Bab Bab 10 · Chapter X

THE house was haunted, long before evening. Shadows slipped down the

walls and waited behind every chair.

Did that door move?

No. She wouldn't go to the Jolly Seventeen. She hadn't energy enough to

caper before them, to smile blandly at Juanita's rudeness. Not today.

But she did want a party. Now! If some one would come in this afternoon,

some one who liked her--Vida or Mrs. Sam Clark or old Mrs. Champ Perry

or gentle Mrs. Dr. Westlake. Or Guy Pollock! She'd telephone----

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

Perhaps they would.

Why not?

She'd have tea ready, anyway. If they came--splendid. If not--what did

she care? She wasn't going to yield to the village and let down; she was

going to keep up a belief in the rite of tea, to which she had always

looked forward as the symbol of a leisurely fine existence. And it would

be just as much fun, even if it was so babyish, to have tea by herself

and pretend that she was entertaining clever men. It would!

She turned the shining thought into action. She bustled to the kitchen,

stoked the wood-range, sang Schumann while she boiled the kettle, warmed

up raisin cookies on a newspaper spread on the rack in the oven. She

scampered up-stairs to bring down her filmiest tea-cloth. She arranged

a silver tray. She proudly carried it into the living-room and set it on

the long cherrywood table, pushing aside a hoop of embroidery, a volume

of Conrad from the library, copies of the Saturday Evening Post, the

Literary Digest, and Kennicott's National Geographic Magazine.

She moved the tray back and forth and regarded the effect. She shook

her head. She busily unfolded the sewing-table set it in the bay-window,

patted the tea-cloth to smoothness, moved the tray. “Some time I'll have

a mahogany tea-table,” she said happily.

She had brought in two cups, two plates. For herself, a straight chair,

but for the guest the big wing-chair, which she pantingly tugged to the

table.

She had finished all the preparations she could think of. She sat and

waited. She listened for the door-bell, the telephone. Her eagerness was

stilled. Her hands drooped.

Surely Vida Sherwin would hear the summons.

She glanced through the bay-window. Snow was sifting over the ridge

of the Howland house like sprays of water from a hose. The wide

yards across the street were gray with moving eddies. The black trees

shivered. The roadway was gashed with ruts of ice.

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

was so empty.

The tea was cold in the pot. With wearily dipping fingertip she tested

it. Yes. Quite cold. She couldn't wait any longer.

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

Simply absurd to wait. She poured her own cup of tea. She sat and stared

at it. What was it she was going to do now? Oh yes; how idiotic; take a

lump of sugar.

She didn't want the beastly tea.

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

II

She was thinking more sharply than she had for weeks.

She reverted to her resolution to change the town--awaken it, prod it,

“reform” it. What if they were wolves instead of lambs? They'd eat her

all the sooner if she was meek to them. Fight or be eaten. It was easier

to change the town completely than to conciliate it! She could not take

their point of view; it was a negative thing; an intellectual squalor;

a swamp of prejudices and fears. She would have to make them take hers.

She was not a Vincent de Paul, to govern and mold a people. What of

that? The tiniest change in their distrust of beauty would be the

beginning of the end; a seed to sprout and some day with thickening

roots to crack their wall of mediocrity. If she could not, as she

desired, do a great thing nobly and with laughter, yet she need not be

content with village nothingness. She would plant one seed in the blank

wall.

Was she just? Was it merely a blank wall, this town which to three

thousand and more people was the center of the universe? Hadn't she,

returning from Lac-qui-Meurt, felt the heartiness of their greetings?

No. The ten thousand Gopher Prairies had no monopoly of greetings and

friendly hands. Sam Clark was no more loyal than girl librarians she

knew in St. Paul, the people she had met in Chicago. And those others

had so much that Gopher Prairie complacently lacked--the world of gaiety

and adventure, of music and the integrity of bronze, of remembered

mists from tropic isles and Paris nights and the walls of Bagdad, of

industrial justice and a God who spake not in doggerel hymns.

