1 
 
MAIN STREET 
 
NOVELS BY SINCLAIR LEWIS 
 
 Our Mr. Wrenn 
 
 The Trail of the Hawk 
 
 The Job 
 
 Free Air 
 
 Main Street 
 
MAIN STREET 
 
 THE STORY OF CAROL KENNICOTT 
 
 BY 
 
 SINCLAIR LEWIS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 
 
 1920 
 
COPYRIGHT, JQ20, BY 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC. 
 
 THE QUINN A BODEN COMPANY 
 RAHWAY N. J. 
 
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, Minn- 
 esota" 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. 
 
 f>ur railway station is the final aspiration of architecture. 
 Sam Clark's annual hardware turnover is the envy of the jour 
 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? 
 
MAIN STREET 
 
 CHAPTER 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 sus- 
 pended 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 Came- 
 lot; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire 
 called the American Middlewest. 
 
 n 
 
 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 
 
2 MAIN STREET 
 
 families in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Dakotas send their 
 children thither, and Blodgett protects them from the wicked- 
 ness 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 adventur- 
 ous 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 stock- 
 ings beneath decorous blue serge bloomers, thuddingly galloped 
 across the floor of the " gym " in practise for the Blodgett 
 Ladies' Basket-Bali 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 plan- 
 ning 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 be- 
 come she would never be static. 
 
 Her versatility ensnared her. By turns she hoped to discover 
 
MAIN STREET 3 
 
 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 adver- 
 tisements 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 experi- 
 ments 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 pre- 
 tended 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, profes- 
 sional 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 
 
4 MAIN STREET 
 
 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 Min- 
 neapolis 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 fore- 
 finger 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 stock- 
 yards, "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." 
 
 " How? " 
 
 "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 sympa- 
 thetic! " 
 
 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. 
 
MAIN STREET 5 
 
 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 grate- 
 ful 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 re- 
 garded 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? No- 
 body 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 unwill- 
 ing 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 
 
6 MAIN STREET 
 
 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 counci 1 
 and dramatically defeated him. 
 
 ra 
 
 Though she was Minnesota-born Carol was not an intima 
 of the prairie villages. Her father, the smiling and shabb 
 the learned and teasingly kind, had come from Massachuset. 
 and through all her childhood he had been a judge in Mankat 
 which is not a prairie town, but in its garden-sheltered stree 
 and aisles of elms is white and green New England rebor 
 Mankato lies between cliffs and the Minnesota River, hard b 
 Traverse des Sioux, where the first settlers made treaties wit 
 the Indians, and the cattle-rustlers once came galloping befor 
 hell-for-leather posses. 
 
 As she climbed along the banks of the dark river Car 
 listened to its fables about the wide land of yellow waters an 
 bleached buffalo bones to the West; the Southern levees an 
 singing darkies and palm trees toward which it was forevt 
 mysteriously gliding; and she heard again the startled bell 
 and thick puffing of high-stacked river steamers wrecked on 
 sand-reefs sixty years ago. Along the decks she saw mission- 
 aries, 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 tarn 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 
 
MAIN STREET 7 
 
 knows stories; and the skitamarigg, who will play with chil- 
 dren 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 Miiller. 
 He gravely taught them the letters on the backs of the encyclo- 
 pedias, and when polite visitors asked about the mental prog- 
 -ess of the "little ones," they were horrified to hear the 
 hildren earnestly repeating A-And, And-Aus, Aus-Bis, Bis-Cal, 
 al-Cha. 
 
 Carol's mother died when she was nine. Her father retired 
 
 ^m the judiciary when she was eleven, and took the family 
 
 iMinneapolis. There he died, two years after. Her sister, a 
 
 Jsy proper advisory soul, older than herself, had become a 
 
 ganger to her even when they lived in the same house. 
 
 *From those early brown and silver days and from her 
 
 ^dependence of relatives Carol retained a willingness to be 
 
 Afferent from brisk efficient book-ignoring people; an instinct 
 
 v observe and wonder at their bustle even when she was 
 
 king part in it. But, she felt approvingly, as she discovered 
 
 \ *r career of town-planning, she was now roused to being brisk 
 
 ad 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 pre- 
 tending 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 strag- 
 gling 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 
 
8 MAIN STREET 
 
 library, an authority on books, invited to dinners with poets 
 and explorers, reading a paper to an association of distinguished 
 scholars. 
 
 The last faculty reception before commencement. In 
 five days they would be in the cyclone of final examina- 
 tions. 
 
 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." 
 
MAIN STREET 9 
 
 " 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 house- 
 work, 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-cata- 
 loguing, 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 Internation- 
 ale. It cannot be reported that Carol had anything significant 
 
io MAIN STREET 
 
 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, Remain Rolland, syndicalism, the Con- 
 federation Generate 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 Win- 
 netka, 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 Cutmdative 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. 
 
 vn 
 
 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 aspira- 
 tions. 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. 
 
MAIN STREET n 
 
 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; some- 
 times, in dread of life's slipping past, she turned into a bac- 
 chanal, 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. Mar- 
 bury 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 Min- 
 nesota 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. 
 
 12 
 
MAIN STREET 13 
 
 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, dis- 
 coursed 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 BA. 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 
 
H MAIN STREET 
 
 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 pa- 
 tients 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 hav- 
 ing lost feminine charm. Say! Don't you think there's a lot 
 
MAIN STREET 15 
 
 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 per- 
 sonality 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! " 
 
 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 encoun- 
 tering 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 
 
16 MAIN STREET 
 
 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 
 
MAIN STREET 17 
 
 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 Kenni- 
 cott 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, con- 
 scious 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? " 
 
18 MAIN STREET 
 
 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 any- 
 thing 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 pic- 
 tures. 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 
 
MAIN STREET 19 
 
 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 un- 
 bathed 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, im- 
 perceptibly climbing the giant tableland that slopes in a thou- 
 sand-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; ap- 
 parently 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 
 
 20 
 
MAIN STREET 21 
 
 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 memo- 
 ries: 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. 
 
 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 ob- 
 viously 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. 
 
22 MAIN STREET 
 
 They had been married at the end of a year of conversa- 
 tional 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 peas- 
 antry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagi- 
 nation 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, impress- 
 ively 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 
 
MAIN STREET 23 
 
 run to for relief from their bleakness Can't you under- 
 stand? 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 fac- 
 tories 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 1 " 
 
 " Oh, they're not so bad," was all he answered. He pre- 
 tended 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 hun- 
 dred 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 tem- 
 porary-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 
 
24 MAIN STREET 
 
 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 Dutch- 
 man, 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 win- 
 dow, 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 wor- 
 ries 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 like 
 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 
 
MAIN STREET 25 
 
 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, play- 
 ing 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 in- 
 equalities, or something different in history, unlike the te- 
 dious 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 loneli- 
 ness which comes most depressingly in the midst of many 
 people she tried to forget problems, to look at the prairie ob- 
 jectively. 
 
 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. 
 
26 MAIN STREET 
 
 Then Kennicott startled her by chuckling, " D' you realize 
 the town after the next is Gopher Prairie? Home! " 
 
 m 
 
 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 charm- 
 ing ... 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 im- 
 pression 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 un- 
 protected 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 
 
MAIN STREET 27 
 
 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 enter- 
 ing 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 ir- 
 ritation 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 
 
28 MAIN STREET 
 
 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 pre- 
 scriptions right fact you might say he's the guy that put the 
 'shun' in 'prescription.' So! Well, leave us take the bonny 
 
MAIN STREET 29 
 
 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 Minniemashie 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 mar- 
 riage. 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 
 
3 o MAIN STREET 
 
 surmounted by scrolls and brackets and bumps of jigsawed 
 wood. No shrubbery to shut off the public gaze. A lugu- 
 brious 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 1 
 
 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 
 
 " 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 dis- 
 appointed 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 bro- 
 cade 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." 
 
32 MAIN STREET 
 
 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 dar- 
 ing 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 g;ave 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 
 
MAIN STREET 33 
 
 she stopped and stated, "I am Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. Some 
 day I hope to confide that a heap of extremely dubious pump- 
 kins 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 Rowland & Gould's more 
 as she does here, what you done with the poster for Fluffed 
 Oats? ") 
 
 n 
 
 When Carol had walked for thirty-two minutes she had com- 
 pletely 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 spar- 
 rows, 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. 
 
34 MAIN STREET 
 
 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 medi- 
 cines in yellow packages nostrums for consumption, for 
 " women's diseases " notorious mixtures of opium and alco- 
 
MAIN STREET 35 
 
 hoi, 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 Rose- 
 bud Movie Palace." Lithographs announcing a film called 
 " Fatty in Love." 
 
 Rowland & 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 pidgifc 
 German or trolling out dirty songs vice gone feeble and un- 
 enterprising 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 pic- 
 tures 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, in- 
 terspersed 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! 
 
3 6 MAIN STREET 
 
 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 tooth- 
 pick. 
 
 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 ad- 
 vertisements. The roaring of a tested motor; a racket which 
 beat at the nerves. Surly young men in khaki union-over- 
 alls. The most energetic and vital places in town. 
 
 A large warehouse for agricultural implements. An impres- 
 sive 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 Prai- 
 rie " 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, 
 
MAIN STREET 37 
 
 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 shut- 
 ting 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 pros- 
 perity. 
 
 In all the town not one building save the Ionic bank which 
 gave pleasure to Carol's eyes; not a dozen buildings which sug- 
 gested 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 plan- 
 lessness, 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 build- 
 ing beside it was crowned with battlements and pyramids of 
 brick capped with blocks of red sandstone. 
 
38 MAIN STREET 
 
 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." 
 
 ni 
 
 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. 
 
 " Veil, so you come to town," said Tina. 
 
 "Ya. Ay get a yob," said Bea. 
 
 " Veil. . . . You got a fella now? " 
 
 "Ya. Yim Yacobson." 
 
 " Veil. 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. 
 Veil. You go take a valk." 
 
 "Ya," said Bea. 
 
MAIN STREET 39 
 
 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! 
 
40 MAIN STREET 
 
 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. 
 
 " Veil? 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 
 
MAIN STREET 41 
 
 a vast prim circle as though they were attending a funeral, 
 she saw the guests. They were waiting so! They were wait- 
 ing 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 pro- 
 duced 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 intro- 
 duce you to them, one at a time." 
 
 " Tell me about them first." 
 
 "Well, the nice-looking couple over there are Harry Hay- 
 
42 MAIN STREET 
 
 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 7 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 democra- 
 tic. 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 any- 
 thing." 
 
 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 under- 
 taker! " 
 
 " 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? " 
 
MAIN STREET 43 
 
 Yes you know president of the Velvet Motor Company 
 of Boston, Mass. make the Velvet Twelve biggest automo- 
 bile 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 Chefs 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, superinten- 
 dent 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 
 
44 MAIN STREET 
 
 with any of the new educational systems? The modern kinder- 
 garten 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 American- 
 ism, no matter what these faddists advocate heaven knows 
 what they do want knitting, I suppose, and classes in wig- 
 gling 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. 57 
 
 " 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 disrespect- 
 fully 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 Bresna- 
 han 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 out- 
 doors. 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. 
 
MAIN STREET 45 
 
 "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 
 loway 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 practi- 
 tioner 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 pre- 
 scription-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 
 
46 MAIN STREET 
 
 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 disap- 
 proved. 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. Slie 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 respect- 
 able 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 Rowland 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 
 
MAIN STREET 47 
 
 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 catch- 
 ing a hen." 
 
 "You bet; that's a slick stunt; do that, Dave! " cheered 
 Chet Dashaway. 
 
 Mr. Dave Dyer obliged. 
 
 All the guests moved their lips in anticipation of being called 
 on for their own stunts. 
 
 " Ella, come on and recite c Old Sweetheart of Mine/ for 
 us," demanded Sam. 
 
 Miss Ella Stowbody, the spinster daughter of the Ionic bank, 
 scratched her dry palms and blushed. " Oh, you don't want 
 to hear that old thing again." 
 
 " Sure we do! You bet! " asserted Sam. 
 
 " My voice is in terrible shape tonight." 
 
 "Tut! Come on! " 
 
 Sam loudly explained to Carol, " Ella is our shark at elocut- 
 ing. She's had professional training. She studied singing and 
 oratory and dramatic art and shorthand for a year, in Mil- 
 waukee." 
 
 Miss Stowbody was reciting. As encore to " An Old Sweet- 
 heart of Mine," she gave a peculiarly optimistic poem regard- 
 ing the value of smiles. 
 
 There were four other stunts: one Jewish, one Irish, one 
 juvenile, and Nat Hicks's parody of Mark Antony's funeral 
 oration. 
 
 During the winter Carol was to hear Dave Dyer's hen- 
 catching impersonation seven times, " An Old Sweetheart of 
 Mine " nine times, the Jewish story and the funeral oration 
 twice; but now she was ardent and, because she did so want 
 to be happy and simple-hearted, she was as disappointed as 
 the others when the stunts were finished, and the party in- 
 stantly sank back into coma. 
 
 They gave up trying to be festive; they began to talk 
 naturally, as they did at their shops and homes. 
 
 The men and women divided, as they had been tending to 
 do all evening. Carol was deserted by the men, left to a 
 group of matrons who steadily pattered of children, sickness, 
 and cooks their own shop-talk. She was piqued. She re- 
 
48 MAIN STREET 
 
 membered visions of herself as a smart married woman in a 
 drawing-room, fencing with clever men. Her dejection was 
 relieved by speculation as to what the men were discussing, in 
 the corner between the piano and the phonograph. Did they 
 rise from these housewifely personalities to a larger world 
 of abstractions and affairs? 
 
 She made her best curtsy to Mrs. Dawson; she twittered, 
 " I won't have my husband leaving me so soon! I'm going 
 over and pull the wretch's ears." She rose with a jeune fille 
 bow. She was self-absorbed and self-approving because she 
 had attained that quality of sentimentality. She proudly 
 dipped across the room and, to the interest and commendation 
 of all beholders, sat on the arm of Kennicott's chair. 
 
 He was gossiping with Sam Clark, Luke Dawson, Jackson 
 Elder of the planing-mill, Chet Dashaway, Dave Dyer, Harry 
 Haydock, and Ezra Stowbody, president of the Ionic bank. 
 
 Ezra Stowbody was a troglodyte. He had come to Gopher 
 Prairie in 1865. He was a distinguished bird of prey 
 swooping thin nose, turtle mouth, thick brows, port-wine 
 cheeks, floss of white hair, contemptuous eyes. He was not 
 happy in the social changes of thirty years. Three decades 
 ago, Dr. Westlake, Julius Flickerbaugh the lawyer, Merriman 
 Peedy the Congregational pastor and himself had been the 
 arbiters. That was as it should be; the fine arts medicine, 
 law, religion, and finance recognized as aristocratic; four 
 Yankees democratically chatting with but ruling the Ohioans 
 and Illini and Swedes and Germans who had ventured to 
 follow them. But Westlake was old, almost retired; Julius 
 Flickerbaugh had lost much of his practice to livelier attorneys ; 
 Reverend (not The Reverend) Peedy was dead; and nobody 
 was impressed in this rotten age of automobiles by the " spank- 
 ing grays " which Ezra still drove. The town was as hetero- 
 geneous as Chicago. Norwegians and Germans owned stores. 
 The social leaders were common merchants. Selling nails was 
 considered as sacred as banking. These upstarts the Clarks, 
 the Haydocks had no dignity. They were sound and con- 
 servative in politics, but they talked about motor cars and 
 pump-guns and heaven only knew what new-fangled fads. Mr. 
 Stowbody felt out of place with them. But his brick house 
 with the mansard roof was still the largest residence in town, 
 and he held his position as squire by occasionally appearing 
 among the younger men and reminding them by a wintry eye 
 
MAIN STREET 49 
 
 that without the banker none of them could carry on then, 
 vulgar businesses. 
 
