly galloped across the floor of the
"gym"
in practise
for the Blodgett Ladies'
Basket-Ball Team.

Even when she was tired her dark eyes were observant.

She did not yet know the immense ability of the world
to be casually cruel and proudly dull,
but if she should ever learn those dismaying powers,
her eyes would never become sullen or heavy or rheumily amorous.

For all her enthusiasms,
for all the fondness and the
"crushes"
which she inspired,
Carol's acquaintances were shy of her.

When she was most ardently singing hymns or planning deviltry she yet seemed gently aloof and critical.

She was credulous,
perhaps;
a born hero-worshipper;
yet she did question and examine unceasingly.

Whatever she might become she would never be static.

Her versatility ensnared her.

By turns she hoped
to discover that she had an unusual voice,
a talent
for the piano,
the ability
to act,
to write,
to manage organizations.

Always she was disappointed,
but always she effervesced anew--over the Student Volunteers,
who intended
to become missionaries,
over painting scenery
for the dramatic club,
over soliciting advertisements
for the college magazine.

She was on the peak that Sunday afternoon when she played in chapel.

Out of the dusk her violin took up the organ theme,
and the candle-light revealed her in a straight golden frock,
her arm arched
to the bow,
her lips serious.

Every man fell in love then
with religion and Carol.

Throughout Senior year she anxiously related all her experiments and partial successes
to a career.

Daily,
on the library steps or in the hall of the Main Building,
the co-eds talked of
"What shall we do when we finish college?"
Even the girls who knew that they were going
to be married pretended
to be considering important business positions;
even they who knew that they would have
to work hinted about fabulous suitors.

As
for Carol,
she was an orphan;
her only near relative was a vanilla-flavored sister married
to an optician in St. Paul.

She had used most of the money from her father's estate.

She was not in love--that is,
not often,
nor ever long at a time.

She would earn her living.

But how she was
to earn it,
how she was
to conquer the world--almost entirely
for the world's own good--she did not see.

Most of the girls who were not betrothed meant
to be teachers.

Of these there were two sorts:

careless young women who admitted that they intended
to leave the
"beastly classroom and grubby children"
the minute they had a chance
to marry;
and studious,
sometimes bulbous-browed and pop- eyed maidens who at class prayer-meetings requested God to
"guide their feet along the paths of greatest usefulness."

Neither sort tempted Carol.

The former seemed insincere
(a favorite word of hers at this era).

The earnest virgins were,
she fancied,
as likely
to do harm as
to do good by their faith in the value of parsing Caesar.

At various times during Senior year Carol finally decided upon studying law,
writing motion-picture scenarios,
professional nursing,
and marrying an unidentified hero.

Then she found a hobby in sociology.

The sociology instructor was new.

He was married,
and therefore taboo,
but he had come from Boston,
he had lived among poets and socialists and Jews and millionaire uplifters at the University Settlement in New York,
and he had a beautiful white strong neck.

He led a giggling class through the prisons,
the charity bureaus,
the employment agencies of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Trailing at the end of the line Carol was indignant at the prodding curiosity of the others,
their manner of staring at the poor as at a Zoo.

She felt herself a great liberator.

She put her hand
to her mouth,
her forefinger and thumb quite painfully pinching her lower lip,
and frowned,
and enjoyed being aloof.

A classmate named Stewart Snyder,
a competent bulky young man in a gray flannel shirt,
a rusty black bow tie,
and the green-and-purple class cap,
grumbled
to her as they walked behind the others in the muck of the South St. Paul stockyards,
"These college chumps make me tired.

They're so top-lofty.

They ought
to of worked on the farm,
the way I have.

These workmen put it all over them."

"I just love common workmen,"
glowed Carol.

"Only you don't want
to forget that common workmen don't think they're common!"
"You're right! I apologize!"
Carol's brows lifted in the astonishment of emotion,
in a glory of abasement.

Her eyes mothered the world.

Stewart Snyder peered at her.

He rammed his large red fists into his pockets,
he jerked them out,
he resolutely got rid of them by clenching his hands behind him,
and he stammered:

"I know.

You get people.

Most of these darn co-eds---- Say,
Carol,
you could do a lot
for people."

"Oh--oh well--you know--sympathy and everything--if you were--say you were a lawyer's wife.

You'd understand his clients.

I'm going
to be a lawyer.

I admit I fall down in sympathy sometimes.

I get so dog-gone impatient
with people that can't stand the gaff.

You'd be good
for a fellow that was too serious.

Make him more--more--YOU know--sympathetic!"
His slightly pouting lips,
his mastiff eyes,
were begging her
to beg him
to go on.

She fled from the steam-roller of his sentiment.

She cried,
"Oh,
see those poor sheep--millions and millions of them."

She darted on.

Stewart was not interesting.

He hadn't a shapely white neck,
and he had never lived among celebrated reformers.

She wanted,
just now,
to have a cell in a settlement-house,
like a nun without the bother of a black robe,
and be kind,
and read Bernard Shaw,
and enormously improve a horde of grateful poor.

The supplementary reading in sociology led her
to a book on village-improvement--tree-planting,
town pageants,
girls'
clubs.

It had pictures of greens and garden-walls in France,
New England,
Pennsylvania.

She had picked it up carelessly,
with a slight yawn which she patted down
with her finger-tips as delicately as a cat.

She dipped into the book,
lounging on her window-seat,
with her slim,
lisle-stockinged legs crossed,
and her knees up under her chin.

She stroked a satin pillow while she read.

About her was the clothy exuberance of a Blodgett College room:

cretonne-covered window-seat,
photographs of girls,
a carbon print of the Coliseum,
a chafing-dish,
and a dozen pillows embroidered or beaded or pyrographed.

Shockingly out of place was a miniature of the Dancing Bacchante.

It was the only trace of Carol in the room.

She had inherited the rest from generations of girl students.

It was as a part of all this commonplaceness that she regarded the treatise on village-improvement.

But she suddenly stopped fidgeting.

She strode into the book.

She had fled half-way through it before the three o'clock bell called her
to the class in English history.

She sighed,
"That's what I'll do after college! I'll get my hands on one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful.

Be an inspiration.

I suppose I'd better become a teacher then,
but--I won't be that kind of a teacher.

I won't drone.

Why should they have all the garden suburbs on Long Island?

Nobody has done anything
with the ugly towns here in the Northwest except hold revivals and build libraries
to contain the Elsie books.

I'll make
'em put in a village green,
and darling cottages,
and a quaint Main Street!"
Thus she triumphed through the class,
which was a typical Blodgett contest between a dreary teacher and unwilling children of twenty,
won by the teacher because his opponents had
to answer his questions,
while their treacherous queries he could counter by demanding,
"Have you looked that up in the library?

Well then,
suppose you do!"
The history instructor was a retired minister.

He was sarcastic today.

He begged of sporting young Mr. Charley Holmberg,
"Now Charles,
would it interrupt your undoubtedly fascinating pursuit of that malevolent fly if I were
to ask you
to tell us that you do not know anything about King John?"
He spent three delightful minutes in assuring himself of the fact that no one exactly remembered the date of Magna Charta.

Carol did not hear him.

She was completing the roof of a half-timbered town hall.

She had found one man in the prairie village who did not appreciate her picture of winding streets and arcades,
but she had assembled the town council and dramatically defeated him.

III Though she was Minnesota-born Carol was not an intimate of the prairie villages.

Her father,
the smiling and shabby,
the learned and teasingly kind,
had come from Massachusetts,
and through all her childhood he had been a judge in Mankato,
which is not a prairie town,
but in its garden-sheltered streets and aisles of elms is white and green New England reborn.

Mankato lies between cliffs and the Minnesota River,
hard by Traverse des Sioux,
where the first settlers made treaties
with the Indians,
and the cattle-rustlers once came galloping before hell-for-leather posses.

As she climbed along the banks of the dark river Carol listened
to its fables about the wide land of yellow waters and bleached buffalo bones
to the West;
the Southern levees and singing darkies and palm trees toward which it was forever mysteriously gliding;
and she heard again the startled bells and thick puffing of high-stacked river steamers wrecked on sand-reefs sixty years ago.

Along the decks she saw missionaries,
gamblers in tall pot hats,
and Dakota chiefs
with scarlet blankets.

.

.

.

Far off whistles at night,
round the river bend,
plunking paddles reechoed by the pines,
and a glow on black sliding waters.

Carol's family were self-sufficient in their inventive life,
with Christmas a rite full of surprises and tenderness,
and
"dressing-up parties"
spontaneous and joyously absurd.

The beasts in the Milford hearth-mythology were not the obscene Night Animals who jump out of closets and eat little girls,
but beneficent and bright-eyed creatures--the tam htab,
who is woolly and blue and lives in the bathroom,
and runs rapidly
to warm small feet;
the ferruginous oil stove,
who purrs and knows stories;
and the skitamarigg,
who will play
with children before breakfast if they spring out of bed and close the window at the very first line of the song about puellas which father sings while shaving.

Judge Milford's pedagogical scheme was
to let the children read whatever they pleased,
and in his brown library Carol absorbed Balzac and Rabelais and Thoreau and Max Muller.

He gravely taught them the letters on the backs of the encyclopedias,
and when polite visitors asked about the mental progress of the
"little ones,"
they were horrified
to hear the children earnestly repeating A-And,
And-Aus,
Aus-Bis,
Bis-Cal,
Cal-Cha.

Carol's mother died when she was nine.

Her father retired from the judiciary when she was eleven,
and took the family
to Minneapolis.

There he died,
two years after.

Her sister,
a busy proper advisory soul,
older than herself,
had become a stranger
to her even when they lived in the same house.

From those early brown and silver days and from her independence of relatives Carol retained a willingness
to be different from brisk efficient book-ignoring people;
an instinct
to observe and wonder at their bustle even when she was taking part in it.

But,
she felt approvingly,
as she discovered her career of town-planning,
she was now roused
to being brisk and efficient herself.

IV In a month Carol's ambition had clouded.

Her hesitancy about becoming a teacher had returned.

She was not,
she worried,
strong enough
to endure the routine,
and she could not picture herself standing before grinning children and pretending
to be wise and decisive.

But the desire
for the creation of a beautiful town remained.

When she encountered an item about small-town women's clubs or a photograph of a straggling Main Street,
she was homesick
for it,
she felt robbed of her work.

It was the advice of the professor of English which led her
to study professional library-work in a Chicago school.

Her imagination carved and colored the new plan.

She saw herself persuading children
to read charming fairy tales,
helping young men
to find books on mechanics,
being ever so courteous
to old men who were hunting
for newspapers--the light of the library,
an authority on books,
invited
to dinners
with poets and explorers,
reading a paper
to an association of distinguished scholars.

