________________________________________________
_ SHE had walked up the railroad track with Hugh, this Sunday
afternoon.
She saw Erik Valborg coming, in an ancient highwater suit,
tramping sullenly and alone, striking at the rails with a stick.
For a second she unreasoningly wanted to avoid him, but she
kept on, and she serenely talked about God, whose voice, Hugh
asserted, made the humming in the telegraph wires. Erik
stared, straightened. They greeted each other with "Hello."
"Hugh, say how-do-you-do to Mr. Valborg."
"Oh, dear me, he's got a button unbuttoned," worried Erik,
kneeling. Carol frowned, then noted the strength with which
he swung the baby in the air.
"May I walk along a piece with you?"
"I'm tired. Let's rest on those ties. Then I must be trotting
back."
They sat on a heap of discarded railroad ties, oak logs
spotted with cinnamon-colored dry-rot and marked with
metallic brown streaks where iron plates had rested. Hugh
learned that the pile was the hiding-place of Injuns; he went
gunning for them while the elders talked of uninteresting
things.
The telegraph wires thrummed, thrummed, thrummed above
them; the rails were glaring hard lines; the goldenrod smelled
dusty. Across the track was a pasture of dwarf clover and
sparse lawn cut by earthy cow-paths; beyond its placid narrow
green, the rough immensity of new stubble, jagged with wheat-
stacks like huge pineapples.
Erik talked of books; flamed like a recent convert to any
faith. He exhibited as many titles and authors as possible,
halting only to appeal, "Have you read his last book? Don't
you think he's a terribly strong writer?"
She was dizzy. But when he insisted, "You've been a
librarian; tell me; do I read too much fiction?" she advised
him loftily, rather discursively. He had, she indicated, never
studied. He had skipped from one emotion to another.
Especially--she hesitated, then flung it at him--he must not guess
at pronunciations; he must endure the nuisance of stopping to
reach for the dictionary.
"I'm talking like a cranky teacher," she sighed.
"No! And I will study! Read the damned dictionary right
through." He crossed his legs and bent over, clutching his
ankle with both hands. "I know what you mean. I've been
rushing from picture to picture, like a kid let loose in an art
gallery for the first time. You see, it's so awful recent that
I've found there was a world--well, a world where beautiful
things counted. I was on the farm till I was nineteen. Dad
is a good farmer, but nothing else. Do you know why he first
sent me off to learn tailoring? I wanted to study drawing,
and he had a cousin that'd made a lot of money tailoring out
in Dakota, and he said tailoring was a lot like drawing, so he
sent me down to a punk hole called Curlew, to work in a
tailor shop. Up to that time I'd only had three months' schooling
a year--walked to school two miles, through snow up to
my knees--and Dad never would stand for my having a single
book except schoolbooks.
"I never read a novel till I got `Dorothy Vernon of Haddon
Hall' out of the library at Curlew. I thought it was the
loveliest thing in the world! Next I read `Barriers Burned
Away' and then Pope's translation of Homer. Some
combination, all right! When I went to Minneapolis, just two
years ago, I guess I'd read pretty much everything in that
Curlew library, but I'd never heard of Rossetti or John Sargent
or Balzac or Brahms. But---- Yump, I'll study. Look here!
Shall I get out of this tailoring, this pressing and repairing?"
"I don't see why a surgeon should spend very much time
cobbling shoes."
"But what if I find I can't really draw and design? After
fussing around in New York or Chicago, I'd feel like a fool
if I had to go back to work in a gents' furnishings store!"
"Please say `haberdashery.' "
"Haberdashery? All right. I'll remember." He shrugged
and spread his fingers wide.
She was humbled by his humility; she put away in her
mind, to take out and worry over later, a speculation as to
whether it was not she who was naive. She urged, "What
if you do have to go back? Most of us do! We can't all
be artists--myself, for instance. We have to darn socks, and
yet we're not content to think of nothing but socks and darning-
cotton. I'd demand all I could get--whether I finally settled
down to designing frocks or building temples or pressing pants.