One seed. Which seed it was did not matter. All knowledge and freedom

were one. But she had delayed so long in finding that seed. Could she

do something with this Thanatopsis Club? Or should she make her house

so charming that it would be an influence? She'd make Kennicott like

poetry. That was it, for a beginning! She conceived so clear a picture

of their bending over large fair pages by the fire (in a non-existent

fireplace) that the spectral presences slipped away. Doors no longer

moved; curtains were not creeping shadows but lovely dark masses in the

dusk; and when Bea came home Carol was singing at the piano which she

had not touched for many days.

Their supper was the feast of two girls. Carol was in the dining-room,

in a frock of black satin edged with gold, and Bea, in blue gingham and

an apron, dined in the kitchen; but the door was open between, and

Carol was inquiring, “Did you see any ducks in Dahl's window?” and Bea

chanting, “No, ma'am. Say, ve have a svell time, dis afternoon. Tina she

have coffee and knackebrod, and her fella vos dere, and ve yoost laughed

and laughed, and her fella say he vos president and he going to make

me queen of Finland, and Ay stick a fedder in may hair and say Ay bane

going to go to var--oh, ve vos so foolish and ve LAUGH so!”

When Carol sat at the piano again she did not think of her husband but

of the book-drugged hermit, Guy Pollock. She wished that Pollock would

come calling.

“If a girl really kissed him, he'd creep out of his den and be human. If

Will were as literate as Guy, or Guy were as executive as Will, I think

I could endure even Gopher Prairie. It's so hard to mother Will. I

could be maternal with Guy. Is that what I want, something to mother, a

man or a baby or a town? I WILL have a baby. Some day. But to have him

isolated here all his receptive years----

“And so to bed.

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

“Oh, I do miss you, Will. But it will be pleasant to turn over in bed as

often as I want to, without worrying about waking you up.

“Am I really this settled thing called a 'married woman'? I feel

so unmarried tonight. So free. To think that there was once a Mrs.

Kennicott who let herself worry over a town called Gopher Prairie when

there was a whole world outside it!

“Of course Will is going to like poetry.”

III

A black February day. Clouds hewn of ponderous timber weighing down

on the earth; an irresolute dropping of snow specks upon the trampled

wastes. Gloom but no veiling of angularity. The lines of roofs and

sidewalks sharp and inescapable.

The second day of Kennicott's absence.

She fled from the creepy house for a walk. It was thirty below zero;

too cold to exhilarate her. In the spaces between houses the wind caught

her. It stung, it gnawed at nose and ears and aching cheeks, and she

hastened from shelter to shelter, catching her breath in the lee of a

barn, grateful for the protection of a billboard covered with ragged

posters showing layer under layer of paste-smeared green and streaky

red.

The grove of oaks at the end of the street suggested Indians, hunting,

snow-shoes, and she struggled past the earth-banked cottages to the

open country, to a farm and a low hill corrugated with hard snow. In

her loose nutria coat, seal toque, virginal cheeks unmarked by lines of

village jealousies, she was as out of place on this dreary hillside as

a scarlet tanager on an ice-floe. She looked down on Gopher Prairie. The

snow, stretching without break from streets to devouring prairie beyond,

wiped out the town's pretense of being a shelter. The houses were black

specks on a white sheet. Her heart shivered with that still loneliness

as her body shivered with the wind.

She ran back into the huddle of streets, all the while protesting that

she wanted a city's yellow glare of shop-windows and restaurants, or the

primitive forest with hooded furs and a rifle, or a barnyard warm and

steamy, noisy with hens and cattle, certainly not these dun houses,

these yards choked with winter ash-piles, these roads of dirty snow and

clotted frozen mud. The zest of winter was gone. Three months more, till

May, the cold might drag on, with the snow ever filthier, the weakened

body less resistent. She wondered why the good citizens insisted on

adding the chill of prejudice, why they did not make the houses of their

spirits more warm and frivolous, like the wise chatterers of Stockholm

and Moscow.