V The last faculty reception before commencement.

In five days they would be in the cyclone of final examinations.

The house of the president had been massed
with palms suggestive of polite undertaking parlors,
and in the library,
a ten-foot room
with a globe and the portraits of Whittier and Martha Washington,
the student orchestra was playing
"Carmen"
and
"Madame Butterfly."

Carol was dizzy
with music and the emotions of parting.

She saw the palms as a jungle,
the pink-shaded electric globes as an opaline haze,
and the eye-glassed faculty as Olympians.

She was melancholy at sight of the mousey girls
with whom she had
"always intended
to get acquainted,"
and the half dozen young men who were ready
to fall in love
with her.

But it was Stewart Snyder whom she encouraged.

He was so much manlier than the others;
he was an even warm brown,
like his new ready-made suit
with its padded shoulders.

She sat
with him,
and
with two cups of coffee and a chicken patty,
upon a pile of presidential overshoes in the coat-closet under the stairs,
and as the thin music seeped in,
Stewart whispered:

"I can't stand it,
this breaking up after four years! The happiest years of life."

She believed it.

"Oh,
I know!
to think that in just a few days we'll be parting,
and we'll never see some of the bunch again!"
"Carol,
you got
to listen
to me! You always duck when I try
to talk seriously
to you,
but you got
to listen
to me.

I'm going
to be a big lawyer,
maybe a judge,
and I need you,
and I'd protect you----"
His arm slid behind her shoulders.

The insinuating music drained her independence.

She said mournfully,
"Would you take care of me?"
She touched his hand.

It was warm,
solid.

"You bet I would! We'd have,
Lord,
we'd have bully times in Yankton,
where I'm going
to settle----"
"But I want
to do something
with life."

"What's better than making a comfy home and bringing up some cute kids and knowing nice homey people?"
It was the immemorial male reply
to the restless woman.

Thus
to the young Sappho spake the melon-venders;
thus the captains
to Zenobia;
and in the damp cave over gnawed bones the hairy suitor thus protested
to the woman advocate of matriarchy.

In the dialect of Blodgett College but
with the voice of Sappho was Carol's answer:

"Of course.

I know.

I suppose that's so.

Honestly,
I do love children.

But there's lots of women that can do housework,
but I--well,
if you HAVE got a college education,
you ought
to use it
for the world."

"I know,
but you can use it just as well in the home.

And gee,
Carol,
just think of a bunch of us going out on an auto picnic,
some nice spring evening."

"Yes."

"And sleigh-riding in winter,
and going fishing----"
Blarrrrrrr! The orchestra had crashed into the
"Soldiers'
Chorus";
and she was protesting,
"No! No! You're a dear,
but I want
to do things.

I don't understand myself but I want-- everything in the world! Maybe I can't sing or write,
but I know I can be an influence in library work.

Just suppose I encouraged some boy and he became a great artist! I will! I will do it! Stewart dear,
I can't settle down
to nothing but dish-washing!"
Two minutes later--two hectic minutes--they were disturbed by an embarrassed couple also seeking the idyllic seclusion of the overshoe-closet.

After graduation she never saw Stewart Snyder again.

She wrote
to him once a week--for one month.

VI A year Carol spent in Chicago.

Her study of library- cataloguing,
recording,
books of reference,
was easy and not too somniferous.

She reveled in the Art Institute,
in symphonies and violin recitals and chamber music,
in the theater and classic dancing.

She almost gave up library work
to become one of the young women who dance in cheese-cloth in the moonlight.

She was taken
to a certified Studio Party,
with beer,
cigarettes.

bobbed hair,
and a Russian Jewess who sang the Internationale.

It cannot be reported that Carol had anything significant
to say
to the Bohemians.

She was awkward
with them,
and felt ignorant,
and she was shocked by the free manners which she had
for years desired.

But she heard and remembered discussions of Freud,
Romain Rolland,
syndicalism,
the Confederation Generale du Travail,
feminism vs.

haremism,
Chinese lyrics,
nationalization of mines,
Christian Science,
and fishing in Ontario.

She went home,
and that was the beginning and end of her Bohemian life.

The second cousin of Carol's sister's husband lived in Winnetka,
and once invited her out
to Sunday dinner.

She walked back through Wilmette and Evanston,
discovered new forms of suburban architecture,
and remembered her desire
to recreate villages.

She decided that she would give up library work and,
by a miracle whose nature was not very clearly revealed
to her,
turn a prairie town into Georgian houses and Japanese bungalows.

The next day in library class she had
to read a theme on the use of the Cumulative Index,
and she was taken so seriously in the discussion that she put off her career of town-planning-- and in the autumn she was in the public library of St. Paul.

VII Carol was not unhappy and she was not exhilarated,
in the St. Paul Library.

She slowly confessed that she was not visibly affecting lives.

She did,
at first,
put into her contact
with the patrons a willingness which should have moved worlds.

But so few of these stolid worlds wanted
to be moved.

When she was in charge of the magazine room the readers did not ask
for suggestions about elevated essays.

They grunted,
"Wanta find the Leather Goods Gazette
for last February."

When she was giving out books the principal query was,
"Can you tell me of a good,
light,
exciting love story
to read?

My husband's going away
for a week."

She was fond of the other librarians;
proud of their aspirations.

And by the chance of propinquity she read scores of books unnatural
to her gay white littleness:

volumes of anthropology
with ditches of foot-notes filled
with heaps of small dusty type,
Parisian imagistes,
Hindu recipes
for curry,
voyages
to the Solomon Isles,
theosophy
with modern American improvements,
treatises upon success in the real-estate business.

She took walks,
and was sensible about shoes and diet.

And never did she feel that she was living.

She went
to dances and suppers at the houses of college acquaintances.

Sometimes she one-stepped demurely;
sometimes,
in dread of life's slipping past,
she turned into a bacchanal,
her tender eyes excited,
her throat tense,
as she slid down the room.

During her three years of library work several men showed diligent interest in her--the treasurer of a fur-manufacturing firm,
a teacher,
a newspaper reporter,
and a petty railroad official.

None of them made her more than pause in thought.

For months no male emerged from the mass.

Then,
at the Marburys',
she met Dr. Will Kennicott.

CHAPTER II IT was a frail and blue and lonely Carol who trotted
to the flat of the Johnson Marburys
for Sunday evening supper.

Mrs. Marbury was a neighbor and friend of Carol's sister;
Mr. Marbury a traveling representative of an insurance company.

They made a specialty of sandwich-salad-coffee lap suppers,
and they regarded Carol as their literary and artistic representative.

She was the one who could be depended upon
to appreciate the Caruso phonograph record,
and the Chinese lantern which Mr. Marbury had brought back as his present from San Francisco.

Carol found the Marburys admiring and therefore admirable.

This September Sunday evening she wore a net frock
with a pale pink lining.

A nap had soothed away the faint lines of tiredness beside her eyes.

She was young,
naive,
stimulated by the coolness.

She flung her coat at the chair in the hall of the flat,
and exploded into the green-plush living-room.

The familiar group were trying
to be conversational.

She saw Mr. Marbury,
a woman teacher of gymnastics in a high school,
a chief clerk from the Great Northern Railway offices,
a young lawyer.

But there was also a stranger,
a thick tall man of thirty-six or -seven,
with stolid brown hair,
lips used
to giving orders,
eyes which followed everything good-naturedly,
and clothes which you could never quite remember.

Mr. Marbury boomed,
"Carol,
come over here and meet Doc Kennicott--Dr. Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie.

He does all our insurance-examining up in that neck of the woods,
and they do say he's some doctor!"
As she edged toward the stranger and murmured nothing in particular,
Carol remembered that Gopher Prairie was a Minnesota wheat-prairie town of something over three thousand people.

"Pleased
to meet you,"
stated Dr. Kennicott.

His hand was strong;
the palm soft,
but the back weathered,
showing golden hairs against firm red skin.

He looked at her as though she was an agreeable discovery.

She tugged her hand free and fluttered,
"I must go out
to the kitchen and help Mrs. Marbury."

She did not speak
to him again till,
after she had heated the rolls and passed the paper napkins,
Mr. Marbury captured her
with a loud,
"Oh,
quit fussing now.

Come over here and sit down and tell us how's tricks."

He herded her
to a sofa
with Dr. Kennicott,
who was rather vague about the eyes,
rather drooping of bulky shoulder,
as though he was wondering what he was expected
to do next.

As their host left them,
Kennicott awoke:

"Marbury tells me you're a high mogul in the public library.

I was surprised.

Didn't hardly think you were old enough I thought you were a girl,
still in college maybe."

"Oh,
I'm dreadfully old.

I expect
to take
to a lip-stick,
and
to find a gray hair any morning now."

"Huh! You must be frightfully old--prob'ly too old
to be my granddaughter,
I guess!"
Thus in the Vale of Arcady nymph and satyr beguiled the hours;
precisely thus,
and not in honeyed pentameters,
discoursed Elaine and the worn Sir Launcelot in the pleached alley.

"How do you like your work?"
asked the doctor.

"It's pleasant,
but sometimes I feel shut off from things-- the steel stacks,
and the everlasting cards smeared all over
with red rubber stamps."

"Don't you get sick of the city?"
"St.

Paul?

Why,
don't you like it?

I don't know of any lovelier view than when you stand on Summit Avenue and look across Lower Town
to the Mississippi cliffs and the upland farms beyond."

"I know but---- Of course I've spent nine years around the Twin Cities--took my B.A.

and M.D.

over at the U.,
and had my internship in a hospital in Minneapolis,
but still,
oh well,
you don't get
to know folks here,
way you do up home.

I feel I've got something
to say about running Gopher Prairie,
but you take it in a big city of two-three hundred thousand,
and I'm just one flea on the dog's back.

And then I like country driving,
and the hunting in the fall.

Do you know Gopher Prairie at all?"
"No,
but I hear it's a very nice town."

"Nice?

Say honestly---- Of course I may be prejudiced,
but I've seen an awful lot of towns--one time I went
to Atlantic City
for the American Medical Association meeting,
and I spent practically a week in New York! But I never saw a town that had such up-and-coming people as Gopher Prairie.

Bresnahan--you know--the famous auto manufacturer--he comes from Gopher Prairie.

Born and brought up there! And it's a darn pretty town.

Lots of fine maples and box- elders,
and there's two of the dandiest lakes you ever saw,
right near town! And we've got seven miles of cement walks already,
and building more every day! Course a lot of these towns still put up
with plank walks,
but not
for us,
you bet!"
"Really?"
(Why was she thinking of Stewart Snyder?)
"Gopher Prairie is going
to have a great future.

Some of the best dairy and wheat land in the state right near there--some of it selling right now at one-fifty an acre,
and I bet it will go up
to two and a quarter in ten years!"
"Is---- Do you like your profession?"
"Nothing like it.