 As Carol defied decency by sitting down with the men, Mr. 
 Stowbody was piping to Mr. Dawson, " Say, Luke, when was't 
 Biggins first settled in Winnebago Township? Wa'n't it in 
 1879? " 
 
 "Why no 'twa'n't! " Mr. Dawson was indignant. "He 
 come out from Vermont in 1867 no, wait, in 1868, it must 
 have been and took a claim on the Rum River, quite a ways 
 above Anoka." 
 
 "He did not! " roared Mr. Stowbody. "He settled first 
 in Blue Earth County, him and his father! " 
 
 (" What's the point at issue? " Carol whispered to Kenni- 
 cott. 
 
 (" Whether this old duck Biggins had an English setter or 
 a Llewellyn. They've been arguing it all evening! ") 
 
 Dave Dyer interrupted to give tidings, " D' tell you that 
 Clara Biggins was in town couple days ago? She bought a 
 hot-water bottle expensive one, too two dollars and thirty 
 cents! " 
 
 " Yaaaaaah! " snarled Mr. Stowbody. " Course. She's just 
 like her grandad was. Never save a cent. Two dollars and 
 twenty thirty, was it? two dollars and thirty cents for a 
 hot-water bottle! Brick wrapped up in a flannel petticoat just 
 as good, anyway! " 
 
 " How's Ella's tonsils, Mr. Stowbody? " yawned Chet Dash- 
 away. 
 
 While Mr. Stowbody gave a somatic and psychic study of 
 them, Carol reflected, " Are they really so terribly interested 
 in Ella's tonsils, or even in Ella's esophagus? I wonder if I 
 could get them away from personalities? Let's risk damna- 
 tion and try." 
 
 " There hasn't been much labor trouble around here, has 
 there, Mr. Stowbody? " she asked innocently. 
 
 " No, ma'am, thank God, we've been free from that, except 
 maybe with hired girls and farm-hands. Trouble enough with 
 these foreign farmers; if you don't watch these Swedes they 
 turn socialist or populist or some fool thing on you in a 
 minute. Of course, if they have loans you can make 'em 
 listen to reason. I just have 'em come into the bank for a 
 talk, and tell 'em a few things. I don't mind their being 
 democrats, so much, but I won't stand having socialists around. 
 
50 MAIN STREET 
 
 But thank God, we ain't got the labor trouble they have in 
 these cities. Even Jack Elder here gets along pretty well, in 
 the planing-mill, don't you, Jack? " 
 
 " Yep. Sure. Don't need so many skilled workmen in my 
 place, and it's a lot of these cranky, wage-hogging, half- 
 baked skilled mechanics that start trouble reading a lot of 
 this anarchist literature and union papers and all." 
 
 " Do you approve of union labor? " Carol inquired of Mr. 
 Elder. 
 
 "Me? I should say not! It's like this: I don't mind 
 dealing with my men if they think they've got any grievances 
 though Lord knows what's come over workmen, nowadays 
 don't appreciate a good job. But still, if they come to me 
 honestly, as man to man, I'll talk things over with them. 
 But I'm not going to have any outsider, any of these walking 
 delegates, or whatever fancy names they call themselves now 
 bunch of rich grafters, living on the ignorant workmen! Not 
 going to have any of those fellows butting in and telling me 
 how to run my business! " 
 
 Mr. Elder was growing more excited, more belligerent and 
 patriotic. " I stand for freedom and constitutional rights. If 
 any man don't like my shop, he can get up and git. Same way, 
 if I don't like him, he gits. And that's all there is to it. I 
 simply can't understand all these complications and hoop-te- 
 doodles and government reports and wage-scales and God 
 knows what all that these fellows are balling up the labor 
 situation with, when it's all perfectly simple. They like what 
 I pay 'em, or they get out. That's all there is to it! " 
 
 " What do you think of profit-sharing? " Carol ventured. 
 
 Mr. Elder thundered his answer, while the others nodded, 
 solemnly and in tune, like a shop-window of flexible toys, 
 comic mandarins and judges and ducks and clowns, set quiver- 
 ing by a breeze from the open door: 
 
 " All this profit-sharing and welfare work and insurance and 
 old-age pension is simply poppycock. Enfeebles a workman's 
 independence and wastes a lot of honest profit. The half- 
 baked thinker that isn't dry behind the ears yet, and these 
 suffragettes and God knows what all buttinskis there are that 
 are trying to tell a business man how to run his business, and 
 some of these college professors are just about as bad, the 
 whole kit and bilin' of 'em are nothing in God's world but 
 socialism in disguise! And it's my bounden duty as a pro- 
 
MAIN STREET 5r 
 
 ducer to resist every attack on the integrity of American in- 
 dustry to the last ditch. Yes SIR! " 
 
 Mr. Elder wiped his brow. 
 
 Dave Dyer added, " Sure! You bet! What they ought to 
 do is simply to hang every one of these agitators, and that 
 would settle the whole thing right off. Don't you think so, 
 doc? " 
 
 " You bet," agreed Kennicott. 
 
 The conversation was at last relieved of the plague of Carol's 
 intrusions and they settled down to the question of whether 
 the justice of the peace had sent that hobo drunk to jail for 
 ten days or twelve. It was a matter not readily determined. 
 Then Dave Dyer communicated his carefree adventures on the 
 gipsy trail: 
 
 " Yep. I get good time out of the flivver. 'Bout a week 
 ago I motored down to New Wurttemberg. That's forty- 
 three No, let's see: It's seventeen miles to Belldale, and 
 
 'bout six and three-quarters, call it seven, to Torgenquist, and 
 it's a good nineteen miles from there to New Wurttemberg 
 seventeen and seven and nineteen, that makes, uh, let me see: 
 seventeen and seven 's twenty-four, plus nineteen, well say 
 plus twenty, that makes forty-four, well anyway, say about 
 forty-three or -four miles from here to New Wurttemberg. We 
 got started about seven-fifteen, prob'ly seven- twenty, because 
 I had to stop and fill the radiator, and we ran along, just keep- 
 ing up a good steady gait " 
 
 Mr. Dyer did finally, for reasons and purposes admitted and 
 justified, attain to New Wurttemberg. 
 
 Once only once the presence of the alien Carol was recog- 
 nized. Chet Dashaway leaned over and said asthmatically, 
 " Say, uh, have you been reading this serial ' Two Out ' in 
 Tingling Tales? Corking yarn! Gosh, the fellow that wrote 
 it certainly can sling baseball slang! " 
 
 The others tried to look literary. Harry Haydock offered, 
 " Juanita is a great hand for reading high-class stuff, like 
 ' Mid the Magnolias ' by this Sara Hetwiggin Butts, and 
 * Riders of Ranch Reckless.' Books. But me," he glanced 
 about importantly, as one convinced that no other hero had 
 ever been in so strange a plight, " I'm so darn busy I don't 
 have much time to read." 
 
 "I never read anything I can't check against," said Sam 
 Clark. 
 
52 MAIN STREET 
 
 Thus ended the literary portion of the conversation, and 
 for seven minutes Jackson Elder outlined reasons for believing: 
 that the pike-fishing was better on the west shore of Lake 
 Minniemashie than on the east though it was indeed quite 
 true that on the east shore Nat Hicks had caught a pike 
 altogether admirable. 
 
 The talk went on. It did go on! Their voices were 
 monotonous, thick, emphatic. They were harshly pompous, like 
 men in the smoking-compartments of Pullman cars. They did 
 not bore Carol. They frightened her. She panted, " They 
 will be cordial to me, because my man belongs to their tribe. 
 God help me if I were an outsider! " 
 
 Smiling as changelessly as an ivory figurine she sat quiescent, 
 avoiding thought, glancing about the living-room and hall, not- 
 ing their betrayal of unimaginative commercial prosperity. 
 Kennicott said, " Dandy interior, eh? My idea of how a 
 place ought to be furnished. Modern." She looked polite, 
 and observed, the oiled floors, hard- wood staircase, unused 
 fireplace with tiles which resembled brown linoleum, cut-glass 
 vases standing upon doilies, and the barred, shut, forbidding 
 unit bookcases that were half filled with swashbuckler novels 
 and unread-looking sets of Dickens, Kipling, O. Henry, and 
 Elbert Hubbard. 
 
 She perceived that even personalities were failing to hold 
 the party. The room filled with hesitancy as with a fog. 
 People cleared their throats, tried to choke down yawns. The 
 men shot their cuffs and the women stuck their combs morfc 
 firmly into their back hair. 
 
 Then a rattle, a daring hope in every eye, the swinging of 
 a door, the smell of strong coffee, Dave Dyer's mewing voice* 
 in a triumphant, " The eats! " They began to chatter. They 
 had something to do. They could escape from themselves,. 
 They fell upon the food chicken sandwiches, maple cake, 
 drug-store ice cream. Even when the food was gone they re- 
 mained cheerful. They could go home, any time now, and go 
 to bed! 
 
 They went, with a flutter of coats, chiffon scarfs, and good- 
 bys. 
 v Carol and Kennicott walked home. 
 
 " Did you like them? " he asked. 
 
 " They were terribly sweet to me." 
 
 " Uh, Carrie You ought to be more careful about 
 
MAIN STREET 53 
 
 shocking folks. Talking about gold stockings, and about 
 showing your ankles to schoolteachers and all! " More 
 mildly: "You gave 'em a good time, but I'd watch out for 
 that, 'f I were you. Juanita Haydock is such a damn cat. I 
 wouldn't give her a chance to criticize me." 
 
 " My poor effort to lift up the party! Was I wrong to 
 try to amuse them? " 
 
 " No! No! Honey, I didn't mean You were the only 
 
 up-and-coming person in the bunch. I just mean Don't 
 
 get onto legs and all that immoral stuff. Pretty conservative 
 crowd." 
 
 She was silent, raw with the shameful thought that the 
 attentive circle might have been criticizing her, laughing at 
 her. 
 
 " Don't, please don't worry! " he pleaded. 
 
 Silence. 
 
 " Gosh, I'm sorry I spoke about it. I just meant But 
 
 they were crazy about you. Sam said to me, l That little 
 lady of yours is the slickest thing that ever came to this 
 town,' he said; and Ma Dawson I didn't hardly know 
 whether she'd like you or not, she's such a dried-up old bird, 
 but she said, < Your bride is so quick and bright, I declare, 
 she just wakes me up.' " 
 
 Carol liked praise, the flavor and fatness of it, but she was 
 so energetically being sorry for herself that she could not 
 taste this commendation. 
 
 " Please! Come on! Cheer up! " His lips said it, his 
 anxious shoulder said it, his arm about her said it, as they 
 halted on the obscure porch of their house. 
 
 " Do you care if they think I'm flighty, Will? " 
 
 " Me? Why, I wouldn't care if the whole world thought 
 you were this or that or anything else. You're my well, 
 you're my soul! " 
 
 He was an undefined mass, as solid-seeming as rock. She 
 found his sleeve, pinched it, cried, "I'm glad! It's sweet to 
 be wanted! You must tolerate my frivolousness. You're all 
 I have! " 
 
 He lifted her, carried her into the house, and with her 
 arms about his neck she forgot Main Street. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 "WE'LL steal the whole day, and go hunting. I want you 
 to see the country round here," Kennicott announced at break- 
 fast. " I'd take the car want you to see how swell she runs 
 since I put in a new piston. But we'll take a team, so we can 
 get right out into the fields. Not many prairie chickens left 
 now, but we might just happen to run onto a small covey." 
 
 He fussed over his hunting-kit. He pulled his hip boots 
 out to full length and examined them for holes. He feverishly 
 counted his shotgun shells, lecturing her on the qualities of 
 smokeless powder. He drew the new hammerless shotgun out 
 of its heavy tan leather case and made her peep through the 
 barrels to see how dazzlingly free they were from rust. 
 
 The world of hunting and camping-outfits and fishing-tackle 
 was unfamiliar to her, and in Kennicott's interest she found 
 something creative and joyous. She examined the smooth 
 stock, the carved hard rubber butt of the gun. The shells, with 
 their brass caps and sleek green bodies and hieroglyphics on 
 the wads, were cool and comfortably heavy in her hands. 
 
 Kennicott wore a brown canvas hunting-coat with vast 
 pockets lining the inside, corduroy trousers which bulged at 
 the wrinkles, peeled and scarred shoes, a scarecrow felt hat. 
 In this uniform he felt virile. They clumped out to the livery 
 buggy, they packed the kit and the box of lunch into the back, 
 crying to each other that it was a magnificent day. 
 
 Kennicott had borrowed Jackson Elder's red and white 
 English setter, a complacent dog with a waving tail of silver 
 hair which flickered in the sunshine. As they started, the dog 
 yelped, and leaped at the horses' heads, till Kennicott took 
 him into the buggy, where he nuzzled Carol's knees and leaned 
 out to sneer at farm mongrels. 
 
 The grays clattered out on the hard dirt road with a 
 pleasant song of hoofs: " Ta ta ta rat! Ta ta ta rat! " It 
 was early and fresh, the air whistling, frost bright on the 
 golden rod. As the sun warmed the world of stubble into a 
 
 54 
 
MAIN STREET 55 
 
 welter of yellow they turned from the highroad, through the 
 bars of a farmer's gate, into a field, slowly bumping over the 
 uneven earth. In a hollow of the rolling prairie they lost 
 sight even of the country road. It was warm and placid. 
 Locusts trilled among the dry wheat-stalks, and brilliant little 
 flies hurtled across the buggy. A buzz of content filled the 
 air. Crows loitered and gossiped in the sky. 
 
 The dog had been let out and after a dance of excitement 
 he settled down to a steady quartering of the field, forth 
 and back, forth and back, his nose down. 
 
 " Pete Rustad owns this farm, and he told me he saw a 
 small covey of chickens in the west forty, last week. Maybe 
 we'll get some sport after all," Kennicott chuckled blissfully. 
 
 She watched the dog in suspense, breathing quickly every 
 time he seemed to halt. She had no desire to slaughter 
 birds, but she did desire to belong to Kennicott's world. 
 
 The dog stopped, on the point, a forepaw held up. 
 
 " By golly! He's hit a scent! Come on! " squealed Kenni- 
 cott. He leaped from the buggy, twisted the reins about the 
 whip-socket, swung her out, caught up his gun, slipped in two 
 shells, stalked toward the rigid dog, Carol pattering after 
 him. The setter crawled ahead, his tail quivering, his belly 
 close to the stubble. Carol was nervous. She expected clouds 
 of large birds to fly up instantly. Her eyes were strained with 
 staring. But they followed the dog for a quarter of a mile, 
 turning, doubling, crossing two low hills, kicking through 
 a swale of weeds, crawling between the strands of a barbed- 
 wire fence. The walking was hard on her pavement-trained 
 feet. The earth was lumpy, the stubble prickly and lined with 
 grass, thistles, abortive stumps of clover. She dragged and 
 floundered. 
 
 She heard Kennicott gasp, " Look! " Three gray birds were 
 starting up from the stubble. They were round, dumpy, like 
 enormous bumble bees. Kennicott was sighting, moving the 
 barrel. She was agitated. Why didn't he fire? The birds 
 would be gone! Then a crash, another, and two birds turned 
 somersaults in the air, plumped down. 
 
 When he showed her the birds she had no sensation of blood. 
 These heaps of feathers were so soft and unbruised there 
 was about them no hint of death. She watched her conquering 
 man tuck them into his inside pocket, and trudged with him 
 back to the buggy. 
 