She circled the outskirts of the town and viewed the slum of “Swede

Hollow.” Wherever as many as three houses are gathered there will be a

slum of at least one house. In Gopher Prairie, the Sam Clarks boasted,

“you don't get any of this poverty that you find in cities--always

plenty of work--no need of charity--man got to be blame shiftless if he

don't get ahead.” But now that the summer mask of leaves and grass was

gone, Carol discovered misery and dead hope. In a shack of thin boards

covered with tar-paper she saw the washerwoman, Mrs. Steinhof, working

in gray steam. Outside, her six-year-old boy chopped wood. He had a torn

jacket, muffler of a blue like skimmed milk. His hands were covered with

red mittens through which protruded his chapped raw knuckles. He halted

to blow on them, to cry disinterestedly.

A family of recently arrived Finns were camped in an abandoned stable. A

man of eighty was picking up lumps of coal along the railroad.

She did not know what to do about it. She felt that these independent

citizens, who had been taught that they belonged to a democracy, would

resent her trying to play Lady Bountiful.

She lost her loneliness in the activity of the village industries--the

railroad-yards with a freight-train switching, the wheat-elevator,

oil-tanks, a slaughter-house with blood-marks on the snow, the creamery

with the sleds of farmers and piles of milk-cans, an unexplained stone

hut labeled “Danger--Powder Stored Here.” The jolly tombstone-yard,

where a utilitarian sculptor in a red calfskin overcoat whistled as

he hammered the shiniest of granite headstones. Jackson Elder's small

planing-mill, with the smell of fresh pine shavings and the burr of

circular saws. Most important, the Gopher Prairie Flour and Milling

Company, Lyman Cass president. Its windows were blanketed with

flour-dust, but it was the most stirring spot in town. Workmen were

wheeling barrels of flour into a box-car; a farmer sitting on sacks of

wheat in a bobsled argued with the wheat-buyer; machinery within the

mill boomed and whined, water gurgled in the ice-freed mill-race.

The clatter was a relief to Carol after months of smug houses. She

wished that she could work in the mill; that she did not belong to the

caste of professional-man's-wife.

She started for home, through the small slum. Before a tar-paper shack,

at a gateless gate, a man in rough brown dogskin coat and black plush

cap with lappets was watching her. His square face was confident,

his foxy mustache was picaresque. He stood erect, his hands in his

side-pockets, his pipe puffing slowly. He was forty-five or -six,

perhaps.

“How do, Mrs. Kennicott,” he drawled.

She recalled him--the town handyman, who had repaired their furnace at

the beginning of winter.

“Oh, how do you do,” she fluttered.

“My name 's Bjornstam. 'The Red Swede' they call me. Remember? Always

thought I'd kind of like to say howdy to you again.”

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

“Yump. Fine mess. No sewage, no street cleaning, and the Lutheran

minister and the priest represent the arts and sciences. Well, thunder,

we submerged tenth down here in Swede Hollow are no worse off than you

folks. Thank God, we don't have to go and purr at Juanity Haydock at the

Jolly Old Seventeen.”

The Carol who regarded herself as completely adaptable was uncomfortable

at being chosen as comrade by a pipe-reeking odd-job man. Probably he

was one of her husband's patients. But she must keep her dignity.

“Yes, even the Jolly Seventeen isn't always so exciting. It's very cold

again today, isn't it. Well----”

Bjornstam was not respectfully valedictory. He showed no signs of

pulling a forelock. His eyebrows moved as though they had a life of

their own. With a subgrin he went on:

“Maybe I hadn't ought to talk about Mrs. Haydock and her Solemcholy

Seventeen in that fresh way. I suppose I'd be tickled to death if I was

invited to sit in with that gang. I'm what they call a pariah, I guess.