Keeps you out,
and yet you have a chance
to loaf in the office
for a change."

"I don't mean that way.

I mean--it's such an opportunity
for sympathy."

Dr. Kennicott launched into a heavy,
"Oh,
these Dutch farmers don't want sympathy.

All they need is a bath and a good dose of salts."

Carol must have flinched,
for instantly he was urging,
"What I mean is--I don't want you
to think I'm one of these old salts-and-quinine peddlers,
but I mean:

so many of my patients are husky farmers that I suppose I get kind of case- hardened."

"It seems
to me that a doctor could transform a whole community,
if he wanted to--if he saw it.

He's usually the only man in the neighborhood who has any scientific training,
isn't he?"
"Yes,
that's so,
but I guess most of us get rusty.

We land in a rut of obstetrics and typhoid and busted legs.

What we need is women like you
to jump on us.

It'd be you that would transform the town."

"No,
I couldn't.

Too flighty.

I did used
to think about doing just that,
curiously enough,
but I seem
to have drifted away from the idea.

Oh,
I'm a fine one
to be lecturing you!"
"No! You're just the one.

You have ideas without having lost feminine charm.

Say! Don't you think there's a lot of these women that go out
for all these movements and so on that sacrifice----"
After his remarks upon suffrage he abruptly questioned her about herself.

His kindliness and the firmness of his personality enveloped her and she accepted him as one who had a right
to know what she thought and wore and ate and read.

He was positive.

He had grown from a sketched-in stranger
to a friend,
whose gossip was important news.

She noticed the healthy solidity of his chest.

His nose,
which had seemed irregular and large,
was suddenly virile.

She was jarred out of this serious sweetness when Marbury bounced over
to them and
with horrible publicity yammered,
"Say,
what do you two think you're doing?

Telling fortunes or making love?

Let me warn you that the doc is a frisky bacheldore,
Carol.

Come on now,
folks,
shake a leg.

Let's have some stunts or a dance or something."

She did not have another word
with Dr. Kennicott until their parting:

"Been a great pleasure
to meet you,
Miss Milford.

May I see you some time when I come down again?

I'm here quite often--taking patients
to hospitals
for majors,
and so on."

"Why----"
"What's your address?"
"You can ask Mr. Marbury next time you come down--if you really want
to know!"
"Want
to know?

Say,
you wait!"
II Of the love-making of Carol and Will Kennicott there is nothing
to be told which may not be heard on every summer evening,
on every shadowy block.

They were biology and mystery;
their speech was slang phrases and flares of poetry;
their silences were contentment,
or shaky crises when his arm took her shoulder.

All the beauty of youth,
first discovered when it is passing--and all the commonplaceness of a well-to-do unmarried man encountering a pretty girl at the time when she is slightly weary of her employment and sees no glory ahead nor any man she is glad
to serve.

They liked each other honestly--they were both honest.

She was disappointed by his devotion
to making money,
but she was sure that he did not lie
to patients,
and that he did keep up
with the medical magazines.

What aroused her
to something more than liking was his boyishness when they went tramping.

They walked from St. Paul down the river
to Mendota,
Kennicott more elastic-seeming in a cap and a soft crepe shirt,
Carol youthful in a tam-o'-shanter of mole velvet,
a blue serge suit
with an absurdly and agreeably broad turn-down linen collar,
and frivolous ankles above athletic shoes.

The High Bridge crosses the Mississippi,
mounting from low banks
to a palisade of cliffs.

Far down beneath it on the St. Paul side,
upon mud flats,
is a wild settlement of chicken-infested gardens and shanties patched together from discarded sign-boards,
sheets of corrugated iron,
and planks fished out of the river.

Carol leaned over the rail of the bridge
to look down at this Yang-tse village;
in delicious imaginary fear she shrieked that she was dizzy
with the height;
and it was an extremely human satisfaction
to have a strong male snatch her back
to safety,
instead of having a logical woman teacher or librarian sniff,
"Well,
if you're scared,
why don't you get away from the rail,
then?"
From the cliffs across the river Carol and Kennicott looked back at St. Paul on its hills;
an imperial sweep from the dome of the cathedral
to the dome of the state capitol.

The river road led past rocky field slopes,
deep glens,
woods flamboyant now
with September,
to Mendota,
white walls and a spire among trees beneath a hill,
old-world in its placid ease.

And
for this fresh land,
the place is ancient.

Here is the bold stone house which General Sibley,
the king of fur-traders,
built in 1835,
with plaster of river mud,
and ropes of twisted grass
for laths.

It has an air of centuries.

In its solid rooms Carol and Kennicott found prints from other days which the house had seen--tail-coats of robin's-egg blue,
clumsy Red River carts laden
with luxurious furs,
whiskered Union soldiers in slant forage caps and rattling sabers.

It suggested
to them a common American past,
and it was memorable because they had discovered it together.

They talked more trustingly,
more personally,
as they trudged on.

They crossed the Minnesota River in a rowboat ferry.

They climbed the hill
to the round stone tower of Fort Snelling.

They saw the junction of the Mississippi and the Minnesota,
and recalled the men who had come here eighty years ago-- Maine lumbermen,
York traders,
soldiers from the Maryland hills.

"It's a good country,
and I'm proud of it.

Let's make it all that those old boys dreamed about,"
the unsentimental Kennicott was moved
to vow.

"Let's!"
"Come on.

Come
to Gopher Prairie.

Show us.

Make the town--well--make it artistic.

It's mighty pretty,
but I'll admit we aren't any too darn artistic.

Probably the lumber- yard isn't as scrumptious as all these Greek temples.

But go
to it! Make us change!"
"I would like to.

Some day!"
"Now! You'd love Gopher Prairie.

We've been doing a lot
with lawns and gardening the past few years,
and it's so homey--the big trees and---- And the best people on earth.

And keen.

I bet Luke Dawson----"
Carol but half listened
to the names.

She could not fancy their ever becoming important
to her.

"I bet Luke Dawson has got more money than most of the swells on Summit Avenue;
and Miss Sherwin in the high school is a regular wonder--reads Latin like I do English;
and Sam Clark,
the hardware man,
he's a corker--not a better man in the state
to go hunting with;
and if you want culture,
besides Vida Sherwin there's Reverend Warren,
the Congregational preacher,
and Professor Mott,
the superintendent of schools,
and Guy Pollock,
the lawyer--they say he writes regular poetry and-- and Raymie Wutherspoon,
he's not such an awful boob when you get
to KNOW him,
and he sings swell.

And---- And there's plenty of others.

Lym Cass.

Only of course none of them have your finesse,
you might call it.

But they don't make
'em any more appreciative and so on.

Come on! We're ready
for you
to boss us!"
They sat on the bank below the parapet of the old fort,
hidden from observation.

He circled her shoulder
with his arm.

Relaxed after the walk,
a chill nipping her throat,
conscious of his warmth and power,
she leaned gratefully against him.

"You know I'm in love
with you,
Carol!"
She did not answer,
but she touched the back of his hand
with an exploring finger.

"You say I'm so darn materialistic.

How can I help it,
unless I have you
to stir me up?"
She did not answer.

She could not think.

"You say a doctor could cure a town the way he does a person.

Well,
you cure the town of whatever ails it,
if anything does,
and I'll be your surgical kit."

She did not follow his words,
only the burring resoluteness of them.

She was shocked,
thrilled,
as he kissed her cheek and cried,
"There's no use saying things and saying things and saying things.

Don't my arms talk
to you--now?"
"Oh,
please,
please!"
She wondered if she ought
to be angry,
but it was a drifting thought,
and she discovered that she was crying.

Then they were sitting six inches apart,
pretending that they had never been nearer,
while she tried
to be impersonal:

"I would like to--would like
to see Gopher Prairie."

"Trust me! Here she is! Brought some snapshots down
to show you."

Her cheek near his sleeve,
she studied a dozen village pictures.

They were streaky;
she saw only trees,
shrubbery,
a porch indistinct in leafy shadows.

But she exclaimed over the lakes:

dark water reflecting wooded bluffs,
a flight of ducks,
a fisherman in shirt sleeves and a wide straw hat,
holding up a string of croppies.

One winter picture of the edge of Plover Lake had the air of an etching:

lustrous slide of ice,
snow in the crevices of a boggy bank,
the mound of a muskrat house,
reeds in thin black lines,
arches of frosty grasses.

It was an impression of cool clear vigor.

"How'd it be
to skate there
for a couple of hours,
or go zinging along on a fast ice-boat,
and skip back home
for coffee and some hot wienies?"
he demanded.

"It might be--fun."

"But here's the picture.

Here's where you come in."

A photograph of a forest clearing:

pathetic new furrows straggling among stumps,
a clumsy log cabin chinked
with mud and roofed
with hay.

In front of it a sagging woman
with tight-drawn hair,
and a baby bedraggled,
smeary,
glorious- eyed.

"Those are the kind of folks I practise among,
good share of the time.

Nels Erdstrom,
fine clean young Svenska.

He'll have a corking farm in ten years,
but now---- I operated his wife on a kitchen table,
with my driver giving the anesthetic.

Look at that scared baby! Needs some woman
with hands like yours.

Waiting
for you! Just look at that baby's eyes,
look how he's begging----"
"Don't! They hurt me.

Oh,
it would be sweet
to help him--so sweet."

As his arms moved toward her she answered all her doubts with
"Sweet,
so sweet."

CHAPTER III UNDER the rolling clouds of the prairie a moving mass of steel.

An irritable clank and rattle beneath a prolonged roar.

The sharp scent of oranges cutting the soggy smell of unbathed people and ancient baggage.

Towns as planless as a scattering of pasteboard boxes on an attic floor.

The stretch of faded gold stubble broken only by clumps of willows encircling white houses and red barns.

No.

7,
the way train,
grumbling through Minnesota,
imperceptibly climbing the giant tableland that slopes in a thousand-mile rise from hot Mississippi bottoms
to the Rockies.

It is September,
hot,
very dusty.

There is no smug Pullman attached
to the train,
and the day coaches of the East are replaced by free chair cars,
with each seat cut into two adjustable plush chairs,
the head-rests covered
with doubtful linen towels.

Halfway down the car is a semi-partition of carved oak columns,
but the aisle is of bare,
splintery,
grease-blackened wood.

There is no porter,
no pillows,
no provision
for beds,
but all today and all tonight they will ride in this long steel box-farmers
with perpetually tired wives and children who seem all
to be of the same age;
workmen going
to new jobs;
traveling salesmen
with derbies and freshly shined shoes.

They are parched and cramped,
the lines of their hands filled
with grime;
they go
to sleep curled in distorted attitudes,
heads against the window-panes or propped on rolled coats on seat- arms,
and legs thrust into the aisle.