What if you do drop back? You'll have had the adventure.
Don't be too meek toward life! Go! You're young, you're
unmarried. Try everything! Don't listen to Nat Hicks and
Sam Clark and be a `steady young man'--in order to help
them make money. You're still a blessed innocent. Go and
play till the Good People capture you!"
"But I don't just want to play. I want to make something
beautiful. God! And I don't know enough. Do you get it?
Do you understand? Nobody else ever has! Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"And so---- But here's what bothers me: I like fabrics;
dinky things like that; little drawings and elegant words. But
look over there at those fields. Big! New! Don't it seem
kind of a shame to leave this and go back to the East and
Europe, and do what all those people have been doing so long?
Being careful about words, when there's millions of bushels off
wheat here! Reading this fellow Pater, when I've helped Dad
to clear fields!"
"It's good to clear fields. But it's not for you. It's one
of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily
make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.
I thought that myself, when I first came to the prairie. `Big--
new.' Oh, I don't want to deny the prairie future. It will
be magnificent. But equally I'm hanged if I want to be bullied
by it, go to war on behalf of Main Street, be bullied and BULLIED
by the faith that the future is already here in the present, and
that all of us must stay and worship wheat-stacks and insist
that this is `God's Country'--and never, of course, do
anything original or gay-colored that would help to make that
future! Anyway, you don't belong here. Sam Clark and Nat
Hicks, that's what our big newness has produced. Go! Before
it's too late, as it has been for--for some of us. Young man,
go East and grow up with the revolution! Then perhaps you
may come back and tell Sam and Nat and me what to do with
the land we've been clearing--if we'll listen--if we don't lynch
you first!"
He looked at her reverently. She could hear him saying,
"I've always wanted to know a woman who would talk to
me like that."
Her hearing was faulty. He was saying nothing of the sort.
He was saying:
"Why aren't you happy with your husband?"
"I--you----"
"He doesn't care for the `blessed innocent' part of you,
does he!"
"Erik, you mustn't----"
"First you tell me to go and be free, and then you say that
I `mustn't'!"
"I know. But you mustn't---- You must be more
impersonal!"
He glowered at her like a downy young owl. She wasn't
sure but she thought that he muttered, "I'm damned if I will."
She considered with wholesome fear the perils of meddling with
other people's destinies, and she said timidly, "Hadn't we
better start back now?"
He mused, "You're younger than I am. Your lips are for
songs about rivers in the morning and lakes at twilight. I don't
see how anybody could ever hurt you. . . . Yes. We better go."
He trudged beside her, his eyes averted. Hugh experimentally
took his thumb. He looked down at the baby seriously.
He burst out, "All right. I'll do it. I'll stay here
one year. Save. Not spend so much money on clothes. And
then I'll go East, to art-school. Work on the side-tailor shop,
dressmaker's. I'll learn what I'm good for: designing clothes,
stage-settings, illustrating, or selling collars to fat men. All
settled." He peered at her, unsmiling.
"Can you stand it here in town for a year?"
"With you to look at?"
"Please! I mean: Don't the people here think you're an
odd bird? (They do me, I assure you!)"
"I don't know. I never notice much. Oh, they do kid me
about not being in the army--especially the old warhorses, the
old men that aren't going themselves. And this Bogart boy.
And Mr. Hicks's son--he's a horrible brat. But probably he's
licensed to say what he thinks about his father's hired man!"
"He's beastly!"
They were in town. They passed Aunt Bessie's house. Aunt
Bessie and Mrs. Bogart were at the window, and Carol saw
that they were staring so intently that they answered her wave
only with the stiffly raised hands of automatons. In the next
block Mrs. Dr. Westlake was gaping from her porch. Carol
said with an embarrassed quaver:
"I want to run in and see Mrs. Westlake. I'll say good-by here."
She avoided his eyes.