I'm the town badman, Mrs. Kennicott: town atheist, and I suppose I must

be an anarchist, too. Everybody who doesn't love the bankers and the

Grand Old Republican Party is an anarchist.”

Carol had unconsciously slipped from her attitude of departure into an

attitude of listening, her face full toward him, her muff lowered. She

fumbled:

“Yes, I suppose so.” Her own grudges came in a flood. “I don't see why

you shouldn't criticize the Jolly Seventeen if you want to. They aren't

sacred.”

“Oh yes, they are! The dollar-sign has chased the crucifix clean off

the map. But then, I've got no kick. I do what I please, and I suppose I

ought to let them do the same.”

“What do you mean by saying you're a pariah?”

“I'm poor, and yet I don't decently envy the rich. I'm an old bach.

I make enough money for a stake, and then I sit around by myself, and

shake hands with myself, and have a smoke, and read history, and I don't

contribute to the wealth of Brother Elder or Daddy Cass.”

“You----I fancy you read a good deal.”

“Yep. In a hit-or-a-miss way. I'll tell you: I'm a lone wolf. I trade

horses, and saw wood, and work in lumber-camps--I'm a first-rate

swamper. Always wished I could go to college. Though I s'pose I'd find

it pretty slow, and they'd probably kick me out.”

“You really are a curious person, Mr.----”

“Bjornstam. Miles Bjornstam. Half Yank and half Swede. Usually known as

'that damn lazy big-mouthed calamity-howler that ain't satisfied with

the way we run things.' No, I ain't curious--whatever you mean by

that! I'm just a bookworm. Probably too much reading for the amount

of digestion I've got. Probably half-baked. I'm going to get in

'half-baked' first, and beat you to it, because it's dead sure to be

handed to a radical that wears jeans!”

They grinned together. She demanded:

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

“Oh, trust us borers into the foundation to know about your leisure

class. Fact, Mrs. Kennicott, I'll say that far as I can make out, the

only people in this man's town that do have any brains--I don't mean

ledger-keeping brains or duck-hunting brains or baby-spanking brains,

but real imaginative brains--are you and me and Guy Pollock and the

foreman at the flour-mill. He's a socialist, the foreman. (Don't tell

Lym Cass that! Lym would fire a socialist quicker than he would a

horse-thief!)”

“Indeed no, I sha'n't tell him.”

“This foreman and I have some great set-to's. He's a regular old-line

party-member. Too dogmatic. Expects to reform everything from

deforestration to nosebleed by saying phrases like 'surplus value.'

Like reading the prayer-book. But same time, he's a Plato J. Aristotle

compared with people like Ezry Stowbody or Professor Mott or Julius

Flickerbaugh.”

“It's interesting to hear about him.”

He dug his toe into a drift, like a schoolboy. “Rats. You mean I talk

too much. Well, I do, when I get hold of somebody like you. You probably

want to run along and keep your nose from freezing.”

“Yes, I must go, I suppose. But tell me: Why did you leave Miss Sherwin,

of the high school, out of your list of the town intelligentsia?”

“I guess maybe she does belong in it. From all I can hear she's in

everything and behind everything that looks like a reform--lot more

than most folks realize. She lets Mrs. Reverend Warren, the president

of this-here Thanatopsis Club, think she's running the works, but Miss

Sherwin is the secret boss, and nags all the easy-going dames into doing

something. But way I figure it out----You see, I'm not interested in

these dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin's trying to repair the holes in this

barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing out the water.

And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry to the crew! Me, I want

to yank it up on the ways, and fire the poor bum of a shoemaker that

built it so it sails crooked, and have it rebuilt right, from the keel

up.”

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

nearly frozen.”

“Say, you better come in and get warm, and see what an old bach's shack

is like.”