6 MAIN STREET 
 
 They found no more prairie chickens that morning. 
 
 At noon they drove into her first farmyard, a private village, 
 a white house with no porches save a low and quite dirty 
 stoop at the back, a crimson barn with white trimmings, a 
 glazed brick silo, an ex-carriage-shed, now the garage of a Ford, 
 an unpainted cow-stable, a chicken-house, a pig-pen, a corn- 
 crib, a granary, the galvanized-iron skeleton tower of a wind- 
 mill. The dooryard was of packed yellow clay, treeless, barren 
 of grass, littered with rusty plowshares and wheels of dis- 
 carded cultivators. Hardened trampled mud, like lava, filled 
 the pig-pen. The doors of the house were grime-rubbed, the 
 corners and eaves were rusted with rain, and the child who 
 stared at them from the kitchen window was smeary-faced. 
 'But beyond the barn was a clump of scarlet geraniums; the 
 prairie breeze was sunshine in motion; the flashing metal 
 blades of the windmill revolved with a lively hum; a horse 
 neighed, a rooster crowed, martins flew in and out of the 
 cow-stable. 
 
 A small spare woman with flaxen hair trotted from the 
 house. She was twanging a Swedish patois not in monotone, 
 like English, but singing it, with a lyrical whine: 
 
 " Pete he say you kom pretty soon hunting, doctor. My, 
 idot's fine you kom. Is dis de bride? Ohhhh! Ve yoost say 
 las 7 night, ve hope maybe ve see her som day. My, soch a 
 pretty lady! " Mrs. Rustad was shining with welcome. " Veil, 
 veil ! Ay hope you lak dis country! Von't you stay for dinner, 
 doctor? " 
 
 " No, but I wonder if you wouldn't like to give us a glass 
 of milk? " condescended Kennicott. 
 
 "Veil Ay should say Ay vill! You vait har a second and 
 Ay run on de milk-house! " She nervously hastened to a tiny 
 red building beside the windmill; she came back with a pitcher 
 of milk from which Carol filled the thermos bottle. 
 
 As they drove off Carol admired, " She's the dearest thing 
 I ever saw. And she adores you. You are the Lord of the 
 Manor." 
 
 " Oh no," much pleased, " but still they do ask my advice 
 about things. Bully people, these Scandinavian farmers. And 
 prosperous, too. Helga Rustad, she's still scared of America, 
 but her kids will be doctors and lawyers and governors of the 
 state and any darn thing they want to." 
 
 " I wonder " Carol was plunged back into last night's 
 
MAIN STREET 57 
 
 Weltschmerz. " I wonder if these farmers aren't bigger than 
 we are? So simple and hard-working. The town lives on 
 them. We townies are parasites, and yet we feel superior 
 to them. Last night I heard Mr. Haydock talking about 
 * hicks.' Apparently he despises the farmers because they 
 haven't reached the social heights of selling thread and but- 
 tons." 
 
 "Parasites? Us? Where'd the farmers be without the 
 town? Who lends them money? Who why, we supply them 
 with everything! " 
 
 " Don't you find that some of the farmers think they pay 
 too much for the services of the towns? " 
 
 " Oh, of course there's a lot of cranks among the farmers 
 same as there are among any class. Listen to some of these 
 kickers, a fellow'd think that the farmers ought to run the 
 state and the whole shooting-match probably if they had 
 their way they'd fill up the legislature with a lot of farmers 
 in manure-covered boots yes, and they'd come tell me I was 
 hired on a salary now, and couldn't fix my fees! That'd be 
 fine for you, wouldn't it! " 
 
 " But why shouldn't they? " 
 
 "Why? That bunch of Telling me Oh, for 
 
 heaven's sake, let's quit arguing. All this discussing may be 
 
 all right at a party but Let's forget it while we're 
 
 hunting." 
 
 " I know. The Wonderlust probably it's a worse affliction 
 than the Wanderlust. I just wonder " 
 
 She told herself that she had everything in the world. 
 And after each self-rebuke she stumbled again on " I just 
 wonder " 
 
 They ate their sandwiches by a prairie slew: long grass 
 reaching up out of clear water, mossy bogs, red-winged black- 
 birds, the scum a splash of gold-green. Kennicott smoked a 
 pipe while she leaned back in the buggy and let her tired spirit 
 be absorbed in the Nirvana of the incomparable sky. 
 
 They lurched to the highroad and awoke from their sun- 
 soaked drowse at the sound of the clopping hoofs. They 
 paused to look for partridges in a rim of woods, little woods, 
 very clean and shiny and gay, silver birches and poplars 
 with immaculate green trunks, encircling a lake of sandy bot- 
 tom, a splashing seclusion demure in the welter of hot prairie. 
 
 Kennicott brought down a fat red squirrel and at dusk he had 
 
59 MAIN STREET 
 
 a dramatic shot at a flight of ducks whirling down from the 
 upper air, skimming the lake, instantly vanishing. 
 
 They drove home under the sunset. Mounds of straw, and 
 wheat-stacks like bee-hives, stood out in startling rose and 
 gold, and the green-tufted stubble glistened. As the vast 
 girdle of crimson darkened, the fulfilled land became autum- 
 nal in deep reds and browns. The black road before the buggy 
 turned to a faint lavender, then was blotted to uncertain 
 grayness. Cattle came in a long line up to the barred gates 
 of the farmyards, and over the resting land was a dark glow. 
 
 Carol had found the dignity and greatness which had failed 
 her in Main Street. 
 
 n 
 
 Till they had a maid they took noon dinner and six o'clock 
 supper at Mrs. Gurrey's boarding-house. 
 
 Mrs. Elisha Gurrey, relict of Deacon Gurrey the dealer in 
 hay and grain, was a pointed-nosed, simpering woman with 
 iron-gray hair drawn so tight that it resembled a soiled hand- 
 kerchief covering her head. But she was unexpectedly cheer- 
 ful, and her dining-room, with its thin tablecloth on a long 
 pine table, had the decency of clean bareness. 
 
 In the line of unsmiling, methodically chewing guests, like 
 horses at a manger, Carol came to distinguish one countenance: 
 the pale, long, spectacled face and sandy pompadour hair of 
 Mr. Raymond P. Wutherspoon, known as " Raymie," pro- 
 fessional bachelor, manager and one half the sales-force in the 
 shoe-department of the Bon Ton Store. 
 
 " You will enjoy Gopher Prairie very much, Mrs. Kennicott," 
 petitioned Raymie. His eyes were like those of a dog waiting 
 to be let in out of the cold. He passed the stewed apricots 
 effusively. " There are a great many bright cultured people 
 here. Mrs. Wilks, the Christian Science reader, is a very 
 bright woman though I am not a Scientist myself, in fact I 
 sing in the Episcopal choir. And Miss Sherwin of the high 
 school she is such a pleasing, bright girl I was fitting her 
 to a pair of tan gaiters yesterday, I declare, it really was a 
 pleasure." 
 
 " Gimme the butter, Carrie," was Kennicott's comment. She 
 defied him by encouraging Raymie: 
 
 " Do you have amateur dramatics and so on here? " 
 
MAIN STREET 59 
 
 " Oh yes! The town's just full of talent. The Knights of 
 Pythias put on a dandy minstrel show last year." 
 
 " It's nice you're so enthusiastic." 
 
 "Oh, do you really think so? Lots of folks jolly me for 
 trying to get up shows and so on. I tell them they have more 
 artistic gifts than they know. Just yesterday I was saying 
 to Harry Hay dock: if he would read poetry, like Longfellow, 
 or if he would join the band I get so much pleasure out of 
 playing the cornet, and our band-leader, Del Snafflin, is such 
 a good musician, I often say he ought to give up his barbering 
 and become a professional musician, he could play the clarinet 
 in Minneapolis or New York or anywhere, but but I couldn't 
 get Harry to see it at all and I hear you and the doctor went 
 out hunting yesterday. Lovely country, isn't it. And did you 
 make some calls? The mercantile life isn't inspiring like 
 medicine. It must be wonderful to see how patients trust 
 you, doctor." 
 
 " Huh. It's me that's got to do all the trusting. Be damn 
 sight more wonderful 'f they'd pay their bills," grumbled 
 Kennicott and, to Carol, he whispered something which 
 sounded like " gentleman hen." 
 
 But Raymie's pale eyes were watering at her. She helped 
 him with, " So you like to read poetry? " 
 
 " Oh yes, so much though to tell the truth, I don't get much 
 
 time for reading, we're always so busy at tie store and 
 
 But we had the dandiest professional reciter at the Pythian 
 Sisters sociable last winter." 
 
 Carol thought she heard a grunt from the traveling salesman 
 at the end of the table, and Kennicott's jerking elbow was a 
 grunt embodied. She persisted: 
 
 " Do you get to see many plays, Mr. Wutherspoon? " 
 
 He shone at her like a dim blue March moon, and sighed, 
 " No, but I do love the movies. I'm a real fan. One trouble 
 with books is that they're not so thoroughly safeguarded by 
 intelligent censors as the movies are, and when you drop into 
 the library and take out a book you never know what you're 
 wasting your time on. What I like in books is a wholesome, 
 
 really improving story, and sometimes Why, once I started 
 
 a novel by this fellow Balzac that you read about, and it 
 told how a lady wasn't living with her husband, I mean she 
 wasn't his wife. It went into details, disgustingly! And the 
 English was real poor. I spoke to the library about it, and 
 
<5o MAIN STREET 
 
 they took it off the shelves. I'm not narrow, but I must say 
 I don't see any use in this deliberately dragging in immorality! 
 Life itself is so full of temptations that in literature one wants 
 only that which is pure and uplifting." 
 
 " What's the name of that Balzac yarn? Where can I get 
 hold of it? " giggled the traveling salesman. 
 
 Raymie ignored him. " But the movies, they are mostly 
 clean, and their humor Don't you think that the most es- 
 sential quality for a person to have is a sense of humor? " 
 
 " I don't know. I really haven't much," said Carol. 
 
 He shook his finger at her. " Now, now, you're too modest. 
 I'm sure we can all see that you have a perfectly corking sense 
 of humor. Besides, Dr. Kennicott wouldn't marry a lady that 
 didn't have. We all know how he loves his fun! " 
 
 "You bet. I'm a jokey old bird. Come on, Carrie; let's 
 beat it," remarked Kennicott. 
 
 Raymie implored, " And what is your chief artistic interest, 
 Mrs. Kennicott? " 
 
 " Oh " Aware that the traveling salesman had mur- 
 mured, " Dentistry," she desperately hazarded, " Architecture." 
 
 " That's a real nice art. I've always said when Haydock & 
 Simons were finishing the new front on the Bon Ton building, 
 the old man came to me, you know, Harry's father, ' D. H.,' 
 I always call him, and he asked me how I liked it, and I said 
 to him, ' Look here, D. H./ I said you see, he was going to 
 leave the front plain, and I said to him, 'It's all very well 
 to have modern lighting and a big display-space,' I said, ' but 
 when you get that in, you want to have some architecture, too/ 
 I said, and he laughed and said he guessed maybe I was right, 
 and so he had 'em put on a cornice." 
 
 " Tin! " observed the traveling salesman. 
 
 Raymie bared his teeth like a belligerent mouse. "Well, 
 what if it is tin? That's not my fault. I told D. H. to make 
 it polished granite. You make me tired! " 
 
 "Leave us go! Come on, Carrie, leave us go! " from 
 Kennicott. 
 
 Raymie waylaid them in the hall and secretly informed Carol 
 that she musn't mind the traveling salesman's coarseness 
 he belonged to the hwa pollwa. 
 
 Kennicott chuckled, " Well, child, how about it? Do you 
 prefer an artistic guy like Raymie to stupid boobs like Sam 
 Clark and me? " 
 
MAIN STREET 61 
 
 " My dear! Let's go home, and play pinochle, and laugh, 
 and be foolish, and slip up to bed, and sleep without dreaming. 
 It's beautiful to be just a solid citizenessl " 
 
 in 
 From the Gopher Prairie Weekly Dauntless: 
 
 One of the most charming affairs of the season was held Tuesday 
 evening at the handsome new residence of Sam and Mrs. Clark, 
 when many of our most prominent citizens gathered to greet the 
 lovely new bride of our popular local physician, Dr. Will Kennicqtt. 
 All present spoke of the many charms of the bride, formerly Miss 
 Carol Milford of St. Paul. Games and stunts were the order of the 
 day, with merry talk and conversation. At a late hour dainty 
 refreshments were served, and the party broke up with many 
 expressions of pleasure at the pleasant affair. Among those present 
 
 were Mesdames Kennicott, Elder 
 
 * * * 
 
 Dr. Will Kennicott, for the past several years one of our most 
 popular and skilful physicians and surgeons, gave the town a 
 delightful surprise when he returned from an extended honeymoon 
 tour in Colorado this week with his charming bride, nee Miss Carol 
 Milford of St. Paul, whose family are socially prominent in 
 Minneapolis and Mankato. Mrs. Kennicott is a lady of manifold 
 charms, not only of striking charm of appearance but is also a 
 distinguished graduate of a school in the East and has for the 
 past year been prominently connected in an important position of 
 responsibility with the St. Paul Public Library, in which city 
 Dr. "Will" had the good fortune to meet her. The city of 
 Gopher Prairie welcomes her to our midst and prophesies for her 
 many happy years in the energetic city of the twin lakes and 
 the future. The Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott will reside for the present 
 at the Doctor's home on Poplar Street which his charming mother 
 has been keeping for him who has now returned to her own home 
 at Lac-qui-Meurt leaving a host of friends who regret her absence 
 and hope to see her soon with us again. 
 
 IV 
 
 She knew that if she was ever to effect any of the " reforms " 
 which she had pictured, she must have a starting-place. What 
 confused her during the three or four months after her marriage 
 was not lack of perception that she must be definite, but sheer 
 careless happiness of her first home. 
 
 In the pride of being a housewife she loved every detail 
 the brocade armchair with the weak back, even the brass water- 
 
62 MAIN STREET 
 
 cock on the hot-water reservoir, when she had become familiar 
 with it by trying to scour it to brilliance. 
 
 She found a maid plump radiant Bea Sorenson from 
 Scandia Crossing. Bea was droll in her attempt to be at once 
 a respectful servant and a bosom friend. They laughed to- 
 gether over the fact that the stove did not draw, over the 
 slipperiness of fish in the pan. 
 
 Like a child playing Grandma in a trailing skirt, Carol 
 paraded uptown for her marketing, crying greetings to house- 
 wives along the way. Everybody bowed to her, strangers and 
 all, and made her feel that they wanted her, that she belonged 
 here. In city shops she was merely A Customer a hat, a 
 voice to bore a harassed clerk. Here she was Mrs. Doc 
 Kennicott, and her preferences in grape-fruit and manners were 
 known and remembered and worth discussing. . . . even 
 if they weren't worth fulfilling. 
 
 Shopping was a delight of brisk conferences. The very mer- 
 chants whose droning she found the dullest at the two or three 
 parties which were given to welcome her were the pleasantest 
 confidants of all when they had something to talk about 
 lemons or cotton voile or floor-oil. With that skip-jack Dave 
 Dyer, the druggist, she conducted a long mock-quarrel. She 
 pretended that he cheated her in the price of magazines and 
 candy; he pretended she was a detective from the Twin Cities. 
 He hid behind the prescription-counter, and when she stamped 
 her foot he came out wailing, " Honest, I haven't done nothing 
 crooked today not yet." 
 