Mrs. Westlake was affable. Carol felt that she was expected
to explain; and while she was mentally asserting that she'd
be hanged if she'd explain, she was explaining:
"Hugh captured that Valborg boy up the track. They
became such good friends. And I talked to him for a while. I'd
heard he was eccentric, but really, I found him quite intelligent.
Crude, but he reads--reads almost the way Dr. Westlake does."
"That's fine. Why does he stick here in town? What's
this I hear about his being interested in Myrtle Cass?"
"I don't know. Is he? I'm sure he isn't! He said he was
quite lonely! Besides, Myrtle is a babe in arms!"
"Twenty-one if she's a day!"
"Well---- Is the doctor going to do any hunting this fall?"
II
The need of explaining Erik dragged her back into doubting.
For all his ardent reading, and his ardent life, was he anything
but a small-town youth bred on an illiberal farm and in cheap
tailor shops? He had rough hands. She had been attracted
only by hands that were fine and suave, like those of her father.
Delicate hands and resolute purpose. But this boy--powerful
seamed hands and flabby will.
"It's not appealing weakness like his, but sane strength that
win animate the Gopher Prairies. Only---- Does that mean
anything? Or am I echoing Vida? The world has always let
`strong' statesmen and soldiers--the men with strong voices--
take control, and what have the thundering boobies done?
What is `strength'?
"This classifying of people! I suppose tailors differ as much
as burglars or kings.
"Erik frightened me when he turned on me. Of course
he didn't mean anything, but I mustn't let him be so personal.
"Amazing impertinence!
"But he didn't mean to be.
"His hands are FIRM. I wonder if sculptors don't have
thick hands, too?
"Of course if there really is anything I can do to HELP the boy----
"Though I despise these people who interfere. He must be independent."
III
She wasn't altogether pleased, the week after, when Erik was
independent and, without asking for her inspiration, planned
the tennis tournament. It proved that he had learned to play
in Minneapolis; that, next to Juanita Haydock, he had the
best serve in town. Tennis was well spoken of in Gopher
Prairie and almost never played. There were three courts:
one belonging to Harry Haydock, one to the cottages at the
lake, and one, a rough field on the outskirts, laid out by a
defunct tennis association.
Erik had been seen in flannels and an imitation panama hat,
playing on the abandoned court with Willis Woodford, the clerk
in Stowbody's bank. Suddenly he was going about proposing
the reorganization of the tennis association, and writing names
in a fifteen-cent note-book bought for the purpose at Dyer's.
When he came to Carol he was so excited over being an
organizer that he did not stop to talk of himself and Aubrey
Beardsley for more than ten minutes. He begged, "Will you
get some of the folks to come in?" and she nodded agreeably.
He proposed an informal exhibition match to advertise the
association; he suggested that Carol and himself, the Haydocks,
the Woodfords, and the Dillons play doubles, and that the
association be formed from the gathered enthusiasts. He had
asked Harry Haydock to be tentative president. Harry, he
reported, had promised, "All right. You bet. But you go
ahead and arrange things, and I'll O.K. 'em." Erik planned
that the match should be held Saturday afternoon, on the old
public court at the edge of town. He was happy in being, for
the first time, part of Gopher Prairie.
Through the week Carol heard how select an attendance
there was to be.
Kennicott growled that he didn't care to go.
Had he any objections to her playing with Erik?
No; sure not; she needed the exercise.
Carol went to the match early. The court was in a meadow
out on the New Antonia road. Only Erik was there. He was
dashing about with a rake, trying to make the court somewhat
less like a plowed field. He admitted that he had stage
fright at the thought of the coming horde. Willis and Mrs.
Woodford arrived, Willis in home-made knickers and black
sneakers through at the toe; then Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon,
people as harmless and grateful as the Woodfords.
Carol was embarrassed and excessively agreeable, like the
bishop's lady trying not to feel out of place at a Baptist
bazaar.
They waited.
The match was scheduled for three. As spectators there
assembled one youthful grocery clerk, stopping his Ford delivery
wagon to stare from the seat, and one solemn small boy, tugging
a smaller sister who had a careless nose.