She looked doubtfully at him, at the low shanty, the yard that was

littered with cord-wood, moldy planks, a hoopless wash-tub. She was

disquieted, but Bjornstam did not give her the opportunity to be

delicate. He flung out his hand in a welcoming gesture which assumed

that she was her own counselor, that she was not a Respectable Married

Woman but fully a human being. With a shaky, “Well, just a moment, to

warm my nose,” she glanced down the street to make sure that she was not

spied on, and bolted toward the shanty.

She remained for one hour, and never had she known a more considerate

host than the Red Swede.

He had but one room: bare pine floor, small work-bench, wall bunk with

amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-stippled coffee-pot on the

shelf behind the pot-bellied cannon-ball stove, backwoods chairs--one

constructed from half a barrel, one from a tilted plank--and a row of

books incredibly assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of

gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and a spotty treatise on “The

Care, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry and Cattle.”

There was but one picture--a magazine color-plate of a steep-roofed

village in the Harz Mountains which suggested kobolds and maidens with

golden hair.

Bjornstam did not fuss over her. He suggested, “Might throw open your

coat and put your feet up on the box in front of the stove.” He tossed

his dogskin coat into the bunk, lowered himself into the barrel chair,

and droned on:

“Yeh, I'm probably a yahoo, but by gum I do keep my independence by

doing odd jobs, and that's more 'n these polite cusses like the clerks

in the banks do. When I'm rude to some slob, it may be partly because I

don't know better (and God knows I'm not no authority on trick forks

and what pants you wear with a Prince Albert), but mostly it's because I

mean something. I'm about the only man in Johnson County that remembers

the joker in the Declaration of Independence about Americans being

supposed to have the right to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of

happiness.'

“I meet old Ezra Stowbody on the street. He looks at me like he wants me

to remember he's a highmuckamuck and worth two hundred thousand dollars,

and he says, 'Uh, Bjornquist----'

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

“'Well, whatever your name is,' he says, 'I understand you have a

gasoline saw. I want you to come around and saw up four cords of maple

for me,' he says.

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

“'What difference does that make? Want you to saw that wood before

Saturday,' he says, real sharp. Common workman going and getting fresh

with a fifth of a million dollars all walking around in a hand-me-down

fur coat!

“'Here's the difference it makes,' I says, just to devil him. 'How do

you know I like YOUR looks?' Maybe he didn't look sore! 'Nope,' I says,

thinking it all over, 'I don't like your application for a loan. Take it

to another bank, only there ain't any,' I says, and I walks off on him.

“Sure. Probably I was surly--and foolish. But I figured there had to be

ONE man in town independent enough to sass the banker!”

He hitched out of his chair, made coffee, gave Carol a cup, and talked

on, half defiant and half apologetic, half wistful for friendliness

and half amused by her surprise at the discovery that there was a

proletarian philosophy.

At the door, she hinted:

“Mr. Bjornstam, if you were I, would you worry when people thought you

were affected?”

“Huh? Kick 'em in the face! Say, if I were a sea-gull, and all over

silver, think I'd care what a pack of dirty seals thought about my

flying?”

It was not the wind at her back, it was the thrust of Bjornstam's scorn

which carried her through town. She faced Juanita Haydock, cocked

her head at Maud Dyer's brief nod, and came home to Bea radiant. She

telephoned Vida Sherwin to “run over this evening.” She lustily played

Tschaikowsky--the virile chords an echo of the red laughing philosopher

of the tar-paper shack.

(When she hinted to Vida, “Isn't there a man here who amuses himself by

being irreverent to the village gods--Bjornstam, some such a name?”

the reform-leader said “Bjornstam? Oh yes. Fixes things. He's awfully

impertinent.”)

IV

Kennicott had returned at midnight. At breakfast he said four several

times that he had missed her every moment.

On her way to market Sam Clark hailed her, “The top o' the mornin'

to yez! Going to stop and pass the time of day mit Sam'l? Warmer, eh?