 She never recalled her first impression of Main Street; never 
 had precisely the same despair at its ugliness. By the end of 
 two shopping-tours everything had changed proportions. As 
 she never entered it, the Minniemashie House ceased to exist 
 for her. Clark's Hardware Store, Dyer's Drug Store, the 
 groceries of Ole Jenson and Frederick Ludelmeyer and How- 
 land & Gould, the meat markets, the notions shop they ex- 
 panded, and hid all other structures. When she entered Mr. 
 Ludelmeyer's store and he wheezed, " Goot mornin', Mrs. 
 Kennicott. Veil, dis iss a fine day," she did not notice the 
 dustiness of the shelves nor the stupidity of the girl clerk; 
 and she did not remember the mute colloquy with him on her 
 first view of Main Street. 
 
 She could not find half the kinds of food she wanted, but 
 that made shopping more of an adventure. When she did 
 
MAIN STREET 63 
 
 contrive to get sweetbreads at Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market 
 the triumph was so vast that she buzzed with excitement and 
 admired the strong wise butcher, Mr. Dahl. 
 
 She appreciated the homely ease of village life. She liked 
 the old men, farmers, G.A.R. veterans, who when they gos- 
 siped sometimes squatted on their heels on the sidewalk, like 
 resting Indians, and reflectively spat over the curb. 
 
 She found beauty in the children. 
 
 She had suspected that her married friends exaggerated their 
 passion for children. But in her work in the library, children 
 had become individuals to her, citizens of the State with their 
 own rights and their own senses of humor. In the library 
 she had not had much time to give them, but now she knew 
 the luxury of stopping, gravely asking Bessie Clark whether 
 her doll had yet recovered from its rheumatism, and agreeing 
 with Oscar Martinsen that it would be Good Fun to go trapping 
 " mushrats." 
 
 She touched the thought, " It would be sweet to have a 
 
 baby of my own. I do want one. Tiny No! Not yet! 
 
 There's so much to do. And I'm still tired from the job. 
 It's in my bones." 
 
 She rested at home. She listened to the village noises com- 
 mon to all the world, jungle or prairie; sounds simple and 
 charged with magic dogs barking, chickens making a gur- 
 gling sound of content, children at play, a man beating a rug, 
 wind in the cottonwood trees, a locust fiddling, a footstep on 
 the walk, jaunty voices of Bea and a grocer's boy in the 
 kitchen, a clinking anvil, a piano not too near. 
 
 Twice a week, at least, she drove into the country with 
 Kennicott, to hunt ducks in lakes enameled with sunset, or to 
 call on patients who looked up to her as the squire's lady and 
 thanked her for toys and magazines. Evenings she went with 
 her husband to the motion pictures and was boisterously greeted 
 by every other couple; or, till it became too cold, they sat on 
 the porch, bawling to passers-by in motors, or to neighbors who 
 were raking the leaves. The dust became golden in the low 
 sun; the street was filled with the fragrance of burning leaves. 
 
 But she hazily wanted some one to whom she could say 
 what she thought. 
 
64 MAIN STREET 
 
 On a slow afternoon when she fidgeted over sewing and 
 wished that the telephone would ring, Bea announced Miss 
 Vida Sherwin. 
 
 Despite Vida Sherwin's lively blue eyes, if you had looked 
 at her in detail you would have found her face slightly lined, 
 and not so much sallow as with the bloom rubbed off; you 
 would have found her chest flat, and her fingers rough from 
 needle and chalk and penholder; her blouses and plain cloth 
 skirts undistinguished; and her hat worn too far back, be- 
 traying a dry forehead. But you never did look at Vida 
 Sherwin in detail. You couldn't. Her electric activity veiled 
 her. She was as energetic as a chipmunk. Her fingers 
 fluttered; her sympathy came out in spurts; she sat on the 
 edge of a chair in eagerness to be near her auditor, to send 
 her enthusiasms and optimism across. 
 
 She rushed into the room pouring out: " I'm afraid you'll 
 think the teachers have been shabby in not coming near you, 
 but we wanted to give you a chance to get settled. I am 
 Vida Sherwin, and I try to teach French and English and a 
 few other things in the high school." 
 
 " I've been hoping to know the teachers. You see, I was 
 a librarian " 
 
 " Oh, you needn't tell me. I know all about you! Awful 
 how much I know this gossipy village. We need you so 
 much here. It's a dear loyal town (and isn't loyalty the finest 
 thing in the world!) but it's a rough diamond, and we need 
 
 you for the polishing, and we're ever so humble " She 
 
 stopped for breath and finished her compliment with a smile. 
 
 " If I could help you in any way Would I be commit- 
 ting the unpardonable sin if I whispered that I think Gopher 
 Prairie is a tiny bit ugly? " 
 
 " Of course it's ugly. Dreadfully! Though I'm probably 
 the only person in town to whom you could safely say that. 
 (Except perhaps Guy Pollock the lawyer have you met him? 
 oh, you must! he's simply a darling intelligence and cul- 
 ture and so gentle.) But I don't care so much about the 
 ugliness. That will change. It's the spirit that gives me 
 hope. It's sound. Wholesome. But afraid. It needs live 
 creatures like you to awaken it. I shall slave-drive you! " 
 
 " Splendid. What shall I do? I've been wondering if it 
 would be possible to have a good architect come here to 
 lecture." 
 
MAIN STREET 65 
 
 " Ye-es, but don't you think it would be better to work 
 with existing agencies? Perhaps it will sound slow to you, but 
 
 I was thinking It would be lovely if we could get you to 
 
 teach Sunday School." 
 
 Carol had the empty expression of one who finds that she 
 has been affectionately bowing to a complete stranger. " Oh 
 yes. But I'm afraid I wouldn't be much good at that. My 
 religion is so foggy." 
 
 " I know. So is mine. I don't care a bit for dogma. 
 Though I do stick firmly to the belief in the fatherhood of 
 God and the brotherhood of man and the leadership of Jesus. 
 As you do, of course." 
 
 Carol looked respectable and thought about having tea. 
 
 " And that's all you need teach in Sunday School. It's 
 the personal influence. Then there's the library-board. You'd 
 be so useful on that. And of course there's our women's 
 study club the Thanatopsis Club." 
 
 " Are they doing anything? Or do they read papers made 
 out of the Encyclopedia? " 
 
 Miss Sherwin shrugged. " Perhaps. But still, they are so 
 earnest. They will respond to your fresher interest. And 
 the Thanatopsis does do a good social work they've made 
 the city plant ever so many trees, and they run the rest-room 
 for farmers' wives. And they do take such an interest in 
 refinement and culture. So in fact, so very unique." 
 
 Carol was disappointed by nothing very tangible. She 
 said politely, " I'll think them all over. I must have a while 
 to look around first." 
 
 Miss Sherwin darted to her, smoothed her hair, peered at 
 her. " Oh, my dear, don't you suppose I know? These first 
 tender days of marriage they're sacred to me. Home, and 
 children that need you, and depend on you to keep them alive, 
 and turn to you with their wrinkly little smiles. And the 
 
 hearth and " She hid her face from Carol as she made an 
 
 activity of patting the cushion of her chair, but she went on 
 with her former briskness: 
 
 " I mean, you must help us when you're ready. . 
 I'm afraid you'll think I'm conservative. I am! So much 
 to conserve. All this treasure of American ideals. Sturdiness 
 and democracy and opportunity. Maybe not at Palm Beach. 
 But, thank heaven, we're free from such social distinctions in 
 Gopher Prairie. I have only one good quality overwhelming 
 
66 MAIN STREET 
 
 belief in the brains and hearts of our nation, our state, our 
 town. It's so strong that sometimes I do have a tiny effect 
 on the haughty ten-thousandaires. I shake 'em up and make 
 3 em believe in ideals yes, in themselves. But I get into a 
 rut of teaching. I need young critical things like you to 
 punch me up. Tell me, what are you reading? " 
 
 " I've been re-reading ' The Damnation of Theron Ware.' 
 Do you know it? " 
 
 " Yes. It was clever. But hard. Man wanted to tear 
 down, not build up. Cynical. Oh, I do hope I'm not a 
 sentimentalist. But I can't see any use in this high-art stuff 
 that doesn't encourage us day-laborers to plod on." 
 
 Ensued a fifteen-minute argument about the oldest topic 
 in the world: It's art but is it pretty? Carol tried to be 
 eloquent regarding honesty of observation. Miss Sherwin stood 
 out for sweetness and a cautious use of the uncomfortable 
 properties of light. At the end Carol cried: 
 
 " I don't care how much we disagree. It's a relief to have 
 somebody talk something besides crops. Let's make Gopher 
 Prairie rock to its foundations: let's have afternoon tea in- 
 stead of afternoon coffee." 
 
 The delighted Bea helped her bring out the ancestral folding 
 sewing-table, whose yellow and black top was scarred with 
 dotted lines from a dressmaker's tracing-wheel, and to set it 
 with an embroidered lunch-cloth, and the mauve-glazed Japa- 
 nese tea-set which she had brought from St. Paul. Miss 
 Sherwin confided her latest scheme moral motion pictures for 
 country districts, with light from a portable dynamo hitched 
 to a Ford engine. Bea was twice called to fill the hot- water 
 pitcher and to make cinnamon toast. 
 
 When Kennicott came home at five he tried to be courtly, 
 as befits the husband of one who has afternoon tea. Carol 
 suggested that Miss Sherwin stay for supper, and that Kenni- 
 cott invite Guy Pollock, the much-praised lawyer, the poetic 
 bachelor. 
 
 Yes, Pollock could come. Yes, he was over the grippe which 
 had prevented his going to Sam Clark's party. 
 
 Carol regretted her impulse. The man would be an opinion- 
 ated politician, heavily jocular about The Bride. But at the 
 entrance of Guy Pollock she discovered a personality. Pollock 
 was a man of perhaps thirty-eight, slender, still, deferential. 
 His voice was low. " It was very good of you to want me," 
 
MAIN STREET 67 
 
 he said, and he offered no humorous remarks, and did not 
 ask her if she didn't think Gopher Prairie was " the livest little 
 burg in the state." 
 
 She fancied that his even grayness might reveal a thousand 
 tints of lavender and blue and silver. 
 
 At supper he hinted his love for Sir Thomas Browne, 
 Thoreau, Agnes Repplier, Arthur Symons, Claude Washburn, 
 Charles Flandrau. He presented his idols diffidently, but he 
 expanded in Carol's bookishness, in Miss Sherwin's voluminous 
 praise, in Kennicott's tolerance of any one who amused^ his 
 wife. 
 
 Carol wondered why Guy Pollock went on digging at routine 
 law-cases; why he remained in Gopher Prairie. She had no 
 one whom she could ask. Neither Kennicott nor Vida Sherwin 
 would understand that there might be reasons why a Pollock 
 should not remain in Gopher Prairie. She enjoyed the faint 
 mystery. She felt triumphant and rather literary. She already 
 had a Group. It would be only a while now before she pro- 
 vided the town with fanlights and a knowledge of Gals- 
 worthy. She was doing things! As she served the emergency 
 dessert of cocoanut and sliced oranges, she cried to Pollock, 
 " Don't you think we ought to get up a dramatic club? " 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 WHEN the first dubious November snow had filtered down, 
 shading with white the bare clods in the plowed fields, when 
 the first small fire had been started in the furnace, which 
 is the shrine of a Gopher Prairie home, Carol began to make 
 the house her own. She dismissed the parlor furniture the 
 golden oak table with brass knobs, the moldy brocade chairs, 
 5ie picture of "The Doctor." She went to Minneapolis, to 
 scamper through department stores and small Tenth Street 
 shops devoted to ceramics and high thought. She had to ship 
 her treasures, but she wanted to bring them back in her arms. 
 
 Carpenters had torn out the partition between front parlor 
 and back parlor, thrown it into a long room on which she 
 lavished yellow and deep blue; a Japanese obi with an in- 
 tricacy of gold thread on stiff ultramarine tissue, which she 
 hung as a panel against the maize wall ; a couch with pillows of 
 sapphire velvet and gold bands ; chairs which, in Gopher Prairie, 
 seemed flippant. She hid the sacred family phonograph in the 
 dining-room, and replaced its stand with a square cabinet on 
 which was a squat blue jar between yellow candles. 
 
 Kennicott decided against a fireplace. " We'll have a new 
 house in a couple of years, anyway." 
 
 She decorated only one room. The rest, Kennicott hinted, 
 she'd better leave till he " made a ten-strike." 
 
 The brown cube of a house stirred and awakened; it seemed 
 to be in motion; it welcomed her back from shopping; it lost 
 its mildewed repression. 
 
 The supreme verdict was Kennicott's "Well, by golly, I 
 was afraid the new junk wouldn't be so comfortable, but I 
 must say this divan, or whatever you call it, is a lot better 
 
 than that bumpy old sofa we had, and when I look around 
 
 Well, it's worth all it cost, I guess." 
 
 Every one in town took an interest in the refurnishing. The 
 carpenters and painters who did not actually assist crossed 
 the lawn to peer through the windows and exclaim, " Fine! 
 
 68 
 
MAIN STREET 69 
 
 Looks swell! " Dave Dyer at the drug store, Harry Haydock 
 and Raymie Wutherspoon at the Bon Ton, repeated daily, 
 " How's the good work coming? I hear the house is getting 
 to be real classy." 
 
 Even Mrs. Bogart. 
 
 Mrs. Bogart lived across the alley from the rear of Carol's 
 house. She was a widow, and a Prominent Baptist, and a 
 Good Influence. She had so painfully reared three sons to 
 be Christian gentlemen that one of them had become an Omaha 
 bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus N. 
 Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most 
 brazen member of the toughest gang hi Boytown. 
 
 Mrs. Bogart was not the acid type of Good Influence. She 
 was the soft, damp, fat, sighing, indigestive, clinging, melan- 
 choly, depressingly hopeful kind. There are in every large 
 chicken-yard a number of old and indignant hens who resemble 
 Mrs. Bogart, and when they are served at Sunday noon 
 dinner, as fricasseed chicken with thick dumplings, they keep 
 up the resemblance. 
 
 Carol had noted that Mrs. Bogart from her side window 
 kept an eye upon the house. The Kennicotts and Mrs. Bogart 
 did not move in the same sets which meant precisely the same 
 in Gopher Prairie as it did on Fifth Avenue or in Mayfair. 
 But the good widow came calling. 
 
 She wheezed in, sighed, gave Carol a pulpy hand, sighed, 
 glanced sharply at the revelation of ankles as Carol crossed 
 her legs, sighed, inspected the new blue chairs, smiled with a 
 coy sighing sound, and gave voice: 
 
 " Fve wanted to call on you so long, dearie, you know we're 
 neighbors, but I thought I'd wait till you got settled, you must 
 run in and see me, how much did that big chair cost? " 
 
 " Seventy-seven dollars! " 
 
 " Sev Sakes alive! Well, I suppose it's all right for them 
 
 that can afford it, though I do sometimes think Of course 
 
 as our pastor said once, at Baptist Church By the way, we 
 
 haven't seen you there yet, and of course your husband was 
 raised up a Baptist, and I do hope he won't drift away from 
 the fold, of course we all know there isn't anything, not clever- 
 ness or gifts of gold or anything, that can make up for humility 
 and the inward grace and they can say what they want to about 
 the P. E. church, but of course there's no church that has more 
 history or has stayed by the true principles of Christianity 
 
70 MAIN STREET 
 
 better than the Baptist Church and In what church were 
 
 you raised, Mrs. Kennicott? " 
 
 " W-why, I went to Congregational, as a girl in Mankato, 
 but my college was Universalist." 
 