"I wonder where the Haydocks are? They ought to show
up, at least," said Erik.
Carol smiled confidently at him, and peered down the empty
road toward town. Only heat-waves and dust and dusty
weeds.
At half-past three no one had come, and the grocery boy
reluctantly got out, cranked his Ford, glared at them in a
disillusioned manner, and rattled away. The small boy and his
sister ate grass and sighed.
The players pretended to be exhilarated by practising
service, but they startled at each dust-cloud from a motor car.
None of the cars turned into the meadow-none till a quarter
to four, when Kennicott drove in.
Carol's heart swelled. "How loyal he is! Depend on him!
He'd come, if nobody else did. Even though he doesn't care
for the game. The old darling!"
Kennicott did not alight. He called out, "Carrie! Harry
Haydock 'phoned me that they've decided to hold the tennis
matches, or whatever you call 'em, down at the cottages at the
lake, instead of here. The bunch are down there now: Haydocks
and Dyers and Clarks and everybody. Harry wanted to
know if I'd bring you down. I guess I can take the time--
come right back after supper."
Before Carol could sum it all up, Erik stammered, "Why,
Haydock didn't say anything to me about the change. Of
course he's the president, but----"
Kennicott looked at him heavily, and grunted, "I don't know
a thing about it. . . . Coming, Carrie?"
"I am not! The match was to be here, and it will be here!
You can tell Harry Haydock that he's beastly rude!" She
rallied the five who had been left out, who would always be
left out. "Come on! We'll toss to see which four of us play
the Only and Original First Annual Tennis Tournament of
Forest Hills, Del Monte, and Gopher Prairie!"
"Don't know as I blame you," said Kennicott. "Well
have supper at home then?" He drove off.
She hated him for his composure. He had ruined her
defiance. She felt much less like Susan B. Anthony as she turned
to her huddled followers.
Mrs. Dillon and Willis Woodford lost the toss. The others
played out the game, slowly, painfully, stumbling on the rough
earth, muffing the easiest shots, watched only by the small boy
and his sniveling sister. Beyond the court stretched the eternal
stubble-fields. The four marionettes, awkwardly going through
exercises, insignificant in the hot sweep of contemptuous land,
were not heroic; their voices did not ring out in the score, but
sounded apologetic; and when the game was over they glanced
about as though they were waiting to be laughed at.
They walked home. Carol took Erik's arm. Through her
thin linen sleeve she could feel the crumply warmth of his
familiar brown jersey coat. She observed that there were
purple and red gold threads interwoven with the brown. She
remembered the first time she had seen it.
Their talk was nothing but improvisations on the theme:
"I never did like this Haydock. He just considers his own
convenience." Ahead of them, the Dillons and Woodfords
spoke of the weather and B. J. Gougerling's new bungalow. No
one referred to their tennis tournament. At her gate Carol
shook hands firmly with Erik and smiled at him.
Next morning, Sunday morning, when Carol was on the
porch, the Haydocks drove up.
"We didn't mean to be rude to you, dearie!" implored
Juanita. "I wouldn't have you think that for anything. We
planned that Will and you should come down and have supper
at our cottage."
"No. I'm sure you didn't mean to be." Carol was super-
neighborly. "But I do think you ought to apologize to poor
Erik Valborg. He was terribly hurt."
"Oh. Valborg. I don't care so much what he thinks,"
objected Harry. "He's nothing but a conceited buttinsky.
Juanita and I kind of figured he was trying to run this
tennis thing too darn much anyway."
"But you asked him to make arrangements."
"I know, but I don't like him. Good Lord, you couldn't
hurt his feelings! He dresses up like a chorus man--and,
by golly, he looks like one!--but he's nothing but a Swede farm
boy, and these foreigners, they all got hides like a covey of
rhinoceroses ."
"But he IS hurt!"
"Well---- I don't suppose I ought to have gone off half-
cocked, and not jollied him along. I'll give him a cigar.
He'll----"
Juanita had been licking her lips and staring at Carol. She
interrupted her husband, "Yes, I do think Harry ought to
fix it up with him. You LIKE him, DON'T you, Carol??"