They do not read;
apparently they do not think.

They wait.

An early-wrinkled,
young-old mother,
moving as though her joints were dry,
opens a suit-case in which are seen creased blouses,
a pair of slippers worn through at the toes,
a bottle of patent medicine,
a tin cup,
a paper-covered book about dreams which the news- butcher has coaxed her into buying.

She brings out a graham cracker which she feeds
to a baby lying flat on a seat and wailing hopelessly.

Most of the crumbs drop on the red plush of the seat,
and the woman sighs and tries
to brush them away,
but they leap up impishly and fall back on the plush.

A soiled man and woman munch sandwiches and throw the crusts on the floor.

A large brick-colored Norwegian takes off his shoes,
grunts in relief,
and props his feet in their thick gray socks against the seat in front of him.

An old woman whose toothless mouth shuts like a mud- turtle's,
and whose hair is not so much white as yellow like moldy linen,
with bands of pink skull apparent between the tresses,
anxiously lifts her bag,
opens it,
peers in,
closes it,
puts it under the seat,
and hastily picks it up and opens it and hides it all over again.

The bag is full of treasures and of memories:

a leather buckle,
an ancient band-concert program,
scraps of ribbon,
lace,
satin.

In the aisle beside her is an extremely indignant parrakeet in a cage.

Two facing seats,
overflowing
with a Slovene iron-miner's family,
are littered
with shoes,
dolls,
whisky bottles,
bundles wrapped in newspapers,
a sewing bag.

The oldest boy takes a mouth-organ out of his coat pocket,
wipes the tobacco crumbs off,
and plays
"Marching through Georgia"
till every head in the car begins
to ache.

The news-butcher comes through selling chocolate bars and lemon drops.

A girl-child ceaselessly trots down
to the water- cooler and back
to her seat.

The stiff paper envelope which she uses
for cup drips in the aisle as she goes,
and on each trip she stumbles over the feet of a carpenter,
who grunts,
"Ouch! Look out!"
The dust-caked doors are open,
and from the smoking-car drifts back a visible blue line of stinging tobacco smoke,
and
with it a crackle of laughter over the story which the young man in the bright blue suit and lavender tie and light yellow shoes has just told
to the squat man in garage overalls.

The smell grows constantly thicker,
more stale.

II
to each of the passengers his seat was his temporary home,
and most of the passengers were slatternly housekeepers.

But one seat looked clean and deceptively cool.

In it were an obviously prosperous man and a black-haired,
fine-skinned girl whose pumps rested on an immaculate horsehide bag.

They were Dr. Will Kennicott and his bride,
Carol.

They had been married at the end of a year of conversational courtship,
and they were on their way
to Gopher Prairie after a wedding journey in the Colorado mountains.

The hordes of the way-train were not altogether new
to Carol.

She had seen them on trips from St. Paul
to Chicago.

But now that they had become her own people,
to bathe and encourage and adorn,
she had an acute and uncomfortable interest in them.

They distressed her.

They were so stolid.

She had always maintained that there is no American peasantry,
and she sought now
to defend her faith by seeing imagination and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers,
and in a traveling man working over his order-blanks.

But the older people,
Yankees as well as Norwegians,
Germans,
Finns,
Canucks,
had settled into submission
to poverty.

They were peasants,
she groaned.

"Isn't there any way of waking them up?

What would happen if they understood scientific agriculture?"
she begged of Kennicott,
her hand groping
for his.

It had been a transforming honeymoon.

She had been frightened
to discover how tumultuous a feeling could be roused in her.

Will had been lordly--stalwart,
jolly,
impressively competent in making camp,
tender and understanding through the hours when they had lain side by side in a tent pitched among pines high up on a lonely mountain spur.

His hand swallowed hers as he started from thoughts of the practise
to which he was returning.

"These people?

Wake
'em up?

What for?

They're happy."

"But they're so provincial.

No,
that isn't what I mean.

They're--oh,
so sunk in the mud."

"Look here,
Carrie.

You want
to get over your city idea that because a man's pants aren't pressed,
he's a fool.

These farmers are mighty keen and up-and-coming."

"I know! That's what hurts.

Life seems so hard
for them --these lonely farms and this gritty train."

"Oh,
they don't mind it.

Besides,
things are changing.

The auto,
the telephone,
rural free delivery;
they're bringing the farmers in closer touch
with the town.

Takes time,
you know,
to change a wilderness like this was fifty years ago.

But already,
why,
they can hop into the Ford or the Overland and get in
to the movies on Saturday evening quicker than you could get down to
'em by trolley in St. Paul."

"But if it's these towns we've been passing that the farmers run
to
for relief from their bleakness Can't you understand?

Just LOOK at them!"
Kennicott was amazed.

Ever since childhood he had seen these towns from trains on this same line.

He grumbled,
"Why,
what's the matter with
'em?

Good hustling burgs.

It would astonish you
to know how much wheat and rye and corn and potatoes they ship in a year."

"But they're so ugly."

"I'll admit they aren't comfy like Gopher Prairie.

But give
'em time."

"What's the use of giving them time unless some one has desire and training enough
to plan them?

Hundreds of factories trying
to make attractive motor cars,
but these towns-- left
to chance.

No! That can't be true.

It must have taken genius
to make them so scrawny!"
"Oh,
they're not so bad,"
was all he answered.

He pretended that his hand was the cat and hers the mouse.

For the first time she tolerated him rather than encouraged him.

She was staring out at Schoenstrom,
a hamlet of perhaps a hundred and fifty inhabitants,
at which the train was stopping.

A bearded German and his pucker-mouthed wife tugged their enormous imitation-leather satchel from under a seat and waddled out.

The station agent hoisted a dead calf aboard the baggage-car.

There were no other visible activities in Schoenstrom.

In the quiet of the halt,
Carol could hear a horse kicking his stall,
a carpenter shingling a roof.

The business-center of Schoenstrom took up one side of one block,
facing the railroad.

It was a row of one-story shops covered
with galvanized iron,
or
with clapboards painted red and bilious yellow.

The buildings were as ill-assorted,
as temporary-looking,
as a mining-camp street in the motion-pictures.

The railroad station was a one-room frame box,
a mirey cattle- pen on one side and a crimson wheat-elevator on the other.

The elevator,
with its cupola on the ridge of a shingled roof,
resembled a broad-shouldered man
with a small,
vicious,
pointed head.

The only habitable structures
to be seen were the florid red-brick Catholic church and rectory at the end of Main Street.

Carol picked at Kennicott's sleeve.

"You wouldn't call this a not-so-bad town,
would you?"
"These Dutch burgs ARE kind of slow.

Still,
at that---- See that fellow coming out of the general store there,
getting into the big car?

I met him once.

He owns about half the town,
besides the store.

Rauskukle,
his name is.

He owns a lot of mortgages,
and he gambles in farm-lands.

Good nut on him,
that fellow.

Why,
they say he's worth three or four hundred thousand dollars! Got a dandy great big yellow brick house
with tiled walks and a garden and everything,
other end of town--can't see it from here--I've gone past it when I've driven through here.

Yes sir!"
"Then,
if he has all that,
there's no excuse whatever
for this place! If his three hundred thousand went back into the town,
where it belongs,
they could burn up these shacks,
and build a dream-village,
a jewel! Why do the farmers and the town- people let the Baron keep it?"
"I must say I don't quite get you sometimes,
Carrie.

Let him?

They can't help themselves! He's a dumm old Dutchman,
and probably the priest can twist him around his finger,
but when it comes
to picking good farming land,
he's a regular wiz!"
"I see.

He's their symbol of beauty.

The town erects him,
instead of erecting buildings."

"Honestly,
don't know what you're driving at.

You're kind of played out,
after this long trip.

You'll feel better when you get home and have a good bath,
and put on the blue negligee.

That's some vampire costume,
you witch!"
He squeezed her arm,
looked at her knowingly.

They moved on from the desert stillness of the Schoenstrom station.

The train creaked,
banged,
swayed.

The air was nauseatingly thick.

Kennicott turned her face from the window,
rested her head on his shoulder.

She was coaxed from her unhappy mood.

But she came out of it unwillingly,
and when Kennicott was satisfied that he had corrected all her worries and had opened a magazine of saffron detective stories,
she sat upright.

Here--she meditated--is the newest empire of the world;
the Northern Middlewest;
a land of dairy herds and exquisite lakes,
of new automobiles and tar-paper shanties and silos likes red towers,
of clumsy speech and a hope that is boundless.

An empire which feeds a quarter of the world--yet its work is merely begun.

They are pioneers,
these sweaty wayfarers,
for all their telephones and bank-accounts and automatic pianos and co-operative leagues.

And
for all its fat richness,
theirs is a pioneer land.

What is its future?

she wondered.

A future of cities and factory smut where now are loping empty fields?

Homes universal and secure?

Or placid chateaux ringed
with sullen huts?

Youth free
to find knowledge and laughter?

Willingness
to sift the sanctified lies?

Or creamy- skinned fat women,
smeared
with grease and chalk,
gorgeous in the skins of beasts and the bloody feathers of slain birds,
playing bridge
with puffy pink-nailed jeweled fingers,
women who after much expenditure of labor and bad temper still grotesquely resemble their own flatulent lap-dogs?

The ancient stale inequalities,
or something different in history,
unlike the tedious maturity of other empires?

What future and what hope?

Carol's head ached
with the riddle.

She saw the prairie,
flat in giant patches or rolling in long hummocks.

The width and bigness of it,
which had expanded her spirit an hour ago,
began
to frighten her.

It spread out so;
it went on so uncontrollably;
she could never know it.

Kennicott was closeted in his detective story.

With the loneliness which comes most depressingly in the midst of many people she tried
to forget problems,
to look at the prairie objectively.

The grass beside the railroad had been burnt over;
it was a smudge prickly
with charred stalks of weeds.

Beyond the undeviating barbed-wire fences were clumps of golden rod.

Only this thin hedge shut them off from the plains-shorn wheat-lands of autumn,
a hundred acres
to a field,
prickly and gray near-by but in the blurred distance like tawny velvet stretched over dipping hillocks.

The long rows of wheat- shocks marched like soldiers in worn yellow tabards.

The newly plowed fields were black banners fallen on the distant slope.

It was a martial immensity,
vigorous,
a little harsh,
unsoftened by kindly gardens.

The expanse was relieved by clumps of oaks
with patches of short wild grass;
and every mile or two was a chain of cobalt slews,
with the flicker of blackbirds'
wings across them.

All this working land was turned into exuberance by the light.

The sunshine was dizzy on open stubble;
shadows from immense cumulus clouds were forever sliding across low mounds;
and the sky was wider and loftier and more resolutely blue than the sky of cities.