What'd the doc's thermometer say it was? Say, you folks better come

round and visit with us, one of these evenings. Don't be so dog-gone

proud, staying by yourselves.”

Champ Perry the pioneer, wheat-buyer at the elevator, stopped her in

the post-office, held her hand in his withered paws, peered at her

with faded eyes, and chuckled, “You are so fresh and blooming, my dear.

Mother was saying t'other day that a sight of you was better 'n a dose

of medicine.”

In the Bon Ton Store she found Guy Pollock tentatively buying a modest

gray scarf. “We haven't seen you for so long,” she said. “Wouldn't you

like to come in and play cribbage, some evening?” As though he meant it,

Pollock begged, “May I, really?”

While she was purchasing two yards of malines the vocal Raymie

Wutherspoon tiptoed up to her, his long sallow face bobbing, and he

besought, “You've just got to come back to my department and see a pair

of patent leather slippers I set aside for you.”

In a manner of more than sacerdotal reverence he unlaced her boots,

tucked her skirt about her ankles, slid on the slippers. She took them.

“You're a good salesman,” she said.

“I'm not a salesman at all! I just like elegant things. All this is so

inartistic.” He indicated with a forlornly waving hand the shelves of

shoe-boxes, the seat of thin wood perforated in rosettes, the display of

shoe-trees and tin boxes of blacking, the lithograph of a smirking

young woman with cherry cheeks who proclaimed in the exalted poetry of

advertising, “My tootsies never got hep to what pedal perfection was

till I got a pair of clever classy Cleopatra Shoes.”

“But sometimes,” Raymie sighed, “there is a pair of dainty little shoes

like these, and I set them aside for some one who will appreciate. When

I saw these I said right away, 'Wouldn't it be nice if they fitted Mrs.

Kennicott,' and I meant to speak to you first chance I had. I haven't

forgotten our jolly talks at Mrs. Gurrey's!”

That evening Guy Pollock came in and, though Kennicott instantly

impressed him into a cribbage game, Carol was happy again.

V

She did not, in recovering something of her buoyancy, forget her

determination to begin the liberalizing of Gopher Prairie by the easy

and agreeable propaganda of teaching Kennicott to enjoy reading poetry

in the lamplight. The campaign was delayed. Twice he suggested that they

call on neighbors; once he was in the country. The fourth evening

he yawned pleasantly, stretched, and inquired, “Well, what'll we do

tonight? Shall we go to the movies?”

“I know exactly what we're going to do. Now don't ask questions! Come

and sit down by the table. There, are you comfy? Lean back and forget

you're a practical man, and listen to me.”

It may be that she had been influenced by the managerial Vida Sherwin;

certainly she sounded as though she was selling culture. But she dropped

it when she sat on the couch, her chin in her hands, a volume of Yeats

on her knees, and read aloud.

Instantly she was released from the homely comfort of a prairie town.

She was in the world of lonely things--the flutter of twilight linnets,

the aching call of gulls along a shore to which the netted foam crept

out of darkness, the island of Aengus and the elder gods and the eternal

glories that never were, tall kings and women girdled with crusted gold,

the woful incessant chanting and the----

“Heh-cha-cha!” coughed Dr. Kennicott. She stopped. She remembered that

he was the sort of person who chewed tobacco. She glared, while he

uneasily petitioned, “That's great stuff. Study it in college? I

like poetry fine--James Whitcomb Riley and some of Longfellow--this

'Hiawatha.' Gosh, I wish I could appreciate that highbrow art stuff. But

I guess I'm too old a dog to learn new tricks.”

With pity for his bewilderment, and a certain desire to giggle, she

consoled him, “Then let's try some Tennyson. You've read him?”

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

And let there be no (what is it?) of farewell

When I put out to sea,

But let the----

Well, I don't remember all of it but----Oh, sure! And there's that 'I

met a little country boy who----' I don't remember exactly how it goes,

but the chorus ends up, 'We are seven.'”