Over and through Carol ran a frightened cautiousness.
"Like him? I haven't an I--dea. He seems to be a very decent
young man. I just felt that when he'd worked so hard on
the plans for the match, it was a shame not to be nice to him."
"Maybe there's something to that," mumbled Harry; then,
at sight of Kennicott coming round the corner tugging the red
garden hose by its brass nozzle, he roared in relief, "What
d' you think you're trying to do, doc?"
While Kennicott explained in detail all that he thought he
was trying to do, while he rubbed his chin and gravely stated,
"Struck me the grass was looking kind of brown in patches--
didn't know but what I'd give it a sprinkling," and while
Harry agreed that this was an excellent idea, Juanita made
friendly noises and, behind the gilt screen of an affectionate
smile, watched Carol's face.
IV
She wanted to see Erik. She wanted some one to play with!
There wasn't even so dignified and sound an excuse as
having Kennicott's trousers pressed; when she inspected them,
all three pairs looked discouragingly neat. She probably
would not have ventured on it had she not spied Nat Hicks
in the pool-parlor, being witty over bottle-pool. Erik was
alone! She fluttered toward the tailor shop, dashed into its
slovenly heat with the comic fastidiousness of a humming bird
dipping into a dry tiger-lily. It was after she had entered
that she found an excuse.
Erik was in the back room, cross-legged on a long table,
sewing a vest. But he looked as though he were doing this
eccentric thing to amuse himself.
"Hello. I wonder if you couldn't plan a sports-suit for
me?" she said breathlessly.
He stared at her; he protested, "No, I won't! God! I'm
not going to be a tailor with you!"
"Why, Erik!" she said, like a mildly shocked mother.
It occurred to her that she did not need a suit, and that
the order might have been hard to explain to Kennicott.
He swung down from the table. "I want to show you
something." He rummaged in the roll-top desk on which Nat
Hicks kept bills, buttons, calendars, buckles, thread-channeled
wax, shotgun shells, samples of brocade for "fancy vests,"
fishing-reels, pornographic post-cards, shreds of buckram lining.
He pulled out a blurred sheet of Bristol board and
anxiously gave it to her. It was a sketch for a frock. It
was not well drawn; it was too finicking; the pillars in the
background were grotesquely squat. But the frock had an
original back, very low, with a central triangular section from
the waist to a string of jet beads at the neck.
"It's stunning. But how it would shock Mrs. Clark!"
"Yes, wouldn't it!"
"You must let yourself go more when you're drawing."
"Don't know if I can. I've started kind of late. But
listen! What do you think I've done this two weeks? I've
read almost clear through a Latin grammar, and about twenty
pages of Caesar."
"Splendid! You are lucky. You haven't a teacher to make
you artificial."
"You're my teacher!"
There was a dangerous edge of personality to his voice.
She was offended and agitated. She turned her shoulder on
him, stared through the back window, studying this typical
center of a typical Main Street block, a vista hidden from
casual strollers. The backs of the chief establishments in town
surrounded a quadrangle neglected, dirty, and incomparably
dismal. From the front, Howland & Gould's grocery was
smug enough, but attached to the rear was a lean-to of storm
streaked pine lumber with a sanded tar roof--a staggering
doubtful shed behind which was a heap of ashes, splintered
packing-boxes, shreds of excelsior, crumpled straw-board,
broken olive-bottles, rotten fruit, and utterly disintegrated
vegetables: orange carrots turning black, and potatoes with
ulcers. The rear of the Bon Ton Store was grim with blistered
black-painted iron shutters, under them a pile of once glossy
red shirt-boxes, now a pulp from recent rain.
As seen from Main Street, Oleson & McGuire's Meat Market
had a sanitary and virtuous expression with its new tile
counter, fresh sawdust on the floor, and a hanging veal cut
in rosettes. But she now viewed a back room with a homemade
refrigerator of yellow smeared with black grease. A man
in an apron spotted with dry blood was hoisting out a hard
slab of meat.