.

.she declared.

"It's a glorious country;
a land
to be big in,"
she crooned.

Then Kennicott startled her by chuckling,
"D'
you realize the town after the next is Gopher Prairie?

Home!"
III That one word--home--it terrified her.

Had she really bound herself
to live,
inescapably,
in this town called Gopher Prairie?

And this thick man beside her,
who dared
to define her future,
he was a stranger! She turned in her seat,
stared at him.

Who was he?

Why was he sitting
with her?

He wasn't of her kind! His neck was heavy;
his speech was heavy;
he was twelve or thirteen years older than she;
and about him was none of the magic of shared adventures and eagerness.

She could not believe that she had ever slept in his arMs. That was one of the dreams which you had but did not officially admit.

She told herself how good he was,
how dependable and understanding.

She touched his ear,
smoothed the plane of his solid jaw,
and,
turning away again,
concentrated upon liking his town.

It wouldn't be like these barren settlements.

It couldn't be! Why,
it had three thousand population.

That was a great many people.

There would be six hundred houses or more.

And---- The lakes near it would be so lovely.

She'd seen them in the photographs.

They had looked charming.

.

.hadn't they?

As the train left Wahkeenyan she began nervously
to watch
for the lakes--the entrance
to all her future life.

But when she discovered them,
to the left of the track,
her only impression of them was that they resembled the photographs.

A mile from Gopher Prairie the track mounts a curving low ridge,
and she could see the town as a whole.

With a passionate jerk she pushed up the window,
looked out,
the arched fingers of her left hand trembling on the sill,
her right hand at her breast.

And she saw that Gopher Prairie was merely an enlargement of all the hamlets which they had been passing.

Only
to the eyes of a Kennicott was it exceptional.

The huddled low wooden houses broke the plains scarcely more than would a hazel thicket.

The fields swept up
to it,
past it.

It was unprotected and unprotecting;
there was no dignity in it nor any hope of greatness.

Only the tall red grain-elevator and a few tinny church-steeples rose from the mass.

It was a frontier camp.

It was not a place
to live in,
not possibly,
not conceivably.

The people--they'd be as drab as their houses,
as flat as their fields.

She couldn't stay here.

She would have
to wrench loose from this man,
and flee.

She peeped at him.

She was at once helpless before his mature fixity,
and touched by his excitement as he sent his magazine skittering along the aisle,
stooped
for their bags,
came up
with flushed face,
and gloated,
"Here we are!"
She smiled loyally,
and looked away.

The train was entering town.

The houses on the outskirts were dusky old red mansions
with wooden frills,
or gaunt frame shelters like grocery boxes,
or new bungalows
with concrete foundations imitating stone.

Now the train was passing the elevator,
the grim storage- tanks
for oil,
a creamery,
a lumber-yard,
a stock-yard muddy and trampled and stinking.

Now they were stopping at a squat red frame station,
the platform crowded
with unshaven farmers and
with loafers--unadventurous people
with dead eyes.

She was here.

She could not go on.

It was the end-- the end of the world.

She sat
with closed eyes,
longing
to push past Kennicott,
hide somewhere in the train,
flee on toward the Pacific.

Something large arose in her soul and commanded,
"Stop it! Stop being a whining baby!"
She stood up quickly;
she said,
"Isn't it wonderful
to be here at last!"
He trusted her so.

She would make herself like the place.

And she was going
to do tremendous things---- She followed Kennicott and the bobbing ends of the two bags which he carried.

They were held back by the slow line of disembarking passengers.

She reminded herself that she was actually at the dramatic moment of the bride's home-coming.

She ought
to feel exalted.

She felt nothing at all except irritation at their slow progress toward the door.

Kennicott stooped
to peer through the windows.

He shyly exulted:

"Look! Look! There's a bunch come down
to welcome us! Sam Clark and the missus and Dave Dyer and Jack Elder,
and,
yes sir,
Harry Haydock and Juanita,
and a whole crowd! I guess they see us now.

Yuh,
yuh sure,
they see us! See
'em waving!"
She obediently bent her head
to look out at them.

She had hold of herself.

She was ready
to love them.

But she was embarrassed by the heartiness of the cheering group.

From the vestibule she waved
to them,
but she clung a second
to the sleeve of the brakeman who helped her down before she had the courage
to dive into the cataract of hand-shaking people,
people whom she could not tell apart.

She had the impression that all the men had coarse voices,
large damp hands,
tooth- brush mustaches,
bald spots,
and Masonic watch-charMs. She knew that they were welcoming her.

Their hands,
their smiles,
their shouts,
their affectionate eyes overcame her.

She stammered,
"Thank you,
oh,
thank you!"
One of the men was clamoring at Kennicott,
"I brought my machine down
to take you home,
doc."

"Fine business,
Sam!"
cried Kennicott;
and,
to Carol,
"Let's jump in.

That big Paige over there.

Some boat,
too,
believe me! Sam can show speed
to any of these Marmons from Minneapolis!"
Only when she was in the motor car did she distinguish the three people who were
to accompany them.

The owner,
now at the wheel,
was the essence of decent self-satisfaction;
a baldish,
largish,
level-eyed man,
rugged of neck but sleek and round of face--face like the back of a spoon bowl.

He was chuckling at her,
"Have you got us all straight yet?"
"Course she has! Trust Carrie
to get things straight and get
'em darn quick! I bet she could tell you every date in history!"
boasted her husband.

But the man looked at her reassuringly and
with a certainty that he was a person whom she could trust she confessed,
"As a matter of fact I haven't got anybody straight."

"Course you haven't,
child.

Well,
I'm Sam Clark,
dealer in hardware,
sporting goods,
cream separators,
and almost any kind of heavy junk you can think of.

You can call me Sam-- anyway,
I'm going
to call you Carrie,
seein'
's you've been and gone and married this poor fish of a bum medic that we keep round here."

Carol smiled lavishly,
and wished that she called people by their given names more easily.

"The fat cranky lady back there beside you,
who is pretending that she can't hear me giving her away,
is Mrs. Sam'l Clark;
and this hungry-looking squirt up here beside me is Dave Dyer,
who keeps his drug store running by not filling your hubby's prescriptions right--fact you might say he's the guy that put the `shun'
in `prescription.'

So! Well,
leave us take the bonny bride home.

Say,
doc,
I'll sell you the Candersen place
for three thousand plunks.

Better be thinking about building a new home
for Carrie.

Prettiest Frau in G.

P.,
if you asks me!"
Contentedly Sam Clark drove off,
in the heavy traffic of three Fords and the Mirmiemashie House Free
'Bus.

"I shall like Mr. Clark.

.

.I CAN'T call him `Sam'! They're all so friendly."

She glanced at the houses;
tried not
to see what she saw;
gave way in:

"Why do these stories lie so?

They always make the bride's home-coming a bower of roses.

Complete trust in noble spouse.

Lies about marriage.

I'm NOT changed.

And this town--O my God! I can't go through
with it.

This junk-heap!"
Her husband bent over her.

"You look like you were in a brown study.

Scared?

I don't expect you
to think Gopher Prairie is a paradise,
after St. Paul.

I don't expect you
to be crazy about it,
at first.

But you'll come
to like it so much-- life's so free here and best people on earth."

She whispered
to him
(while Mrs. Clark considerately turned away),
"I love you
for understanding.

I'm just--I'm beastly over-sensitive.

Too many books.

It's my lack of shoulder-muscles and sense.

Give me time,
dear."

"You bet! All the time you want!"
She laid the back of his hand against her cheek,
snuggled near him.

She was ready
for her new home.

Kennicott had told her that,
with his widowed mother as housekeeper,
he had occupied an old house,
"but nice and roomy,
and well-heated,
best furnace I could find on the market."

His mother had left Carol her love,
and gone back
to Lac-qui-Meurt.

It would be wonderful,
she exulted,
not
to have
to live in Other People's Houses,
but
to make her own shrine.

She held his hand tightly and stared ahead as the car swung round a corner and stopped in the street before a prosaic frame house in a small parched lawn.

IV A concrete sidewalk
with a
"parking"
of grass and mud.

A square smug brown house,
rather damp.

A narrow concrete walk up
to it.

Sickly yellow leaves in a windrow
with dried wings of box-elder seeds and snags of wool from the cotton- woods.

A screened porch
with pillars of thin painted pine surmounted by scrolls and brackets and bumps of jigsawed wood.

No shrubbery
to shut off the public gaze.

A lugubrious bay-window
to the right of the porch.

Window curtains of starched cheap lace revealing a pink marble table
with a conch shell and a Family Bible.

"You'll find it old-fashioned--what do you call it?--Mid- Victorian.

I left it as is,
so you could make any changes you felt were necessary."

Kennicott sounded doubtful
for the first time since he had come back
to his own.

"It's a real home!"
She was moved by his humility.

She gaily motioned good-by
to the Clarks.

He unlocked the door-- he was leaving the choice of a maid
to her,
and there was no one in the house.

She jiggled while he turned the key,
and scampered in.

.

.

.

It was next day before either of them remembered that in their honeymoon camp they had planned that he should carry her over the sill.

In hallway and front parlor she was conscious of dinginess and lugubriousness and airlessness,
but she insisted,
"I'll make it all jolly."

As she followed Kennicott and the bags up
to their bedroom she quavered
to herself the song of the fat little-gods of the hearth:

I have my own home,
To do what I please with,
To do what I please with,
My den
for me and my mate and my cubs,
My own! She was close in her husband's arms;
she clung
to him;
whatever of strangeness and slowness and insularity she might find in him,
none of that mattered so long as she could slip her hands beneath his coat,
run her fingers over the warm smoothness of the satin back of his waistcoat,
seem almost
to creep into his body,
find in him strength,
find in the courage and kindness of her man a shelter from the perplexing world.

"Sweet,
so sweet,"
she whispered.

CHAPTER IV I
"THE Clarks have invited some folks
to their house
to meet us,
tonight,"
said Kennicott,
as he unpacked his suit-case.

"Oh,
that is nice of them!"
"You bet.

I told you you'd like
'em.

Squarest people on earth.

Uh,
Carrie---- Would you mind if I sneaked down
to the office
for an hour,
just
to see how things are?"
"Why,
no.

Of course not.

I know you're keen
to get back
to work."

"Sure you don't mind?"
"Not a bit.

Out of my way.

Let me unpack."

But the advocate of freedom in marriage was as much disappointed as a drooping bride at the alacrity
with which he took that freedom and escaped
to the world of men's affairs.