 " Well But of course as the Bible says, is it the Bible, 
 
 at least I know I have heard it in church and everybody admits 
 it, it's proper for the little bride to take her husband's vessel 
 of faith, so we all hope we shall see you at the Baptist Church 
 
 and As I was saying, of course I agree with Reverend 
 
 Zitterel in thinking that the great trouble with this nation 
 today is lack of spiritual faith so few going to church, and 
 people automobiling on Sunday and heaven knows what all. 
 But still I do think that one trouble is this terrible waste of 
 money, people feeling that they've got to have bath-tubs and 
 
 telephones in their houses I heard you were selling the 
 
 old furniture cheap." 
 
 "Yes!" 
 
 " Well of course you know your own mind, but I can't 
 help thinking, when Will's ma was down here keeping house 
 for him she used to run in to see me, real often! it was good 
 enough furniture for her. But there, there, I mustn't croak, 
 I just wanted to let you know that when you find you can't de- 
 pend on a lot of these gadding young folks like the Haydocks 
 and the Dyers and heaven only knows how much money 
 Juanita Haydock blows in in a year why then you may be 
 glad to know that slow old Aunty Bogart is always right there, 
 
 and heaven knows " A portentous sigh. " I hope you and 
 
 your husband won't have any of the troubles, with sickness and 
 quarreling and wasting money and all that so many of these 
 
 young couples do have and But I must be running along 
 
 now, dearie. It's been such a pleasure and Just run in 
 
 and see me any time. I hope Will is well? I thought he 
 looked a wee mite peaked." 
 
 It was twenty minutes later when Mrs. Bogart finally oozed 
 out of the front door. Carol ran back into the living-room 
 and jerked open the windows. " That woman has left damp 
 finger-prints in the air," she said. 
 
MAIN STREET 71 
 
 n 
 
 Carol was extravagant, but at least she did not try to clear 
 herself of blame by going about whimpering, " I know I'm 
 terribly extravagant but I don't seem to be able to help it." 
 
 Kennicott had never thought of giving her an allowance. 
 His mother had never had one! As a wage-earning spinster 
 Carol had asserted to her fellow librarians that when she was 
 married, she was going to have an allowance and be business- 
 like and modern. But it was too much trouble to explain to 
 Kennicott's kindly stubbornness that she was a practical house- 
 keeper as well as a flighty playmate. She bought a budget- 
 plan account book and made her budgets as exact as budgets 
 are likely to be when they lack budgets. 
 
 For the first month it was a honeymoon jest to beg prettily, 
 to confess, " I haven't a cent in the house, dear," and to be 
 told, " You're an extravagant little rabbit." But the budget 
 book made her realize how inexact were her finances. She 
 became self-conscious ; occasionally she was indignant that she 
 should always have to petition him for the money with which 
 to buy his food. She caught herself criticizing his belief that, 
 since his joke about trying to keep her out of the poorhouse 
 had once been accepted as admirable humor, it should continue 
 to be his daily bon mot. It was a nuisance to have to run 
 down the street after him because she had forgotten to ask 
 him for money at breakfast. 
 
 But she couldn't "hurt his feelings," she reflected. He 
 liked the lordliness of giving largess. 
 
 She tried to reduce the frequency of begging by opening 
 accounts and having the bills sent to him. She had found that 
 staple groceries, sugar, flour, could be most cheaply purchased 
 at Axel Egge's rustic general store. She said sweetly to Axel: 
 
 " I think I'd better open a charge account here." 
 
 "I don't do no business except for cash," grunted Axel. 
 
 She flared, " Do you know who I am? " 
 
 "Yuh, sure, I know. The doc is good for it. But that's 
 yoost a rule I made. I make low prices. I do business for 
 cash." 
 
 She stared at his red impassive face, and her fingers had 
 the undignified desire to slap him, but her reason agreed with 
 him. " You're quite right. You shouldn't break your rule 
 for me." 
 
72 MAIN STREET 
 
 Her rage had not been lost. It had been transferred to 
 her husband. She wanted ten pounds of sugar in a hurry, but 
 she had no money. She ran up the stairs to Kennicott's office. 
 On the door was a sign advertising a headache cure and 
 
 stating, " The doctor is out, back at " Naturally, the blank 
 
 space was not filled out. She stamped her foot. She ran 
 down to the drug store the doctor's club. 
 
 As she entered she heard Mrs. Dyer demanding, "Dave, 
 I've got to have some money." 
 
 Carol saw that her husband was there, and two other men, 
 all listening in amusement. 
 
 Dave Dyer snapped, " How much do you want? Dollar be 
 enough? " 
 
 "No, it won't 1 I've got to get some underclothes for the 
 kids." 
 
 "Why, good Lord, they got enough now to fill the closet 
 so I couldn't find my hunting boots, last time I wanted them." 
 
 " I don't care. They're all in rags. You got to give me 
 ten dollars " 
 
 Carol perceived that Mrs. Dyer was accustomed to this in- 
 dignity. She perceived that the men, particularly Dave, re- 
 garded it as an excellent jest. She waited she knew what 
 would come it did. Dave yelped, " Where's that ten dollars 
 I gave you last year? " and he looked to the other men to 
 laugh. They laughed. 
 
 Cold and still, Carol walked up to Kennicott and com- 
 manded, " I want to see you upstairs." 
 
 " Why something the matter? " 
 
 " Yes! " 
 
 He clumped after her, up the stairs, into his barren office. 
 Before he could get out a query she stated: 
 
 " Yesterday, in front of a saloon, I heard a German farm- 
 wife beg her husband for a quarter, to get a toy for the baby 
 and he refused. Just now I've heard Mrs. Dyer going through 
 the same humiliation. And I I'm in the same position! I 
 have to beg you for money. Daily! I have just been informed 
 that I couldn't have any sugar because I hadn't the money 
 to pay for it! " 
 
 " Who said that? By God, 111 kill any " 
 
 " Tut. It wasn't his fault. It was yours. And mine. I now 
 humbly beg you to give me the money with which to buy meals 
 for you to eat. And hereafter to remember it. The next time, 
 
MAIN STREET 73 
 
 I sha'n't beg. I shall simply starve. Do you understand? 
 I can't go on being a slave " 
 
 Her defiance, her enjoyment of the role, ran out. She 
 was sobbing against his overcoat, " How can you shame me 
 so? " and he was blubbering, " Dog-gone it, I meant to give 
 you some, and I forgot it. I swear I won't again. By golly 
 I won't! " 
 
 He pressed fifty dollars upon her, and after that he re- 
 membered to give her money regularly. . . . sometimes. 
 
 Daily she determined, " But I must have a stated amount 
 be business-like. System. I must do something about it." 
 And daily she didn't do anything about it. 
 
 in 
 
 Mrs. Bogart had, by the simpering viciousness of her com- 
 ments on the new furniture, stirred Carol to economy. She 
 spoke judiciously to Bea about left-overs. She read the cook- 
 book again and, like a child with a picture-book, she studied 
 the diagram of the beef which gallantly continues to browse 
 though it is divided into cuts. 
 
 But she was a deliberate and joyous spendthrift in her 
 preparations for her first party, the housewarming. She made 
 lists on every envelope and laundry-slip in her desk. She 
 sent orders to Minneapolis " fancy grocers." She pinned pat- 
 terns and sewed. She was irritated when Kennicott was 
 jocular about " these frightful big doings that are going on." 
 She regarded the affair as an attack on Gopher Prairie's timid- 
 ity in pleasure. " I'll make 'em lively, if nothing else. I'll 
 make 'em stop regarding parties as committee-meetings." 
 
 Kennicott usually considered himself the master of the 
 house. At his desire, she went hunting, which was his symbol 
 of happiness, and she ordered porridge for breakfast, which 
 was his symbol of morality. But when he came home on the 
 afternoon before the housewarming he found himself a slave, 
 an intruder, a blunderer. Carol wailed, " Fix the furnace so 
 you won't have to touch it after supper. And for heaven's sake 
 take that horrible old door-mat off the porch. And put on your 
 nice brown and white shirt. Why did you come home so 
 late? Would you mind hurrying? Here it is almost supper- 
 time, and those fiends are just as likely as not to come at 
 seven instead of eight. Please hurry! " 
 
74 MAIN STREET 
 
 She was as unreasonable as an amateur leading woman on 
 a first night, and he was reduced to humility. When she came 
 down to supper, when she stood in the doorway, he gasped. 
 She was in a silver sheath, the calyx of a lily, her piled hair 
 like black glass; she had the fragility and costliness of a 
 Viennese goblet; and her eyes were intense. He was stirred 
 to rise from the table and to hold the chair for her; and all 
 through supper he ate his bread dry because he felt that she 
 would think him common if he said " Will you hand me the 
 butter? " 
 
 IV 
 
 She had reached the calmness of not caring whether her 
 guests liked the party or not, and a state of satisfied suspense 
 in regard to Bea's technique in serving, before Kennicott cried 
 from the bay-window in the living-room, " Here comes some- 
 body! " and Mr. and Mrs. Luke Dawson faltered in, at a 
 quarter to eight. Then in a shy avalanche arrived the entire 
 aristocracy of Gopher Prairie: all persons engaged in a pro- 
 fession, or earning more than twenty-five hundred dollars a 
 year, or possessed of grandparents born in America. 
 
 Even while they were removing their overshoes they were 
 peeping at the new decorations. Carol saw Dave Dyer se- 
 cretively turn over the gold pillows to find a price-tag, and 
 heard Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh, the attorney, gasp, " Well, I'll 
 be switched," as he viewed the vermilion print hanging against 
 the Japanese obi. She was amused. But her high spirits slack- 
 ened as she beheld them form in dress parade, in a long, silent, 
 uneasy circle clear round the living-room. She felt that she 
 had been magically whisked back to her first party, at Sam 
 Clark's. 
 
 "Have I got to lift them, like so many pigs of iron? I 
 don't know that I can make them happy, but I'll make them 
 hectic." 
 
 A silver flame in the darkling circle, she whirled around, drew 
 them with her smile, and sang, " I want my party to be noisy 
 and undignified! This is the christening of my house, and 
 I want you to help me have a bad influence on it, so that 
 it will be a giddy house. For me, won't you all join in an 
 old-fashioned square dance? And Mr. Dyer will call." 
 
 She had a record on the phonograph ; Dave Dyer was caper- 
 ing in the center of the floor, loose-jointed, lean, small, rusty- 
 
MAIN STREET 75 
 
 headed, pointed of nose, clapping his hands and shouting, 
 " Swing y' pardners alamun lef ! " 
 
 Even the millionaire Dawsons and Ezra Stowbody and 
 " Professor " George Edwin Mott danced, looking only slightly 
 foolish; and by rushing about the room and being coy and coax- 
 ing to all persons over forty-five, Carol got them into a waltz 
 and a Virginia Reel. But when she left them to disenjoy them- 
 selves in their own way Harry Haydock put a one-step record 
 on the phonograph, the younger people took the floor, and 
 all the elders sneaked back to their chairs, with crystallized 
 smiles which meant, " Don't believe I'll try this one myself, 
 but I do enjoy watching the youngsters dance." 
 
 Half of them were silent; half resumed the discussions of 
 that afternoon in the store. Ezra Stowbody hunted for some- 
 thing to say, hid a yawn, and offered to Lyman Cass, the 
 owner of the flour-mill, " How d' you folks like the new fur- 
 nace, Lym? Huh? So." 
 
 " Oh, let them alone. Don't pester them. They must like 
 it, or they wouldn't do it." Carol warned herself. But they 
 gazed at her so expectantly when she flickered past that she 
 was reconvinced that in their debauches of respectability they 
 had lost the power of play as well as the power of impersonal 
 thought. Even the dancers were gradually crushed by the 
 invisible force of fifty perfectly pure and well-behaved and 
 negative minds; and they sat down, two by two. In twenty 
 minutes the party was again elevated to the decorum of a 
 prayer-meeting. 
 
 "We're going to do something exciting," Carol exclaimed 
 to her new confidante, Vida Sherwin. She saw that in the 
 growing quiet her voice had carried across the room. Nat 
 Hicks, Ella Stowbody, and Dave Dyer were abstracted, fingers 
 and lips slightly moving. She knew with a cold certainty that 
 Dave was reheasing his " stunt " about the Norwegian catching 
 the hen, Ella running over the first lines of " An Old Sweetheart 
 of Mine," and Nat thinking of his popular parody on Mark 
 Antony's oration. 
 
 "But I will not have anybody use the word ' stunt ' in my 
 house," she whispered to Miss Sherwin. 
 
 " That's good. I tell you: why not have Raymond Wuther- 
 spoon sing? " 
 
 " Raymie? Why, my dear, he's the most sentimental yearner 
 in town! " 
 
76 MAIN STREET 
 
 " See here, child! Your opinions on house-decorating are 
 sound, but your opinions of people are rotten! Raymie does 
 
 wag his tail. But the poor dear Longing for what he 
 
 calls l self-expression ' and no training in anything except selling 
 shoes. But he can sing. And some day when he gets away 
 from Harry Haydock's patronage and ridicule, he'll do some- 
 thing fine." 
 
 Carol apologized for her superciliousness. She urged 
 Raymie, and warned the planners of " stunts/' " We all want 
 you to sing, Mr. Wutherspoon. You're the only famous actor 
 I'm going to let appear on the stage tonight." 
 
 While Raymie blushed and admitted, " Oh, they don't want 
 to hear me," he was clearing his throat, pulling his clean hand- 
 kerchief farther out of his breast pocket, and thrusting his 
 fingers between the buttons of his vest. 
 
 In her affection for Raymie's defender, in her desire to " dis- 
 cover artistic talent," Carol prepared to be delighted by the 
 recital. 
 
 Raymie sang " Fly as a Bird," " Thou Art My Dove," and 
 "When the Little Swallow Leaves Its Tiny Nest," all in a 
 reasonably bad offertory tenor. 
 
 Carol was shuddering with the vicarious shame which sen- 
 sitive people feel when they listen to an " elocutionist " being 
 humorous, or to a precocious child publicly doing badly what 
 no child should do at all. She wanted to laugh at the gratified 
 importance in Raymie's half-shut eyes; she wanted to weep 
 over the meek ambitiousness which clouded like an aura his 
 pale face, flap ears, and sandy pompadour. She tried to look 
 admiring, for the benefit of Miss Sherwin, that trusting ad- 
 mirer of all that was or conceivably could be the good, the 
 true, and the beautiful. 
 
 At the end of the third ornithological lyric Miss Sherwin 
 roused from her attitude of inspired vision and breathed to 
 Carol, " My! That was sweet! Of course Raymond hasn't 
 an unusually good voice, but don't you think he puts such 
 a lot of feeling into it? " 
 
 Carol lied blackly and magnificently, but without originality: 
 " Oh yes, I do think he has so much feeling! " 
 
 She saw that after the strain of listening in a cultured man- 
 ner the audience had collapsed ; had given up their last hope 
 of being amused. She cried, "Now we're going to play an 
 idiotic game which I learned in Chicago. You will have to 
 
MAIN STREET 77 ; 
 
 take off your shoes, for a starter! After that you will probably 
 break your knees and shoulder-blades." 
 
 Much attention and incredulity. A few eyebrows indicating 
 a verdict that Doc Kennicott's bride was noisy and im- 
 proper. 
 
 " I shall choose the most vicious, like Juanita Haydock and 
 myself, as the shepherds. The rest of you are wolves. Your 
 shoes are the sheep. The wolves go out into the hall. The 
 shepherds scatter the sheep through this room, then turn off 
 all the lights, and the wolves crawl in from the hall and in the 
 darkness they try to get the shoes away from the shepherds 
 who are permitted to do anything except bite and use black- 
 jacks. The wolves chuck the captured shoes out into the hall. 
 No one excused! Come on! Shoes off! " 
 
 Every one looked at every one else and waited for every 
 one else to begin. 
 