Behind Billy's Lunch, the cook, in an apron which must
long ago have been white, smoked a pipe and spat at the
pest of sticky flies. In the center of the block, by itself, was
the stable for the three horses of the drayman, and beside it a
pile of manure.
The rear of Ezra Stowbody's bank was whitewashed, and
back of it was a concrete walk and a three-foot square of
grass, but the window was barred, and behind the bars she
saw Willis Woodford cramped over figures in pompous books.
He raised his head, jerkily rubbed his eyes, and went back
to the eternity of figures.
The backs of the other shops were an impressionistic picture
of dirty grays, drained browns, writhing heaps of refuse.
"Mine is a back-yard romance--with a journeyman tailor!"
She was saved from self-pity as she began to think through
Erik's mind. She turned to him with an indignant, "It's
disgusting that this is all you have to look at."
He considered it. "Outside there? I don't notice much.
I'm learning to look inside. Not awful easy!"
"Yes. . . . I must be hurrying."
As she walked home--without hurrying--she remembered
her father saying to a serious ten-year-old Carol, "Lady, only
a fool thinks he's superior to beautiful bindings, but only a
double-distilled fool reads nothing but bindings."
She was startled by the return of her father, startled by a
sudden conviction that in this flaxen boy she had found
the gray reticent judge who was divine love, perfect under-
standing. She debated it, furiously denied it, reaffirmed it,
ridiculed it. Of one thing she was unhappily certain: there
was nothing of the beloved father image in Will Kennicott.
V
She wondered why she sang so often, and why she found
so many pleasant things--lamplight seen though trees on
a cool evening, sunshine on brown wood, morning sparrows,
black sloping roofs turned to plates of silver by moonlight.
Pleasant things, small friendly things, and pleasant places--a
field of goldenrod, a pasture by the creek--and suddenly a
wealth of pleasant people. Vida was lenient to Carol at the
surgical-dressing class; Mrs. Dave Dyer flattered her with
questions about her health, baby, cook, and opinions on the
war.
Mrs. Dyer seemed not to share the town's prejudice against
Erik. "He's a nice-looking fellow; we must have him go on
one of our picnics some time." Unexpectedly, Dave Dyer also
liked him. The tight-fisted little farceur had a confused
reverence for anything that seemed to him refined or clever. He
answered Harry Haydock's sneers, "That's all right now!
Elizabeth may doll himself up too much, but he's smart, and
don't you forget it! I was asking round trying to find
out where this Ukraine is, and darn if he didn't tell me.
What's the matter with his talking so polite? Hell's bells,
Harry, no harm in being polite. There's some regular he-
men that are just as polite as women, prett' near."
Carol found herself going about rejoicing, "How neighborly
the town is!" She drew up with a dismayed "Am I falling in
love with this boy? That's ridiculous! I'm merely interested
in him. I like to think of helping him to succeed."
But as she dusted the living-room, mended a collar-band,
bathed Hugh, she was picturing herself and a young artistan
Apollo nameless and evasive--building a house in the
Berkshires or in Virginia; exuberantly buying a chair with his
first check; reading poetry together, and frequently being
earnest over valuable statistics about labor; tumbling out of
bed early for a Sunday walk, and chattering (where Kennicott
would have yawned) over bread and butter by a lake. Hugh
was in her pictures, and he adored the young artist, who made
castles of chairs and rugs for him. Beyond these playtimes
she saw the "things I could do for Erik"--and she admitted that Erik
did partly make up the image of her altogether perfect artist.
In panic she insisted on being attentive to Kennicott, when
he wanted to be left alone to read the newspaper.
VI
She needed new clothes. Kennicott had promised, "We'll
have a good trip down to the Cities in the fall, and take plenty
of time for it, and you can get your new glad-rags then." But
as she examined her wardrobe she flung her ancient black
velvet frock on the floor and raged, "They're disgraceful.
Everything I have is falling to pieces."
There was a new dressmaker and milliner, a Mrs.