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

color.”

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

She was not transported to Camelot. She read with an eye cocked on him,

and when she saw how much he was suffering she ran to him, kissed his

forehead, cried, “You poor forced tube-rose that wants to be a decent

turnip!”

“Look here now, that ain't----”

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

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

emphasis:

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

He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal and reassured. But

when he complimented her, “That was fine. I don't know but what you

can elocute just as good as Ella Stowbody,” she banged the book and

suggested that they were not too late for the nine o'clock show at the

movies.

That was her last effort to harvest the April wind, to teach divine

unhappiness by a correspondence course, to buy the lilies of Avalon and

the sunsets of Cockaigne in tin cans at Ole Jenson's Grocery.

But the fact is that at the motion-pictures she discovered herself

laughing as heartily as Kennicott at the humor of an actor who stuffed

spaghetti down a woman's evening frock. For a second she loathed her

laughter; mourned for the day when on her hill by the Mississippi

she had walked the battlements with queens. But the celebrated cinema

jester's conceit of dropping toads into a soup-plate flung her into

unwilling tittering, and the afterglow faded, the dead queens fled

through darkness.

VI

She went to the Jolly Seventeen's afternoon bridge. She had learned

the elements of the game from the Sam Clarks. She played quietly and

reasonably badly. She had no opinions on anything more polemic than

woolen union-suits, a topic on which Mrs. Howland discoursed for five

minutes. She smiled frequently, and was the complete canary-bird in her

manner of thanking the hostess, Mrs. Dave Dyer.

Her only anxious period was during the conference on husbands.

The young matrons discussed the intimacies of domesticity with a

frankness and a minuteness which dismayed Carol. Juanita Haydock

communicated Harry's method of shaving, and his interest in

deer-shooting. Mrs. Gougerling reported fully, and with some irritation,

her husband's inappreciation of liver and bacon. Maud Dyer chronicled

Dave's digestive disorders; quoted a recent bedtime controversy with

him in regard to Christian Science, socks and the sewing of buttons

upon vests; announced that she “simply wasn't going to stand his always

pawing girls when he went and got crazy-jealous if a man just danced

with her”; and rather more than sketched Dave's varieties of kisses.

So meekly did Carol give attention, so obviously was she at last

desirous of being one of them, that they looked on her fondly, and

encouraged her to give such details of her honeymoon as might be of

interest. She was embarrassed rather than resentful. She deliberately

misunderstood. She talked of Kennicott's overshoes and medical ideals

till they were thoroughly bored. They regarded her as agreeable but

green.

Till the end she labored to satisfy the inquisition. She bubbled at

Juanita, the president of the club, that she wanted to entertain them.

“Only,” she said, “I don't know that I can give you any refreshments as

nice as Mrs. Dyer's salad, or that simply delicious angel's-food we had

at your house, dear.”

“Fine! We need a hostess for the seventeenth of March. Wouldn't it be

awfully original if you made it a St. Patrick's Day bridge! I'll be

tickled to death to help you with it. I'm glad you've learned to play

bridge. At first I didn't hardly know if you were going to like Gopher

Prairie. Isn't it dandy that you've settled down to being homey with us!

Maybe we aren't as highbrow as the Cities, but we do have the daisiest

times and--oh, we go swimming in summer, and dances and--oh, lots of

good times. If folks will just take us as we are, I think we're a pretty

good bunch!”

“I'm sure of it. Thank you so much for the idea about having a St.

Patrick's Day bridge.”

“Oh, that's nothing. I always think the Jolly Seventeen are so good at

original ideas. If you knew these other towns Wakamin and Joralemon and

all, you'd find out and realize that G. P. is the liveliest, smartest

town in the state. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan, the famous auto

manufacturer, came from here and----Yes, I think that a St. Patrick's

Day party would be awfully cunning and original, and yet not too queer

or freaky or anything.”