 Carol kicked off her silver slippers, and ignored the universal 
 glance at her arches. The embarrassed but loyal Vida Sherwin 
 unbuttoned her high black shoes. Ezra Stowbody cackled, 
 "Well, you're a terror to old folks. You're like the gals I 
 used to go horseback-riding with, back in the sixties. Ain't 
 much accustomed to attending parties barefoot, but here goes! " 
 With a whoop and a gallant jerk Ezra snatched off his elastic- 
 sided Congress shoes. 
 
 The others giggled and followed. 
 
 When the sheep had been penned up, in the darkness the 
 timorous wolves crept into the living-room, squealing, halting, 
 thrown out of their habit of stolidity by the strangeness of 
 advancing through nothingness toward a waiting foe, a mys- 
 terious foe which expanded and grew more menacing. The 
 wolves peered to make out landmarks, they touched gliding 
 arms which did not seem to be attached to a body, they 
 quivered with a rapture of fear. Reality had vanished. A 
 yelping squabble suddenly rose, then Juanita Haydock's high 
 titter, and Guy Pollock's astonished, "Ouch! Quit! You're 
 scalping me! " 
 
 Mrs. Luke Dawson galloped backward on stiff hands and 
 knees into the safety of the lighted hallway, moaning, " I der 
 clare, I nev' was so upset in my life! " But the propriety was 
 shaken out of her, and she delightedly continued to ejaculate 
 " Nev' in my life " as she saw the living-room door opened 
 by invisible hands and shoes hurling through it, as she heard 
 
78 MAIN STREET 
 
 from the darkness beyond the door a squawling, a bumping, 
 a resolute " Here's a lot of shoes. Come on, you wolves. Ow! 
 Y' would, would you! " 
 
 When Carol abruptly turned on the lights in the embattled 
 living-room, half of the company were sitting back against the 
 walls, where they had craftily remained throughout the en- 
 gagement, but in the middle of the floor Kennicott was wrest- 
 ling with Harry Haydock their collars torn off, their hair in 
 their eyes; and the owlish Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh was re- 
 treating from Juanita Haydock, and gulping with unaccustomed 
 laughter. Guy Pollock's discreet brown scarf hung down his 
 back. Young Rita Simons's net blouse had lost two buttons, 
 and betrayed more of her delicious plump shoulder than was 
 regarded as pure in Gopher Prairie. Whether by shock, dis- 
 gust, joy of combat, or physical activity, all the party were 
 freed from their years of social decorum. George Edwin Mott 
 giggled; Luke Dawson twisted his beard; Mrs. Clark insisted, 
 " I did too, Sam I got a shoe I never knew I could fight 
 so terrible! " 
 
 Carol was certain that she was a great reformer. 
 
 She mercifully had combs, mirrors, brushes, needle and 
 thread ready. She permitted them to restore the divine 
 decency of buttons. 
 
 The grinning Bea brought down-stairs a pile of soft thick 
 sheets of paper with designs of lotos blossoms, dragons, apes, 
 in cobalt and crimson and gray, and patterns of purple 
 birds flying among sea-green trees in the valleys of Nowhere. 
 
 " These," Carol announced, " are real Chinese masquerade 
 costumes. I got them from an importing shop in Minneapolis. 
 You are to put them on over your clothes, and please forget 
 that you are Minnesotans, and turn into mandarins and coolies 
 and and samurai (isn't it?), and anything else you can think 
 of." 
 
 While they were shyly rustling the paper costumes she dis- 
 appeared. Ten minutes after she gazed down from the stairs 
 upon grotesquely ruddy Yankee heads above Oriental robes, 
 and cried to them, " The Princess Winky Poo salutes her 
 court! " 
 
 As they looked up she caught their suspense of admiration. 
 They saw an airy figure in trousers and coat of green brocade 
 edged with gold; a high gold collar under a proud chin; black 
 hair pierced with jade pins; a languid peacock fan in an out- 
 
MAIN STREET 79 
 
 stretched hand; eyes uplifted to a vision of pagoda towers. 
 When she dropped her pose and smiled down she discovered 
 Kennicott apoplectic with domestic pride and gray Guy Pol- 
 lock staring beseechingly. For a second she saw nothing in 
 all the pink and brown mass of their faces save the hunger 
 of the two men. 
 
 She shook off the spell and ran down. "We're going to 
 have a real Chinese concert. Messrs. Pollock, Kennicott, and, 
 well, Stowbody are drummers; the rest of us sing and play the 
 fife." 
 
 The fifes were combs with tissue paper; the drums were 
 tabourets and the sewing-table. Loren Wheeler, editor of the 
 Dauntless, led the orchestra, with a ruler and a totally in- 
 accurate sense of rhythm. The music was a reminiscence of 
 tom-toms heard at circus fortune-telling tents or at the Minne- 
 sota State Fair, but the whole company pounded and puffed 
 and whined in a sing-song, and looked rapturous. 
 
 Before they were quite tired of the concert Carol led them 
 in a dancing procession to the dining-room, to blue bowls of 
 chow mein, with Lichee nuts and ginger preserved in syrup. 
 
 None of them save that city-rounder Harry Haydock had 
 heard of any Chinese dish except chop sooey. With agree- 
 able doubt they ventured through the bamboo shoots into the 
 golden fried noodles of the chow mein; and Dave Dyer did 
 a not very humorous Chinese dance with Nat Hicks; and 
 there was hubbub and contentment. 
 
 Carol relaxed, and found that she was shockingly tired. She 
 had carried them on her thin shoulders. She could not keep 
 it up. She longed for her father, that artist at creating hyster- 
 ical parties. She thought of smoking a cigarette, to shock 
 them, and dismissed the obscene thought before it was quite 
 formed. She wondered whether they could for five minutes 
 be coaxed to talk about something besides the winter top of 
 Knute Stamquist's Ford, and what Al Tingley had said about 
 his mother-in-law. She sighed, " Oh, let 'em alone. I've 
 done enough." She crossed her trousered legs, and snuggled 
 luxuriously above her saucer of ginger; she caught Pollock's 
 congratulatory still smile, and thought well of herself for having 
 thrown a rose light on the pallid lawyer ; repented the heretical 
 supposition that any male save her husband existed; jumped 
 up to find Kennicott and whisper, " Happy, my lord ? . . . 
 No, it didn't cost much! " 
 
8o MAIN STREET 
 
 " Best party this town ever saw. Only Don't cross your 
 
 legs in that costume. Shows your knees too plain." 
 
 She was vexed. She resented his clumsiness. She returned 
 to Guy Pollock and talked of Chinese religions not that she 
 knew anything whatever about Chinese religions, but he had 
 read a book on the subject as, on lonely evenings in his office, 
 he had read at least one book on every subject in the world. 
 Guy's thin maturity was changing in her vision to flushed youth 
 and they were roaming an island in the yellow sea of chatter 
 when she realized that the guests were beginning that cough 
 which indicated, hi the universal instinctive language, that 
 they desired to go home and go to bed. 
 
 While they asserted that it had been " the nicest party 
 they'd ever seen my! so clever and original," she smiled tre- 
 mendously, shook hands, and cried many suitable things re- 
 garding children, and being sure to wrap up warmly, and 
 Raymie's singing and Juanita Haydock's prowess at games. 
 Then she turned wearily to Kennicott in a house filled with 
 quiet and crumbs and shreds of Chinese costumes. 
 
 He was gurgling, " I tell you, Carrie, you certainly are a 
 wonder, and guess you're right about waking folks up. Now 
 you've showed 'em how, they won't go on having the same old 
 kind of parties and stunts and everything. Here! Don't touch 
 a thing! Done enough. Pop up to bed, and I'll clear up." 
 
 His wise surgeon's-hands stroked her shoulder, and her ir- 
 ritation at his clumsiness was lost in his strength. 
 
 v 
 From the Weekly Dauntless: 
 
 One of the most delightful social events of recent months was 
 held Wednesday evening in the housewarming of Dr. and Mrs. 
 Kennicott, who have completely redecorated their charming home 
 on Poplar Street, and is now extremely nifty in modern color 
 scheme. The doctor and his bride were at home to their numerous 
 friends and a number of novelties in diversions were held, including 
 a Chinese orchestra in original and genuine Oriental costumes, of 
 which Ye Editor was leader. Dainty refreshments were served 
 in true Oriental style, and one and all voted a delightful time. 
 
 VI 
 
 ^ The week after, the Chet Dashaways gave a party. The 
 circle of mourners kept its place all evening, and Dave Dyer 
 did the " stunt " of the Norwegian and the hen. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 GOPHER PRAIRIE was digging in for the winter. Through late 
 November and all December it snowed daily; the thermometer 
 was at zero and might drop to twenty below, or thirty. Winter 
 is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry. 
 Storm sheds were erected at every door. In every block the 
 householders, Sam Clark, the wealthy Mr. Dawson, all save 
 asthmatic Ezra Stowbody who extravagantly hired a boy, were 
 seen perilously staggering up ladders, carrying storm windows 
 and screwing them to second-story jambs. While Kennicott 
 put up his windows Carol danced inside the bedrooms and 
 begged him not to swallow the screws, which he held in his 
 mouth like an extraordinary set of external false teeth. 
 
 The universal sign of winter was the town handyman 
 Miles Bjornstam, a tall, thick, red-mustached bachelor, opinion- 
 ated atheist, general-store arguer, cynical Santa Claus. Chil- 
 dren loved him, and he sneaked away from work to tell them 
 improbable stories of sea-faring and horse-trading and bears. 
 The children's parents either laughed at him or hated him. He 
 was the one democrat in town. He called both Lyman Cass 
 the miller and the Finn homesteader from Lost Lake by their 
 first names. He was known as " The Red Swede," and con- 
 sidered slightly insane. 
 
 Bjornstam could do anything with his hands solder a pan, 
 weld an automobile spring, soothe a frightened filly, tinker a 
 clock, carve a Gloucester schooner which magically went into 
 a bottle. Now, for a week, he was commissioner general of 
 Gopher Prairie. He was the only person besides the repairman 
 at Sam Clark's who understood plumbing. Everybody begged 
 him to look over the furnace and the water-pipes. He rushed 
 from house to house till after bedtime ten o'clock. Icicles 
 from burst water-pipes hung along the skirt of his brown dog- 
 skin overcoat; his plush cap, which he never took off in the 
 house, was a pulp of ice and coal-dust; his red hands were 
 cracked to rawness; he chewed the stub of a cigar. 
 
 81 
 
82 MAIN STREET 
 
 But he was courtly to Carol. He stooped to examine the 
 furnace flues; he straightened, glanced down at her, and 
 hemmed, " Got to fix your furnace, no matter what else I do." 
 
 The poorer houses of Gopher Prairie, where the services of 
 Miles Bjornstam were a luxury which included the shanty 
 of Miles Bjornstam were banked to the lower windows with 
 earth and manure. Along the railroad the sections of snow 
 fence, which had been stacked all summer in romantic wooden 
 tents occupied by roving small boys, were set up to prevent 
 drifts from covering the track. 
 
 The farmers came into town in home-made sleighs, with bed- 
 quilts and hay piled in the rough boxes. 
 
 Fur coats, fur caps, fur mittens, overshoes buckling almost 
 to the knees, gray knitted scarfs ten feet long, thick woolen 
 socks, canvas jackets lined with fluffy yellow wool like the 
 plumage of ducklings, moccasins, red flannel wristlets for the 
 blazing chapped wrists of boys these protections against win- 
 ter were busily dug out of moth-ball-sprinkled drawers and 
 tar-bags in closets, and all over town small boys were squeal- 
 ing, " Oh, there's my mittens! " or " Look at my shoe-packs! " 
 There is so sharp a division between the panting summer and 
 the stinging winter of the Northern plains that they redis- 
 covered with surprise and a feeling of heroism this armor of 
 an Artie explorer. 
 
 Winter garments surpassed even personal gossip as the 
 topic at parties. It was good form to ask, " Put on your 
 heavies yet? " There were as many distinctions in wraps as in 
 motor cars. The lesser sort appeared in yellow and black 
 dogskin coats, but Kennicott was lordly in a long raccoon 
 ulster and a new seal cap. When the snow was too deep for 
 his motor he went off on country calls in a shiny, floral, steel- 
 tipped cutter, only his ruddy nose and his cigar emerging from 
 the fur. 
 
 Carol herself stirred Main Street by a loose coat of nutria. 
 Her finger-tips loved the silken fur. 
 
 Her liveliest activity now was organizing outdoor sports in 
 the motor-paralyzed town. 
 
 The automobile and bridge-whist had not only made more 
 evident the social divisions in Gopher Prairie but they had 
 also enfeebled the love of activity. It was so rich-looking to 
 sit and drive and so easy. Skiing and sliding were " stupid " 
 and " old-fashioned." In fact, the village longed for the ele- 
 
MAIN STREET 83 
 
 gance of city recreations almost as much as the cities longed 
 for village sports; and Gopher Prairie took as much pride in 
 neglecting coasting as St. Paul or New York in going 
 coasting. Carol did inspire a successful skating-party in mid- 
 November. Plover Lake glistened in clear sweeps of gray- 
 green ice, ringing to the skates. On shore the ice-tipped reeds 
 clattered in the wind, and oak twigs with stubborn last leaves 
 hung against a milky sky. Harry Haydock did figure-eights, 
 and Carol was certain that she had found the perfect life. 
 But when snow had ended the skating and she tried to get up 
 a moonlight sliding party, the matrons hesitated to stir away 
 from their radiators and their daily bridge-whist imitations of 
 the city. She had to nag them. They scooted down a long 
 hill on a bob-sled, they upset and got snow down their, necks, 
 they shrieked that they would do it again immediately and 
 they did not do it again at all. 
 
 She badgered another group into going skiing. They shouted 
 and threw snowballs, and informed her that it was such fun, 
 and they'd have another skiing expedition right away, and 
 they jollily returned home and never thereafter left their 
 manuals of bridge. 
 
 Carol was discouraged. She was grateful when Kennicott 
 invited her to go rabbit-hunting in the woods. She waded 
 down stilly cloisters between burnt stump and icy oak, through 
 drifts marked with a million hieroglyphics of rabbit and mouse 
 and bird. She squealed as he leaped on a pile of brush and 
 fired at the rabbit which ran out. He belonged there, mas- 
 culine in reefer and sweater and high-laced boots. That night 
 she ate prodigiously of steak and fried potatoes; she produced 
 electric sparks by touching his ear with her finger-tip ; she slept 
 twelve hours; and awoke to think how glorious was this brave 
 land. 
 
 She rose to a radiance of sun on snow. Snug in her furs she 
 trotted up-town. Frosted shingles smoked against a sky colored 
 like flax-blossoms, sleigh-bells clinked, shouts of greeting 
 were loud in the thin bright air, and everywhere was a 
 rhythmic sound of wood-sawing. It was Saturday, and the 
 neighbors' sons were getting up the winter fuel. Behind walls 
 of corded wood in back yards their sawbucks stood in de- 
 pressions scattered with canary-yellow flakes of sawdust. The 
 frames of their buck-saws were cherry-red, the blades blued 
 steel, and the fresh cut ends of the sticks poplar, maple, iron- 
 
84 MAIN STREET 
 
 wood, birch were marked with engraved rings of growth. The 
 boys wore shoe-packs, blue flannel shirts with enormous pearl 
 buttons, and mackinaws of crimson, lemon yellow, and foxy 
 brown. 
 