Swiftwaite. It was said that she was not altogether an elevating
influence in the way she glanced at men; that she would as
soon take away a legally appropriated husband as not; that if
there WAS any Mr. Swiftwaite, "it certainly was strange that
nobody seemed to know anything about him!" But she had
made for Rita Gould an organdy frock and hat to match
universally admitted to be "too cunning for words," and the
matrons went cautiously, with darting eyes and excessive
politeness, to the rooms which Mrs. Swiftwaite had taken in
the old Luke Dawson house, on Floral Avenue.
With none of the spiritual preparation which normally
precedes the buying of new clothes in Gopher Prairie, Carol
marched into Mrs. Swiftwaite's, and demanded, "I want to
see a hat, and possibly a blouse."
In the dingy old front parlor which she had tried to make
smart with a pier glass, covers from fashion magazines,
anemic French prints, Mrs. Swiftwaite moved smoothly among
the dress-dummies and hat-rests, spoke smoothly as she took
up a small black and red turban. "I am sure the lady will
find this extremely attractive."
"It's dreadfully tabby and small-towny," thought Carol,
while she soothed, "I don't believe it quite goes with me."
"It's the choicest thing I have, and I'm sure you'll find
it suits you beautifully. It has a great deal of chic. Please
try it on," said Mrs. Swiftwaite, more smoothly than ever.
Carol studied the woman. She was as imitative as a glass
diamond. She was the more rustic in her effort to appear
urban. She wore a severe high-collared blouse with a row of
small black buttons, which was becoming to her low-breasted
slim neatness, but her skirt was hysterically checkered, her
cheeks were too highly rouged, her lips too sharply penciled.
She was magnificently a specimen of the illiterate divorcee of
forty made up to look thirty, clever, and alluring.
While she was trying on the hat Carol felt very condescending.
She took it off, shook her head, explained with the kind
smile for inferiors, "I'm afraid it won't do, though it's
unusually nice for so small a town as this."
"But it's really absolutely New-Yorkish."
"Well, it----"
"You see, I know my New York styles. I lived in New
York for years, besides almost a year in Akron!"
"You did?" Carol was polite, and edged away, and went
home unhappily. She was wondering whether her own airs
were as laughable as Mrs. Swiftwaite's. She put on the eye-
glasses which Kennicott had recently given to her for reading,
and looked over a grocery bill. She went hastily up to her
room, to her mirror. She was in a mood of self-depreciation.
Accurately or not, this was the picture she saw in the mirror:
Neat rimless eye-glasses. Black hair clumsily tucked under
a mauve straw hat which would have suited a spinster. Cheeks
clear, bloodless. Thin nose. Gentle mouth and chin. A
modest voile blouse with an edging of lace at the neck. A
virginal sweetness and timorousness--no flare of gaiety, no
suggestion of cities, music, quick laughter.
"I have become a small-town woman. Absolute. Typical.
Modest and moral and safe. Protected from life. GENTEEL!
The Village Virus--the village virtuousness. My hair--just
scrambled together. What can Erik see in that wedded spinster
there? He does like me! Because I'm the only woman who's
decent to him! How long before he'll wake up to me? . . .
I've waked up to myself. . . . Am I as old as--as old as I am?
"Not really old. Become careless. Let myself look tabby.
"I want to chuck every stitch I own. Black hair and
pale cheeks--they'd go with a Spanish dancer's costume--
rose behind my ear, scarlet mantilla over one shoulder, the
other bare."
She seized the rouge sponge, daubed her cheeks, scratched at
her lips with the vermilion pencil until they stung, tore open
her collar. She posed with her thin arms in the attitude of
the fandango. She dropped them sharply. She shook her head.
"My heart doesn't dance," she said. She flushed as she
fastened her blouse.
"At least I'm much more graceful than Fern Mullins.
Heavens! When I came here from the Cities, girls imitated
me. Now I'm trying to imitate a city girl." _
Read next: CHAPTER 30
Read previous: CHAPTER 28
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