She gazed about their bedroom,
and its full dismalness crawled over her:

the awkward knuckly L-shape of it;
the black walnut bed
with apples and spotty pears carved on the headboard;
the imitation maple bureau,
with pink-daubed scent-bottles and a petticoated pin-cushion on a marble slab uncomfortably like a gravestone;
the plain pine washstand and the garlanded water- pitcher and bowl.

The scent was of horsehair and plush and Florida Water.

"How could people ever live
with things like this?"
she shuddered.

She saw the furniture as a circle of elderly judges,
condemning her
to death by smothering.

The tottering brocade chair squeaked,
"Choke her--choke her--smother her."

The old linen smelled of the tomb.

She was alone in this house,
this strange still house,
among the shadows of dead thoughts and haunting repressions.

"I hate it! I hate it!"
she panted.

"Why did I ever----"
She remembered that Kennicott's mother had brought these family relics from the old home in Lac-qui-Meurt.

"Stop it! They're perfectly comfortable things.

They're--comfortable.

Besides---- Oh,
they're horrible! We'll change them,
right away."

Then,
"But of course he HAS
to see how things are at the office----"
She made a pretense of busying herself
with unpacking.

The chintz-lined,
silver-fitted bag which had seemed so desirable a luxury in St. Paul was an extravagant vanity here.

The daring black chemise of frail chiffon and lace was a hussy at which the deep-bosomed bed stiffened in disgust,
and she hurled it into a bureau drawer,
hid it beneath a sensible linen blouse.

She gave up unpacking.

She went
to the window,
with a purely literary thought of village charm--hollyhocks and lanes and apple-cheeked cottagers.

What she saw was the side of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church--a plain clapboard wall of a sour liver color;
the ash-pile back of the church;
an unpainted stable;
and an alley in which a Ford delivery-wagon had been stranded.

This was the terraced garden below her boudoir;
this was
to be her scenery for----
"I mustn't! I mustn't! I'm nervous this afternoon.

Am I sick?

.

.

.

Good Lord,
I hope it isn't that! Not now! How people lie! How these stories lie! They say the bride is always so blushing and proud and happy when she finds that out,
but--I'd hate it! I'd be scared
to death! Some day but---- Please,
dear nebulous Lord,
not now! Bearded sniffy old men sitting and demanding that we bear children.

If THEY had
to bear them----! I wish they did have to! Not now! Not till I've got hold of this job of liking the ash-pile out there! .

.

.

I must shut up.

I'm mildly insane.

I'm going out
for a walk.

I'll see the town by myself.

My first view of the empire I'm going
to conquer!"
She fled from the house.

She stared
with seriousness at every concrete crossing,
every hitching-post,
every rake
for leaves;
and
to each house she devoted all her speculation.

What would they come
to mean?

How would they look six months from now?

In which of them would she be dining?

Which of these people whom she passed,
now mere arrangements of hair and clothes,
would turn into intimates,
loved or dreaded,
different from all the other people in the world?

As she came into the small business-section she inspected a broad-beamed grocer in an alpaca coat who was bending over the apples and celery on a slanted platform in front of his store.

Would she ever talk
to him?

What would he say if she stopped and stated,
"I am Mrs. Dr. Kennicott.

Some day I hope
to confide that a heap of extremely dubious pumpkins as a window-display doesn't exhilarate me much."

(The grocer was Mr. Frederick F.

Ludelmeyer,
whose market is at the corner of Main Street and Lincoln Avenue.

In supposing that only she was observant Carol was ignorant,
misled by the indifference of cities.

She fancied that she was slipping through the streets invisible;
but when she had passed,
Mr. Ludelmeyer puffed into the store and coughed at his clerk,
"I seen a young woman,
she come along the side street.

I bet she iss Doc Kennicott's new bride,
good-looker,
nice legs,
but she wore a hell of a plain suit,
no style,
I wonder will she pay cash,
I bet she goes
to Howland & Gould's more as she does here,
what you done
with the poster
for Fluffed Oats?"
)
II When Carol had walked
for thirty-two minutes she had completely covered the town,
east and west,
north and south;
and she stood at the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue and despaired.

Main Street
with its two-story brick shops,
its story-and-a- half wooden residences,
its muddy expanse from concrete walk
to walk,
its huddle of Fords and lumber-wagons,
was too small
to absorb her.

The broad,
straight,
unenticing gashes of the streets let in the grasping prairie on every side.

She realized the vastness and the emptiness of the land.

The skeleton iron windmill on the farm a few blocks away,
at the north end of Main Street,
was like the ribs of a dead cow.

She thought of the coming of the Northern winter,
when the unprotected houses would crouch together in terror of storms galloping out of that wild waste.

They were so small and weak,
the little brown houses.

They were shelters
for sparrows,
not homes
for warm laughing people.

She told herself that down the street the leaves were a splendor.

The maples were orange;
the oaks a solid tint of raspberry.

And the lawns had been nursed
with love.

But the thought would not hold.

At best the trees resembled a thinned woodlot.

There was no park
to rest the eyes.

And since not Gopher Prairie but Wakamin was the county-seat,
there was no court-house
with its grounds.

She glanced through the fly-specked windows of the most pretentious building in sight,
the one place which welcomed strangers and determined their opinion of the charm and luxury of Gopher Prairie--the Minniemashie House.

It was a tall lean shabby structure,
three stories of yellow-streaked wood,
the corners covered
with sanded pine slabs purporting
to symbolize stone.

In the hotel office she could see a stretch of bare unclean floor,
a line of rickety chairs
with brass cuspidors between,
a writing-desk
with advertisements in mother-of-pearl letters upon the glass-covered back.

The dining-room beyond was a jungle of stained table-cloths and catsup bottles.

She looked no more at the Minniemashie House.

A man in cuffless shirt-sleeves
with pink arm-garters,
wearing a linen collar but no tie,
yawned his way from Dyer's Drug Store across
to the hotel.

He leaned against the wall,
scratched a while,
sighed,
and in a bored way gossiped
with a man tilted back in a chair.

A lumber-wagon,
its long green box filled
with large spools of barbed-wire fencing,
creaked down the block.

A Ford,
in reverse,
sounded as though it were shaking
to pieces,
then recovered and rattled away.

In the Greek candy-store was the whine of a peanut-roaster,
and the oily smell of nuts.

There was no other sound nor sign of life.

She wanted
to run,
fleeing from the encroaching prairie,
demanding the security of a great city.

Her dreams of creating a beautiful town were ludicrous.

Oozing out from every drab wall,
she felt a forbidding spirit which she could never conquer.

She trailed down the street on one side,
back on the other,
glancing into the cross streets.

It was a private Seeing Main Street tour.

She was within ten minutes beholding not only the heart of a place called Gopher Prairie,
but ten thousand towns from Albany
to San Diego:

Dyer's Drug Store,
a corner building of regular and unreal blocks of artificial stone.

Inside the store,
a greasy marble soda-fountain
with an electric lamp of red and green and curdled-yellow mosaic shade.

Pawed-over heaps of tooth- brushes and combs and packages of shaving-soap.

Shelves of soap-cartons teething-rings,
garden-seeds,
and patent medicines in yellow packages-nostrums
for consumption,
for
"women's diseases"--notorious mixtures of opium and alco- hol,
in the very shop
to which her husband sent patients
for the filling of prescriptions.

From a second-story window the sign
"W.

P.

Kennicott,
Phys.

& Surgeon,"
gilt on black sand.

A small wooden motion-picture theater called
"The Rosebud Movie Palace."

Lithographs announcing a film called
"Fatty in Love."

Howland & Gould's Grocery.

In the display window,
black,
overripe bananas and lettuce on which a cat was sleeping.

Shelves lined
with red crepe paper which was now faded and torn and concentrically spotted.

Flat against the wall of the second story the signs of lodges--the Knights of Pythias,
the Maccabees,
the Woodmen,
the Masons.

Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market--a reek of blood.

A jewelry shop
with tinny-looking wrist-watches
for women.

In front of it,
at the curb,
a huge wooden clock which did not go.

A fly-buzzing saloon
with a brilliant gold and enamel whisky sign across the front.

Other saloons down the block.

From them a stink of stale beer,
and thick voices bellowing pidgin German or trolling out dirty songs--vice gone feeble and unenterprising and dull--the delicacy of a mining-camp minus its vigor.

In front of the saloons,
farmwives sitting on the seats of wagons,
waiting
for their husbands
to become drunk and ready
to start home.

A tobacco shop called
"The Smoke House,"
filled
with young men shaking dice
for cigarettes.

Racks of magazines,
and pictures of coy fat prostitutes in striped bathing-suits.

A clothing store
with a display of
"ox-blood-shade Oxfords
with bull-dog toes."

Suits which looked worn and glossless while they were still new,
flabbily draped on dummies like corpses
with painted cheeks.

The Bon Ton Store--Haydock & Simons'--the largest shop in town.

The first-story front of clear glass,
the plates cleverly bound at the edges
with brass.

The second story of pleasant tapestry brick.

One window of excellent clothes
for men,
interspersed
with collars of floral pique which showed mauve daisies on a saffron ground.

Newness and an obvious notion of neatness and service.

Haydock & Simons.

Haydock.

She had met a Haydock at the station;
Harry Haydock;
an active person of thirty-five.

He seemed great
to her,
now,
and very like a saint.

His shop was clean! Axel Egge's General Store,
frequented by Scandinavian farmers.

In the shallow dark window-space heaps of sleazy sateens,
badly woven galateas,
canvas shoes designed
for women
with bulging ankles,
steel and red glass buttons upon cards
with broken edges,
a cottony blanket,
a granite-ware frying-pan reposing on a sun-faded crepe blouse.

Sam Clark's Hardware Store.

An air of frankly metallic enterprise.

Guns and churns and barrels of nails and beautiful shiny butcher knives.

Chester Dashaway's House Furnishing Emporium.

A vista of heavy oak rockers
with leather seats,
asleep in a dismal row.

Billy's Lunch.

Thick handleless cups on the wet oilcloth- covered counter.

An odor of onions and the smoke of hot lard.

In the doorway a young man audibly sucking a toothpick.

The warehouse of the buyer of cream and potatoes.

The sour smell of a dairy.

The Ford Garage and the Buick Garage,
competent one- story brick and cement buildings opposite each other.

Old and new cars on grease-blackened concrete floors.

Tire advertisements.

The roaring of a tested motor;
a racket which beat at the nerves.

Surly young men in khaki union-overalls.

The most energetic and vital places in town.

A large warehouse
for agricultural implements.

An impressive barricade of green and gold wheels,
of shafts and sulky seats,
belonging
to machinery of which Carol knew nothing-- potato-planters,
manure-spreaders,
silage-cutters,
disk-harrows,
breaking-plows.

A feed store,
its windows opaque
with the dust of bran,
a patent medicine advertisement painted on its roof.

Ye Art Shoppe,
Prop.