 Carol cried " Fine day! " to the boys; she came in a glow 
 to Rowland & Gould's grocery, her collar white with frost 
 from her breath; she bought a can of tomatoes as though it 
 were Orient fruit; and returned home planning to surprise 
 Kennicott with an omelet Creole for dinner. 
 
 So brilliant was the snow-glare that when she entered the 
 house she saw the door-knobs, the newspaper on the table, 
 every white surface as dazzling mauve, and her head was dizzy 
 in the pyrotechnic dimness. When her eyes had recovered she 
 felt expanded, drunk with health, mistress of life. The world 
 was so luminous that she sat down at her rickety little desk in 
 the living-room to make a poem. (She got no farther than 
 "The sky is bright, the sun is warm, there ne'er will be 
 another storm.") 
 
 In the mid-afternoon of this same day Kennicott was called 
 into the country. It was Bea's evening out her evening for 
 the Lutheran Dance. Carol was alone from three till mid- 
 night. She wearied of reading pure love stories in the magazines 
 and sat by a radiator, beginning to brood. 
 
 Thus she chanced to discover that she had nothing to do. 
 
 She had, she meditated, passed through the novelty of seeing 
 the town and meeting people, of skating and sliding and 
 hunting. Bea was competent; there was no household labor 
 except sewing and darning and gossipy assistance to Bea in 
 bed-making. She couldn't satisfy her ingenuity in planning 
 meals. At Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market you didn't give 
 orders you wofully inquired whether there was anything 
 today besides steak and pork and ham. The cuts of beef were 
 not cuts. They were hacks. Lamb chops were as exotic as 
 sharks' fins. The meat-dealers shipped their best to the city, 
 with its higher prices. 
 
 In all the shops there was the same lack of choice. She 
 could not find a glass-headed picture-nail in town; she did 
 not hunt for the sort of veiling she wanted she took what 
 she could get; and only at Rowland & Gould's was there such 
 
MAIN STREET 85 
 
 a luxury as canned asparagus. Routine care was all she could 
 devote to the house. Only by such fussing as the Widow 
 Bogart's could she make it fill her time. 
 
 She could not have outside employment. To the village 
 doctor's wife it was taboo. 
 
 She was a woman with a working brain and no work. 
 
 There were only three things which she could do: Have 
 children; start her career of reforming; or become so definitely 
 a part of the town that she would be fulfilled by the activities 
 of church and study-club and bridge-parties. 
 
 Children, yes, she wanted them, but She was not quite 
 
 ready. She had been embarrassed by Kennicott's frankness, 
 but she agreed with him that in the insane condition of civiliza- 
 tion, which made the rearing of citizens more costly and perilous 
 than any other crime, it was inadvisable to have children till 
 
 he had made more money. She was sorry Perhaps he had 
 
 made all the mystery of love a mechanical cautiousness but 
 
 She fled from the thought with a dubious, " Some day." 
 
 Her "reforms," her impulses toward beauty in raw Main 
 Street, they had become indistinct. But she would set them 
 going now. She would! She swore it with soft fist beating 
 the edges of the radiator. And at the end of all her vows 
 she had no notion as to when and where the crusade was to 
 begin. 
 
 Become an authentic part of the town? She began to think 
 with unpleasant lucidity. She reflected that she did not know 
 whether the people liked her. She had gone to the women at 
 afternoon-coffees, to the merchants in their stores, with so many 
 outpouring comments and whimsies that she hadn't given them 
 a chance to betray their opinions of her. The men smiled 
 but did they like her? She was lively among the women 
 but was she one of them? She could not recall many times 
 when she had been admitted to the whispering of scandal 
 which is the secret chamber of Gopher Prairie conversation. 
 
 She was poisoned with doubt, as she drooped up to bed. 
 
 Next day, through her shopping, her mind sat back and 
 observed. Dave Dyer and Sam Clark were as cordial as 
 she had been fancying; but wasn't there an impersonal abrupt- 
 ness in the " H' are yuh? " of Chet Dashaway? Rowland the 
 grocer was curt. Was that merely his usual manner? 
 
 " It's infuriating to have to pay attention to what people 
 think. In St. Paul I didn't care. But here I'm spied on. 
 
86 MAIN STREET 
 
 They're watching me. I mustn't let it make me self-conscious," 
 she coaxed herself overstimulated by the drug of thought, 
 and offensively on the defensive. 
 
 m 
 
 A thaw which stripped the snow from the sidewalks; a 
 ringing iron night when the lakes could be heard booming; 
 a clear roistering morning. In tarn o'shanter and tweed skirt 
 Carol felt herself a college junior going out to play hockey. 
 She wanted to whoop, her legs ached to run. On the way 
 home from shopping she yielded, as a pup would have yielded. 
 She galloped down a block and as she jumped from a curb 
 across a welter of slush, she gave a student " Yippee! " 
 
 She saw that in a window three old women were gasping. 
 Their triple glare was paralyzing. Across the street, at an- 
 other window, the curtain had secretively moved. She stopped, 
 walked on sedately, changed from the girl Carol into Mrs. Dr. 
 Kennicott. 
 
 She never again felt quite young enough and defiant enough 
 and free enough to run and halloo in the public streets; and 
 it was as a Nice Married Woman that she attended the next 
 weekly bridge of the Jolly Seventeen. 
 
 IV 
 
 The Jolly Seventeen (the membership of which ranged from 
 fourteen to twenty-six) was the social cornice of Gopher 
 Prairie. It was the country club, the diplomatic set, the St. 
 Cecilia, the Ritz oval room, the Club de Vingt. To belong to 
 it was to be " in." Though its membership partly coincided 
 with that of the Thanatopsis study club, the Jolly Seventeen 
 as a separate entity guffawed at the Thanatopsis, and con- 
 sidered it middle-class and even "highbrow." 
 
 Most of the Jolly Seventeen were young married women, 
 with their husbands as associate members. Once a week they 
 had a women's afternoon-bridge; once a month the husbands 
 joined them for supper and evening-bridge; twice a year they 
 had dances at I. O. O. F. Hall. Then the town exploded. Only 
 at the annual balls of the Firemen and of the Eastern Star 
 was there such prodigality of chiffon scarfs and tangoing and 
 heart-burnings, and these rival institutions were not select 
 
MAIN STREET 87 
 
 hired girls attended the Firemen's Ball, with section-hands 
 and laborers. Ella Stowbody had once gone to a Jolly Seven- 
 teen Soiree in the village hack, hitherto confined to chief 
 mourners at funerals; and Harry Haydock and Dr. Terry 
 Gould always appeared in the town's only specimens of evening 
 clothes. 
 
 The afternoon-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen which followed 
 Carol's lonely doubting was held at Juanita Haydock's new 
 concrete bungalow, with its door of polished oak and beveled 
 plate-glass, jar of ferns in the plastered hall, and in the 
 living-room, a fumed oak Morris chair, sixteen color-prints, 
 and a square varnished table with a mat made of cigar-ribbons 
 on which was one Illustrated Gift Edition and one pack of 
 cards in a burnt-leather case. 
 
 Carol stepped into a sirocco of furnace heat. They were 
 already playing. Despite her flabby resolves she had not yet 
 learned bridge. She was winningly apologetic about it to 
 Juanita, and ashamed that she should have to go on being 
 apologetic. 
 
 Mrs. Dave Dyer, a sallow woman with a thin prettiness, 
 devoted to experiments in religious cults, illnesses, and scandal- 
 bearing, shook her finger at Carol and trilled, " You're a 
 naughty one! I don't believe you appreciate the honor, when 
 you got into the Jolly Seventeen so easy! " 
 
 Mrs. Chet Dashaway nudged her neighbor at the second 
 table. But Carol kept up the appealing bridal manner so far 
 as possible. She twittered, "You're perfectly right. I'm a 
 lazy thing. I'll make Will start teaching me this very evening." 
 Her supplication had all the sound of birdies in the nest, and 
 Easter church-bells, and frosted Christmas cards. Internally 
 she snarled, " That ought to be saccharine enough." She sat 
 in the smallest rocking-chair, a model of Victorian modesty. 
 But she saw or she imagined that the women who had gurgled 
 at her so welcomingly when she had first come to Gopher 
 Prairie were nodding at her brusquely. 
 
 During the pause after the first game she petitioned Mrs. 
 Jackson Elder, " Don't you think we ought to get up another 
 bob-sled party soon? " 
 
 "It's so cold when you get dumped in the snow," said 
 Mrs. Elder, indifferently. 
 
 " I hate snow down my neck," volunteered Mrs. Dave Dyer, 
 with an unpleasant look at .Carol and, turning her back, she 
 
88 MAIN STREET 
 
 bubbled at Rita Simons, " Dearie, won't you run in this eve- 
 ning? I've got the loveliest new Butterick pattern I want to 
 show you." 
 
 Carol crept back to her chair. In the fervor of discussing 
 the game they ignored her. She was not used to being a 
 wallflower. She struggled to keep from oversensitiveness, from 
 becoming unpopular by the sure method of believing that she 
 was unpopular; but she hadn't much reserve of patience, and 
 at the end of the second game, when Ella Stowbody sniffily 
 asked her, "Are you going to send to Minneapolis for your 
 dress for the next soiree heard you were," Carol said " Don't 
 know yet " with unnecessary sharpness. 
 
 She was relieved by the admiration with which the jeune fille 
 Rita Simons looked at the steel buckles on her pumps; but 
 she resented Mrs. Rowland's tart demand, " Don't you find 
 that new couch of yours is too broad to be practical? " She 
 nodded, then shook her head, and touchily left Mrs. Rowland 
 to get out of it any meaning she desired. Immediately she 
 wanted to make peace. She was close to simpering in the 
 sweetness with which she addressed Mrs. Rowland: " I think 
 that is the prettiest display of beef-tea your husband has in 
 his store." 
 
 " Oh yes, Gopher Prairie isn't so much behind the times," 
 gibed Mrs. Rowland. Some one giggled. 
 
 Their rebuffs made her haughty; her haughtiness irritated 
 them to franker rebuffs; they were working up to a state of 
 painfully righteous war when they were saved by the coming 
 of food. 
 
 Though Juanita Haydock was highly advanced in the mat- 
 ters of finger-bowls, doilies, and bath-mats, her " refreshments " 
 were typical of all the afternoon-coffees. Juanita's best friends, 
 Mrs. Dyer and Mrs. Dashaway, passed large dinner plates, 
 each with a spoon, a fork, and a coffee cup without saucer. 
 They apologized and discussed the afternoon's game as they 
 passed through the thicket of women's feet. Then they dis- 
 tributed hot buttered rolls, coffee poured from an enamel-ware 
 pot, stuffed olives, potato salad, and angel's-food cake. There 
 was, even in the most strictly conforming Gopher Prairie 
 circles, a certain option as to collations. The olives need not 
 be stuffed. Doughnuts were in some houses well thought of as 
 a substitute for the hot buttered rolls. But there was in all 
 the town no heretic save Carol who omitted angel's-food. 
 
MAIN STREET 89 
 
 They ate enormously. Carol had a suspicion that the 
 thriftier housewives made the afternoon treat do for evening 
 supper. 
 
 She tried to get back into the current. She edged over to 
 Mrs. McGanum. Chunky, amiable, young Mrs. McGanum, 
 with her breast and arms of a milkmaid, and her loud delayed 
 laugh which burst startlingly from a sober face, was the 
 daughter of old Dr. Westlake, and the wife of Westlake's 
 partner, Dr. McGanum. Kennicott asserted that Westlake and 
 McGanum and their contaminated families were tricky, but 
 Carol had found them gracious. She asked for friendliness by 
 crying to Mrs. McGanum, " How is the baby's throat now? " 
 and she was attentive while Mrs. McGanum rocked and knitted 
 and placidly described symptoms. 
 
 Vida Sherwin came in after school, with Miss Ethel Villets, 
 the town librarian. Miss Sherwin's optimistic presence gave 
 Carol more confidence. She talked. She informed the circle, 
 " I drove almost down to Wahkeenyan with Will, a few days 
 ago. Isn't the country lovely! And I do admire the Scan- 
 dinavian farmers down there so: their big red barns and silos 
 and milking-machines and everything. Do you all know that 
 lonely Lutheran church, with the tin-covered spire, that stands 
 out alone on a hill? It's so bleak; somehow it seems so brave. 
 I do think the Scandinavians are the hardiest and best 
 people " 
 
 " Oh, do you think so? " protested Mrs. Jackson Elder. 
 " My husband says the Svenskas that work in the planing-mill 
 are perfectly terrible so silent and cranky, and so selfish, the 
 way they keep demanding raises. If they had their way they'd 
 simply ruin the business." 
 
 " Yes, and they're simply ghastly hired girls! " wailed Mrs. 
 Dave Dyer. " I swear, I work myself to skin and bone trying 
 to please my hired girls when I can get them! I do every- 
 thing hi the world for them. They can have their gentleman 
 friends call on them in the kitchen any time, and they get 
 just the same to eat as we do, if there's any left over, and I 
 practically never jump on them." 
 
 Juanita Haydock rattled, " They're ungrateful, all that class 
 of people. I do think the domestic problem is simply becoming 
 awful. I don't know what the country's coming to, with these 
 Scandahoofian clodhoppers demanding every cent you can save, 
 and so ignorant and impertinent, and on my word, demanding 
 
90 MAIN STREET 
 
 bath-tubs and everything as if they weren't mighty good and 
 lucky at home if they got a bath in the wash-tub." 
 
 They were off, riding hard. Carol thought of Bea and way- 
 laid them: 
 
 " But isn't it possibly the fault of the mistresses if the maids 
 are ungrateful? For generations we've given them the leavings 
 of food, and holes to live in. I don't want to boast, but I 
 must say I don't have much trouble with Bea. She's so 
 friendly. The Scandinavians are sturdy and honest " 
 
 Mrs. Dave Dyer snapped, " Honest? Do you call it honest 
 to hold us up for every cent of pay they can get? I can't 
 say that Fve had any of them steal anything (though you 
 might call it stealing to eat so much that a roast of beef hardly 
 lasts three days), but just the same I don't intend to let them 
 think they can put anything over on me! I always make them 
 pack and unpack their trunks down-stairs, right under my 
 eyes, and then I know they aren't being tempted to dishonesty 
 by any slackness on my part! " 
 
 " How much do the maids get here? " Carol ventured. 
 
 Mrs. B. J. Gougerling, wife of the banker, stated in a shocked 
 manner, " Any place from three-fifty to five-fifty a week! I 
 know positively that Mrs. Clark, after swearing that she 
 wouldn't weaken and encourage them in their outrageous de- 
 mands, went and paid five-fifty think of it! practically a 
 dollar a day for unskilled work and, of course, her food and 
 room and a chance to do her own washing right in with the 
 rest of the wash. How much do you pay, Mrs. Kennicott? " 
 
 11 Yes! How much do you pay? " insisted half a dozen. 
 
 " W-why, I pay six a week," she feebly confessed. 
 
 They gasped. Juanita protested, " Don't you think it's hard 
 on the rest of us when you pay so much? " Juanita 's demand 
 was re-inforced by the universal glower. 
 