Mrs. Mary Ellen Wilks,
Christian Science Library open daily free.

A touching fumble at beauty.

A one-room shanty of boards recently covered
with rough stucco.

A show-window delicately rich in error:

vases starting out
to imitate tree-trunks but running off into blobs of gilt-- an aluminum ash-tray labeled
"Greetings from Gopher Prairie"
--a Christian Science magazine--a stamped sofa-cushion portraying a large ribbon tied
to a small poppy,
the correct skeins of embroidery-silk lying on the pillow.

Inside the shop,
a glimpse of bad carbon prints of bad and famous pictures,
shelves of phonograph records and camera films,
wooden toys,
and in the midst an anxious small woman sitting in a padded rocking chair.

A barber shop and pool room.

A man in shirt sleeves,
presumably Del Snafflin the proprietor,
shaving a man who had a large Adam's apple.

Nat Hicks's Tailor Shop,
on a side street off Main.

A one- story building.

A fashion-plate showing human pitchforks in garments which looked as hard as steel plate.

On another side street a raw red-brick Catholic Church
with a varnished yellow door.

The post-office--merely a partition of glass and brass shutting off the rear of a mildewed room which must once have been a shop.

A tilted writing-shelf against a wall rubbed black and scattered
with official notices and army recruiting-posters.

The damp,
yellow-brick schoolbuilding in its cindery grounds.

The State Bank,
stucco masking wood.

The Farmers'
National Bank.

An Ionic temple of marble.

Pure,
exquisite,
solitary.

A brass plate with
"Ezra Stowbody,
Pres't."

A score of similar shops and establishments.

Behind them and mixed
with them,
the houses,
meek cottages or large,
comfortable,
soundly uninteresting symbols of prosperity.

In all the town not one building save the Ionic bank which gave pleasure
to Carol's eyes;
not a dozen buildings which suggested that,
in the fifty years of Gopher Prairie's existence,
the citizens had realized that it was either desirable or possible
to make this,
their common home,
amusing or attractive.

It was not only the unsparing unapologetic ugliness and the rigid straightness which overwhelmed her.

It was the planlessness,
the flimsy temporariness of the buildings,
their faded unpleasant colors.

The street was cluttered
with electric- light poles,
telephone poles,
gasoline pumps
for motor cars,
boxes of goods.

Each man had built
with the most valiant disregard of all the others.

Between a large new
"block"
of two-story brick shops on one side,
and the fire-brick Overland garage on the other side,
was a one-story cottage turned into a millinery shop.

The white temple of the Farmers'
Bank was elbowed back by a grocery of glaring yellow brick.

One store-building had a patchy galvanized iron cornice;
the building beside it was crowned
with battlements and pyramids of brick capped
with blocks of red sandstone.

She escaped from Main Street,
fled home.

She wouldn't have cared,
she insisted,
if the people had been comely.

She had noted a young man loafing before a shop,
one unwashed hand holding the cord of an awning;
a middle-aged man who had a way of staring at women as though he had been married too long and too prosaically;
an old farmer,
solid,
wholesome,
but not clean--his face like a potato fresh from the earth.

None of them had shaved
for three days.

"If they can't build shrines,
out here on the prairie,
surely there's nothing
to prevent their buying safety-razors!"
she raged.

She fought herself:

"I must be wrong.

People do live here.

It CAN'T be as ugly as--as I know it is! I must be wrong.

But I can't do it.

I can't go through
with it."

She came home too seriously worried
for hysteria;
and when she found Kennicott waiting
for her,
and exulting,
"Have a walk?

Well,
like the town?

Great lawns and trees,
eh?"
she was able
to say,
with a self-protective maturity new
to her,
"It's very interesting."

III The train which brought Carol
to Gopher Prairie also brought Miss Bea Sorenson.

Miss Bea was a stalwart,
corn-colored,
laughing young woman,
and she was bored by farm-work.

She desired the excitements of city-life,
and the way
to enjoy city-life was,
she had decided,
to
"go get a yob as hired girl in Gopher Prairie."

She contentedly lugged her pasteboard telescope from the station
to her cousin,
Tina Malmquist,
maid of all work in the residence of Mrs. Luke Dawson.

"Vell,
so you come
to town,"
said Tina.

"Ya.

Ay get a yob,"
said Bea.

"Vell.

.

.

.

You got a fella now?"
"Ya.

Yim Yacobson."

"Vell.

I'm glat
to see you.

How much you vant a veek?"
"Sex dollar."

"There ain't nobody pay dat.

Vait! Dr. Kennicott,
I t'ink he marry a girl from de Cities.

Maybe she pay dat.

Vell.

You go take a valk."

"Ya,"
said Bea.

So it chanced that Carol Kennicott and Bea Sorenson were viewing Main Street at the same time.

Bea had never before been in a town larger than Scandia Crossing,
which has sixty-seven inhabitants.

As she marched up the street she was meditating that it didn't hardly seem like it was possible there could be so many folks all in one place at the same time.

My! It would take years
to get acquainted
with them all.

And swell people,
too! A fine big gentleman in a new pink shirt
with a diamond,
and not no washed-out blue denim working-shirt.

A lovely lady in a longery dress
(but it must be an awful hard dress
to wash).

And the stores! Not just three of them,
like there were at Scandia Crossing,
but more than four whole blocks! The Bon Ton Store--big as four barns--my! it would simply scare a person
to go in there,
with seven or eight clerks all looking at you.

And the men's suits,
on figures just like human.

And Axel Egge's,
like home,
lots of Swedes and Norskes in there,
and a card of dandy buttons,
like rubies.

A drug store
with a soda fountain that was just huge,
awful long,
and all lovely marble;
and on it there was a great big lamp
with the biggest shade you ever saw--all different kinds colored glass stuck together;
and the soda spouts,
they were silver,
and they came right out of the bottom of the lamp- stand! Behind the fountain there were glass shelves,
and bottles of new kinds of soft drinks,
that nobody ever heard of.

Suppose a fella took you THERE! A hotel,
awful high,
higher than Oscar Tollefson's new red barn;
three stories,
one right on top of another;
you had
to stick your head back
to look clear up
to the top.

There was a swell traveling man in there--probably been
to Chicago,
lots of times.

Oh,
the dandiest people
to know here! There was a lady going by,
you wouldn't hardly say she was any older than Bea herself;
she wore a dandy new gray suit and black pumps.

She almost looked like she was looking over the town,
too.

But you couldn't tell what she thought.

Bea would like
to be that way--kind of quiet,
so nobody would get fresh.

Kind of--oh,
elegant.

A Lutheran Church.

Here in the city there'd be lovely sermons,
and church twice on Sunday,
EVERY Sunday! And a movie show! A regular theater,
just
for movies.

With the sign
"Change of bill every evening."

Pictures every evening! There were movies in Scandia Crossing,
but only once every two weeks,
and it took the Sorensons an hour
to drive in-- papa was such a tightwad he wouldn't get a Ford.

But here she could put on her hat any evening,
and in three minutes'
walk be
to the movies,
and see lovely fellows in dress-suits and Bill Hart and everything! How could they have so many stores?

Why! There was one just
for tobacco alone,
and one
(a lovely one--the Art Shoppy it was)
for pictures and vases and stuff,
with oh,
the dandiest vase made so it looked just like a tree trunk! Bea stood on the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue.

The roar of the city began
to frighten her.

There were five automobuls on the street all at the same time--and one of
'em was a great big car that must of cost two thousand dollars--and the
'bus was starting
for a train
with five elegant- dressed fellows,
and a man was pasting up red bills
with lovely pictures of washing-machines on them.

and the jeweler was laying out bracelets and wrist-watches and EVERYTHING on real velvet.

What did she care if she got six dollars a week?

Or two! It was worth while working
for nothing,
to be allowed
to stay here.

And think how it would be in the evening,
all lighted up--and not
with no lamps,
but
with electrics! And maybe a gentleman friend taking you
to the movies and buying you a strawberry ice cream soda! Bea trudged back.

"Vell?

You lak it?"
said Tina.

"Ya.

Ay lak it.

Ay t'ink maybe Ay stay here,"
said Bea.

IV The recently built house of Sam Clark,
in which was given the party
to welcome Carol,
was one of the largest in Gopher Prairie.

It had a clean sweep of clapboards,
a solid squareness,
a small tower,
and a large screened porch.

Inside,
it was as shiny,
as hard,
and as cheerful as a new oak upright piano.

Carol looked imploringly at Sam Clark as he rolled
to the door and shouted,
"Welcome,
little lady! The keys of the city are yourn!"
Beyond him,
in the hallway and the living-room,
sitting in a vast prim circle as though they were attending a funeral,
she saw the guests.

They were WAITING so! They were waiting
for her! The determination
to be all one pretty flowerlet of appreciation leaked away.

She begged of Sam,
"I don't dare face them! They expect so much.

They'll swallow me in one mouthful--glump!--like that!"
"Why,
sister,
they're going
to love you--same as I would if I didn't think the doc here would beat me up!"
"B-but---- I don't dare! Faces
to the right of me,
faces in front of me,
volley and wonder!"
She sounded hysterical
to herself;
she fancied that
to Sam Clark she sounded insane.

But he chuckled,
"Now you just cuddle under Sam's wing,
and if anybody rubbers at you too long,
I'll shoo
'em off.

Here we go! Watch my smoke-- Sam'l,
the ladies'
delight and the bridegrooms'
terror!"
His arm about her,
he led her in and bawled,
"Ladies and worser halves,
the bride! We won't introduce her round yet,
because she'll never get your bum names straight anyway.

Now bust up this star-chamber!"
They tittered politely,
but they did not move from the social security of their circle,
and they did not cease staring.

Carol had given creative energy
to dressing
for the event.

Her hair was demure,
low on her forehead
with a parting and a coiled braid.

Now she wished that she had piled it high.

Her frock was an ingenue slip of lawn,
with a wide gold sash and a low square neck,
which gave a suggestion of throat and molded shoulders.

But as they looked her over she was certain that it was all wrong.

She wished alternately that she had worn a spinsterish high-necked dress,
and that she had dared
to shock them
with a violent brick-red scarf which she had bought in Chicago.

She was led about the circle.

Her voice mechanically produced safe remarks:

"Oh,
I'm sure I'm going
to like it here ever so much,"
and
"Yes,
we did have the best time in Colorado--mountains,"
and
"Yes,
I lived in St. Paul several years.

Euclid P.

Tinker?

No,
I don't REMEMBER meeting him,
but I'm pretty sure I've heard of him."

Kennicott took her aside and whispered,
"Now I'll introduce you
to them,
one at a time."

"Tell me about them first."

"Well,
the nice-looking couple over there are Harry Hay- dock and his wife,
Juanita.

Harry's dad owns most of the Bon Ton,
but it's Harry who runs it and gives it the pep.

He's a hustler.

Next
to him is Dave Dyer the druggist--you met him this afternoon--mighty good duck-shot.

The tall husk beyond him is Jack Elder--Jackson Elder--owns the planing-mill,
and the Minniemashie House,
and quite a share in the Farmers'
National Bank.

Him and his wife are good sports--him and Sam and I go hunting together a lot.

The old cheese there is Luke Dawson,
the richest man in town.

Next
to him is Nat Hicks,
the tailor."

"Really?

A tailor?"
"Sure.

Why not?

Maybe we're slow,
but we are democratic.

I go hunting
with Nat same as I do
with Jack Elder."

"I'm glad.

I've never met a tailor socially.

It must be charming
to meet one and not have
to think about what you owe him.

And do you---- Would you go hunting
with your barber,
too?"
"No but---- No use running this democracy thing into the ground.

Besides,
I've known Nat
for years,
and besides,
he's a mighty good shot and---- That's the way it is,
see?

Next
to Nat is Chet Dashaway.

Great fellow
for chinning.

He'll talk your arm off,
about religion or politics or books or anything."

Carol gazed
with a polite approximation
to interest at Mr. Dashaway,
a tan person
with a wide mouth.

"Oh,
I know! He's the furniture-store man!"
She was much pleased
with herself.

"Yump,
and he's the undertaker.

You'll like him.

Come shake hands
with him."

"Oh no,
no! He doesn't--he doesn't do the embalming and all that--himself?

I couldn't shake hands
with an undertaker!"
"Why not?

You'd be proud
to shake hands
with a great surgeon,
just after he'd been carving up people's bellies."

She sought
to regain her afternoon's calm of maturity.

"Yes.

You're right.

I want--oh,
my dear,
do you know how much I want
to like the people you like?

I want
to see people as they are."

"Well,
don't forget
to see people as other folks see them as they are! They have the stuff.

Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here?

Born and brought up here!"
"Bresnahan?"
"Yes--you know--president of the Velvet Motor Company of Boston,
Mass.--make the Velvet Twelve--biggest automobile factory in New England."

"I think I've heard of him."

"Sure you have.

Why,
he's a millionaire several times over! Well,
Perce comes back here
for the black-bass fishing almost every summer,
and he says if he could get away from business,
he'd rather live here than in Boston or New York or any of those places.

HE doesn't mind Chet's undertaking."

"Please! I'll--I'll like everybody! I'll be the community sunbeam!"
He led her
to the Dawsons.

Luke Dawson,
lender of money on mortgages,
owner of Northern cut-over land,
was a hesitant man in unpressed soft gray clothes,
with bulging eyes in a milky face.

His wife had bleached cheeks,
bleached hair,
bleached voice,
and a bleached manner.

She wore her expensive green frock,
with its passementeried bosom,
bead tassels,
and gaps between the buttons down the back,
as though she had bought it second- hand and was afraid of meeting the former owner.

They were shy.

It was
"Professor"
George Edwin Mott,
superintendent of schools,
a Chinese mandarin turned brown,
who held Carol's hand and made her welcome.

When the Dawsons and Mr. Mott had stated that they were
"pleased
to meet her,"
there seemed
to be nothing else
to say,
but the conversation went on automatically.

"Do you like Gopher Prairie?"
whimpered Mrs. Dawson.

"Oh,
I'm sure I'm going
to be ever so happy."

"There's so many nice people."

Mrs. Dawson looked
to Mr. Mott
for social and intellectual aid.

He lectured:

"There's a fine class of people.

I don't like some of these retired farmers who come here
to spend their last days-- especially the Germans.

They hate
to pay school-taxes.

They hate
to spend a cent.

But the rest are a fine class of people.

Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here?

Used
to go
to school right at the old building!"
"I heard he did."

"Yes.

He's a prince.

He and I went fishing together,
last time he was here.

The Dawsons and Mr. Mott teetered upon weary feet,
and smiled at Carol
with crystallized expressions.

She went on:

"Tell me,
Mr. Mott:

Have you ever tried any experiments
with any of the new educational systems?

The modern kindergarten methods or the Gary system?"
"Oh.

Those.

Most of these would-be reformers are simply notoriety-seekers.

I believe in manual training,
but Latin and mathematics always will be the backbone of sound Americanism,
no matter what these faddists advocate--heaven knows what they do want--knitting,
I suppose,
and classes in wiggling the ears!"
The Dawsons smiled their appreciation of listening
to a savant.

Carol waited till Kennicott should rescue her.

The rest of the party waited
for the miracle of being amused.

Harry and Juanita Haydock,
Rita Simons and Dr. Terry Gould--the young smart set of Gopher Prairie.

She was led
to them.

Juanita Haydock flung at her in a high,
cackling,
friendly voice:

"Well,
this is SO nice
to have you here.

We'll have some good parties--dances and everything.

You'll have
to join the Jolly Seventeen.

We play bridge and we have a supper once a month.

You play,
of course?"
"N-no,
I don't."

"Really?

In St. Paul?"
"I've always been such a book-worm."

"We'll have
to teach you.

Bridge is half the fun of life."

Juanita had become patronizing,
and she glanced disrespectfully at Carol's golden sash,
which she had previously admired.

Harry Haydock said politely,
"How do you think you're going
to like the old burg?"
"I'm sure I shall like it tremendously."

"Best people on earth here.

Great hustlers,
too.

Course I've had lots of chances
to go live in Minneapolis,
but we like it here.

Real he-town.

Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here?"
Carol perceived that she had been weakened in the biological struggle by disclosing her lack of bridge.

Roused
to nervous desire
to regain her position she turned on Dr. Terry Gould,
the young and pool-playing competitor of her husband.

Her eyes coquetted
with him while she gushed:

"I'll learn bridge.

But what I really love most is the outdoors.

Can't we all get up a boating party,
and fish,
or whatever you do,
and have a picnic supper afterwards?"
"Now you're talking!"
Dr. Gould affirmed.

He looked rather too obviously at the cream-smooth slope of her shoulder.

"Like fishing?.

Fishing is my middle name.

I'll teach you bridge.

Like cards at all?"
"I used
to be rather good at bezique."

She knew that bezique was a game of cards--or a game of something else.

Roulette,
possibly.

But her lie was a triumph.

Juanita's handsome,
high-colored,
horsey face showed doubt.

Harry stroked his nose and said humbly,
"Bezique?

Used
to be great gambling game,
wasn't it?"
While others drifted
to her group,
Carol snatched up the conversation.

She laughed and was frivolous and rather brittle.

She could not distinguish their eyes.

They were a blurry theater-audience before which she self-consciously enacted the comedy of being the Clever Little Bride of Doc Kennicott:

"These-here celebrated Open Spaces,
that's what I'm going out for.

I'll never read anything but the sporting-page again.

Will converted me on our Colorado trip.

There were so many mousey tourists who were afraid
to get out of the motor
'bus that I decided
to be Annie Oakley,
the Wild Western Wampire,
and I bought oh! a vociferous skirt which revealed my perfectly nice ankles
to the Presbyterian glare of all the Ioway schoolma'ams,
and I leaped from peak
to peak like the nimble chamoys,
and---- You may think that Herr Doctor Kennicott is a Nimrod,
but you ought
to have seen me daring him
to strip
to his B.

V.

D.'

s and go swimming in an icy mountain brook."

She knew that they were thinking of becoming shocked,
but Juanita Haydock was admiring,
at least.

She swaggered on:

"I'm sure I'm going
to ruin Will as a respectable practitioner---- Is he a good doctor,
Dr. Gould?"
Kennicott's rival gasped at this insult
to professional ethics,
and he took an appreciable second before he recovered his social manner.

"I'll tell you,
Mrs. Kennicott."

He smiled at Kennicott,
to imply that whatever he might say in the stress of being witty was not
to count against him in the commercio-medical warfare.

"There's some people in town that say the doc is a fair
to middlin'
diagnostician and prescription-writer,
but let me whisper this
to you--but
for heaven's sake don't tell him I said so--don't you ever go
to him
for anything more serious than a pendectomy of the left ear or a strabismus of the cardiograph."

No one save Kennicott knew exactly what this meant,
but they laughed,
and Sam Clark's party assumed a glittering lemon-yellow color of brocade panels and champagne and tulle and crystal chandeliers and sporting duchesses.

Carol saw that George Edwin Mott and the blanched Mr. and Mrs. Dawson were not yet hypnotized.

They looked as though they wondered whether they ought
to look as though they disapproved.

She concentrated on them:

"But I know whom I wouldn't have dared
to go
to Colorado with! Mr. Dawson there! I'm sure he's a regular heart- breaker.

When we were introduced he held my hand and squeezed it frightfully."

"Haw! Haw! Haw!"
The entire company applauded.

Mr. Dawson was beatified.

He had been called many things-- loan-shark,
skinflint,
tightwad,
pussyfoot--but he had never before been called a flirt.

"He is wicked,
isn't he,
Mrs. Dawson?

Don't you have
to lock him up?"
"Oh no,
but maybe I better,"
attempted Mrs. Dawson,
a tint on her pallid face.

For fifteen minutes Carol kept it up.

She asserted that she was going
to stage a musical comedy,
that she preferred cafe parfait
to beefsteak,
that she hoped Dr. Kennicott would never lose his ability
to make love
to charming women,
and that she had a pair of gold stockings.

They gaped
for more.

But she could not keep it up.

She retired
to a chair behind Sam Clark's bulk.

The smile-wrinkles solemnly flattened out in the faces of all the other collaborators in having a party,
and again they stood about hoping but not expecting
to be amused.

Carol listened.

She discovered that conversation did not exist in Gopher Prairie.

Even at this affair,
which brought out the young smart set,
the hunting squire set,
the respectable intellectual set,
and the solid financial set,
they sat up
with gaiety as
with a corpse.

Juanita Haydock talked a good deal in her rattling voice but it was invariably of personalities:

the rumor that Raymie Wutherspoon was going
to send
for a pair of patent leather shoes
with gray buttoned tops;
the rheumatism of Champ Perry;
the state of Guy Pollock's grippe;
and the dementia of Jim Howland in painting his fence salmon-pink.

Sam Clark had been talking
to Carol about motor cars,
but he felt his duties as host.

While he droned,
his brows popped up and down.

He interrupted himself,
"Must stir
'em up."

He worried at his wife,
"Don't you think I better stir
'em up?"
He shouldered into the center of the room,
and cried:

"Let's have some stunts,
folks."

"Yes,
let's!"
shrieked Juanita Haydock.

"Say,
Dave,
give us that stunt about the Norwegian catching a hen."

"You bet;
that's a slick st