 Carol was angry. " I don't care! A maid has one of the 
 hardest jobs on earth. She works from ten to eighteen hours 
 a day. She has to wash slimy dishes and dirty clothes. She 
 tends the children and runs to the door with wet chapped 
 hands and " 
 
 Mrs. Dave Dyer broke into Carol's peroration with a furious, 
 " That's all very well, but believe me, I do those things myself 
 when I'm without a maid and that's a good share of the time 
 for a person that isn't willing to yield and pay exorbitant 
 wages! " 
 
MAIN STREET 9* 
 
 Carol was retorting, " But a maid does it for strangers, and 
 all she gets out of it is the pay " 
 
 Their eyes were hostile. Four of them were talking at once. 
 Vida Sherwin's dictatorial voice cut through, took control of 
 the revolution: 
 
 "Tut, tut, tut, tut! What angry passions and what an 
 idiotic discussion! All of you getting too serious. Stop it! 
 Carol Kennicott, you're probably right, but you're too much 
 ahead of the times. Juanita, quit looking so belligerent. What 
 is this, a card party or a hen fight? Carol, you stop admiring 
 yourself as the Joan of Arc of the hired girls, or I'll spank 
 you. You come over here and talk libraries with Ethel Villets. 
 Boooooo! If there's any more pecking, I'll take charge of 
 the hen roost myself! " 
 
 They all laughed artificially, and Carol obediently " talked 
 libraries." 
 
 A small-town bungalow, the wives of a village doctor and 
 a village dry-goods merchant, a provincial teacher, a colloquial 
 brawl over paying a servant a dollar more a week. Yet this 
 insignificance echoed cellar-plots and cabinet meetings and 
 labor conferences in Persia and Prussia, Rome and Boston, and 
 the orators who deemed themselves international leaders were 
 but the raised voices of a billion Juanitas denouncing a million 
 Carols, with a hundred thousand Vida Sherwins trying to shoo 
 away the storm. 
 
 Carol felt guilty. She devoted herself to admiring the 
 spinsterish Miss Villets and immediately committed another 
 offense against the laws of decency. 
 
 "We haven't seen you at the library yet," Miss Villets 
 reproved. 
 
 " I've wanted to run in so much but I've been getting settled 
 
 and I'll probably come in so often you'll get tired of 
 
 me! I hear you have such a nice library." 
 
 " There are many who like it. We have two thousand more 
 books than Wakamin." 
 
 " Isn't that fine. I'm sure you are largely responsible. 
 I've had some experience, in St. Paul." 
 
 " So I have been informed. Not that I entirely approve 
 of library methods in these large cities. So careless, letting 
 tramps and all sorts of dirty persons practically sleep in the 
 reading-rooms." 
 
 " I know, but the poor souls Well, I'm sure you will 
 
92 MAIN STREET 
 
 agree with me in one thing: The chief task of a librarian is to 
 get people to read." 
 
 "You feel so? My feeling, Mrs. Kennicott, and I am 
 merely quoting the librarian of a very large college, is that the 
 first duty of the conscientious librarian is to preserve the 
 books." 
 
 " Oh! " Carol repented her " Oh." Miss Villets stiffened, 
 and attacked: 
 
 " It may be all very well in cities, where they have unlimited 
 funds, to let nasty children ruin books and just deliberately 
 tear them up, and fresh young men take more books out 
 than they are entitled to by the regulations, but I'm never 
 going to permit it in this library! " 
 
 " What if some children are destructive? They learn to 
 read. Books are cheaper than minds." 
 
 " Nothing is cheaper than the minds of some of these children 
 that come in and bother me simply because their mothers 
 don't keep them home where they belong. Some librarians 
 may choose to be so wishy-washy and turn their libraries into 
 nursing-homes and kindergartens, but as long as I'm in charge, 
 the Gopher Prairie library is going to be quiet and decent, and 
 the books well kept! " 
 
 Carol saw that the others were listening, waiting for her 
 to be objectionable. She flinched before their dislike. She 
 hastened to smile in agreement with Miss Villets, to glance 
 publicly at her wrist-watch, to warble that it was " so late 
 have to hurry home husband such nice party maybe you 
 were right about maids, prejudiced because Bea so nice such 
 perfectly divine angel's-food, Mrs. Haydock must give me the 
 recipe good-by, such happy party " 
 
 She walked home. She reflected, " It was my fault. I was 
 
 touchy. And I opposed them so much. Only I can't! 
 
 I can't be one of them if I must damn all the maids toiling 
 in filthy kitchens, all the ragged hungry children. And these 
 women are to be my arbiters, the rest of my life! " 
 
 She ignored Bea's call from the kitchen; she ran up-stairs 
 to the unfrequented guest-room; she wept in terror, her body 
 a pale arc as she knelt beside a cumbrous black-walnut bed, 
 beside a puffy mattress covered with a red quilt, in a shuttered 
 and airless room. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 " DON'T I, in looking for things to do, show that I'm not 
 attentive enough to Will? Am I impressed enough by his 
 work? I will be. Oh, I will be. If I can't be one of the 
 town, if I must be an outcast " 
 
 When Kennicott came home she bustled, " Dear, you must 
 tell me a lot more about your cases. I want to know. I want 
 to understand." 
 
 " Sure. You bet." And he went down to fix the furnace. 
 
 At supper she asked, " For instance, what did you do 
 today? " 
 
 " Do today? How do you mean? " 
 
 " Medically. I want to understand " 
 
 " Today? Oh, there wasn't much of anything: couple 
 chumps with bellyaches, and a sprained wrist, and a fool 
 woman that thinks she wants to kill herself because her hus- 
 band doesn't like her and Just routine work." 
 
 " But the unhappy woman doesn't sound routine! " 
 
 " Her? Just case of nerves. You can't do much with these 
 marriage mix-ups." 
 
 " But dear, please, will you tell me about the next case 
 that you do think is interesting? " 
 
 " Sure. You bet. Tell you about anything that Say, 
 
 that's pretty good salmon. Get it at Rowland's? " 
 
 n 
 
 Four days after the Jolly Seventeen debacle Vida Sherwin 
 called and casually blew Carol's world to pieces. 
 
 " May I come in and gossip a while? " she said, with such 
 excess of bright innocence that Carol was uneasy. Vida took 
 off her furs with a bounce, she sat down as though it were 
 a gymnasium exercise, she flung out: 
 
 " Feel disgracefully good, this weather! Raymond Wuther- 
 spoon says if he had my energy he'd be a grand opera singer. 
 
 93 
 
94 MAIN STREET 
 
 I always think this climate is the finest in the world, and my 
 friends are the dearest people in the world, and my work is 
 the most essential thing in the world. Probably I fool myself. 
 But I know one thing for certain: You're the pluckiest little 
 idiot in the world." 
 
 " And so you are about to flay me alive." Carol was 
 cheerful about it. 
 
 "Am I? Perhaps. I've been wondering I know that the 
 third party to a squabble is often the most to blame: the one 
 who runs between A and B having a beautiful time telling each 
 of them what the other has said. But I want you to take a 
 
 big part in vitalizing Gopher Prairie and so Such a very 
 
 unique opportunity and Am I silly? " 
 
 " I know what you mean. I was too abrupt at the Jolly 
 Seventeen." 
 
 " It isn't that. Matter of fact, I'm glad you told them some 
 wholesome truths about servants. (Though perhaps you were 
 just a bit tactless.) It's bigger than that. I wonder if you 
 understand that in a secluded community like this every new- 
 comer is on test? People cordial to her but watching her all 
 the time. I remember when a Latin teacher came here from 
 Wellesley, they resented her broad A. Were sure it was 
 affected. Of course they have discussed you " 
 
 " Have they talked about me much? " 
 
 " My dear! " 
 
 " I always feel as though I walked around in a cloud, looking 
 out at others but not being seen. I feel so inconspicuous and 
 so normal so normal that there's nothing about me to discuss. 
 I can't realize that Mr. and Mrs. Hay dock must gossip about 
 me." Carol was working up a small passion of distaste. " And 
 I don't like it. It makes me crawly to think of their daring 
 to talk over all I do and say. Pawing me over! I resent it. 
 I hate " 
 
 " Wait, child! Perhaps they resent some things in you. I 
 want you to try and be impersonal. They'd paw over any- 
 body who came in new. Didn't you, with newcomers in 
 College? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 "Well then! Will you be impersonal? I'm paying you the 
 compliment of supposing that you can be. I want you to 
 be big enough to help me make this town worth while." 
 
 " 111 be as impersonal as cold boiled potatoes. (Not that 
 
MAIN STREET 95 
 
 I shall ever be able to help you l make the town worth while.') 
 What do they say about me? Really. I want to know." 
 
 " Of course the illiterate ones resent your references to any- 
 thing farther away than Minneapolis. They're so suspicious 
 that's it, suspicious. And some think you dress too well." 
 
 " Oh, they do, do they! Shall I dress in gunny-sacking to 
 suit them? " 
 
 " Please! Are you going to be a baby? " 
 
 " I'll be good," sulkily. 
 
 " You certainly will, or I won't tell you one single thing. 
 You must understand this: I'm not asking you to change your- 
 self. Just want you to know what they think. You must 
 do that, no matter how absurd their prejudices are, if you're 
 going to handle them. Is it your ambition to make this a 
 better town, or isn't it? " 
 
 " I don't know whether it is or not! " 
 
 " Why why Tut, tut, now, of course it is! Why, I 
 
 depend on you. You're a born reformer." 
 
 " I am not not any more! " 
 
 " Of course you are." 
 
 "Oh, if I really could help So they think I'm af- 
 fected? " 
 
 " My lamb, they do! Now don't say they're nervy. After 
 all, Gopher Prairie standards are as reasonable to Gopher 
 Prairie as Lake Shore Drive standards are to Chicago. And 
 there's more Gopher Prairies than there are Chicagos. Or 
 
 Londons. And I'll tell you the whole story: They think 
 
 you're showing off when you say ' American ' instead of 
 ' Ammurrican.' They think you're too frivolous. Life's so 
 serious to them that they can't imagine any kind of laughter 
 except Juanita's snortling. Ethel Villets was sure you were 
 patronizing her when " 
 
 "Oh, I was not! " 
 
 " you talked about encouraging reading; and Mrs. Elder 
 
 thought you were patronizing when you said she had ' such 
 a pretty little car.' She thinks it's an enormous car! And 
 some of the merchants say you're too flip when you talk to 
 them in the store and " 
 
 " Poor me, when I was trying to be friendly! " 
 
 " every housewife in town is doubtful about your being 
 
 so chummy with your Bea. All right to be kind, but they say 
 you act as though she were your cousin. (Wait now! There's 
 
96 MAIN STREET 
 
 plenty more.) And they think you were eccentric in fur- 
 nishing this room they think the broad couch and that Japa- 
 nese dingus are absurd. (Wait! I know they're silly.) And 
 I guess Fve heard a dozen criticize you because you don't 
 go to church oftener and " 
 
 " I can't stand it I can't bear to realize that they've been 
 saying all these things while I've been going about so happily 
 and liking them. I wonder if you ought to have told me? It 
 will make me self-conscious." 
 
 " I wonder the same thing. Only answer I can get is the 
 old saw about knowledge being power. And some day you'll 
 see how absorbing it is to have power, even here; to control 
 
 the town Oh, I'm a crank. But I do like to see things 
 
 moving." 
 
 "It hurts. It makes these people seem so beastly and 
 treacherous, when I've been perfectly natural with them. But 
 let's have it all. What did they say about my Chinese house- 
 warming party? " 
 
 "Why, uh " 
 
 " Go on. Or I'll make up worse things than anything you 
 can tell me." 
 
 "They did enjoy it. But I guess some of them felt you 
 were showing off pretending that your husband is richer than 
 he is." 
 
 " I can't Their meanness of mind is beyond any horrors 
 
 I could imagine. They really thought that I And you 
 
 want to ' reform ' people like that when dynamite is so cheap? 
 Who dared to say that? The rich or the poor? " 
 
 " Fairly well assorted." 
 
 " Can't they at least understand me well enough to see 
 that though I might be affected and culturine, at least I simply 
 couldn't commit that other kind of vulgarity? If they must 
 know, you may tell them, with my compliments, that Will 
 makes about four thousand a year, and the party cost half of 
 what they probably thought it did. Chinese things are not 
 very expensive, and I made my own costume " 
 
 " Stop it! Stop beating me! I know all that. What they 
 meant was: they felt you were starting dangerous competition 
 by giving a party such as most people here can't afford. Four 
 thousand is a pretty big income for this town." 
 
 " I never thought of starting competition. Will you believe 
 that it was in all love and friendliness that I tried to give 
 
MAIN STREET 97 
 
 them the gayest party I could? It was foolish; it was childish 
 and noisy. But I did mean it so well." 
 
 " I know, of course. And it certainly is unfair of them to 
 make fun of your having that Chinese food chow men, was 
 it? and to laugh about your wearing those pretty trou- 
 sers " 
 
 Carol sprang up, whimpering, " Oh, they didn't do that! 
 They didn't poke fun at my feast, that I ordered so carefully 
 for them! And my little Chinese costume that I was so happy 
 making I made it secretly, to surprise them. And they've 
 been ridiculing it, all this while! " 
 
 She was huddled on the couch. 
 
 Vida was stroking her hair, muttering, "I shouldn't " 
 
 Shrouded in shame, Carol did not know when Vida slipped 
 away. The clock's bell, at half past five, aroused her. "I 
 must get hold of myself before Will comes. I hope he never 
 knows what a fool his wife is. ... Frozen, sneering, 
 horrible hearts." 
 
 Like a very small, very lonely girl she trudged up-stairs, 
 slow step by step, her feet dragging, her hand on the rail. 
 It was not her husband to whom she wanted to run for pro- 
 tection it was her father, her smiling understanding father, 
 dead these twelve years. 
 
 ra 
 
 Kennicott was yawning, stretched in the largest chair, be- 
 tween the radiator and a small kerosene stove. 
 
 Cautiously, " Will dear, I wonder if the people here don't 
 criticize me sometimes? They must. I mean: if they ever do, 
 you mustn't let it bother you." 
 
 " Criticize you? Lord, I should say not. They all keep 
 telling me you're the swellest girl they ever saw." 
 
 " Well, I've just fancied The merchants probably think 
 
 I'm too fussy about shopping. I'm afraid I bore Mr. Dash- 
 away and Mr. Rowland and Mr. Ludelmeyer." 
 
 " I can tell you how that is. I didn't want to speak of it, 
 but since you've brought it up: Chet Dashaway probably 
 resents the fact that you got this new furniture down in the 
 Cities instead of here. I didn't want to raise any objection at 
 
 the time but After all, I make my money here and they 
 
 naturally expect me to spend it here." 
 
98 MAIN STREET 
 
 " If Mr. Dashaway will kindly tell me how any civilized per- 
 son can furnish a room out of the mortuary pieces that he 
 calls " She remembered. She said meekly, " But I under- 
 stand." 
 
 " And Rowland and Ludelmeyer Oh, you've probably 
 
 handed 'em a few roasts for the bum stocks they carry, when 
 you just meant to jolly 'em. But rats, what do we care! 
 This is an independent town, not like these Eastern holes 
 where you have to watch your step all the time, and live up 
 to fool demands and social customs, and a lot of old tabbies 
 always busy criticizing. Everybody's free here to do what he 
 wants to." He said it with a flourish, and Carol perceived 
 that he believed it. She turned her breath of fury into a 
 yawn. 
 
 " By the way, Carrie, while we're talking of this: Of course 
 I like to keep independent, and I don't believe in this business 
 of binding yourself to trade with the man that trades with 
 you unless you really want to, but same time: I'd be just 
 as glad if you dealt with Jenson or Ludelmeyer as much as 
 you can, instead of Rowland & Gould, who go to Dr. Gould 
 every last time, and the whole tribe of 'em the same way. 
 I don't see why I should be paying out my good money for 
 groceries and having them pass it on to Terry Gould! " 
 
 " I've gone to Rowland & Gould because they're better, and 
 cleaner." 
 
 " I know. I don't mean cut them out entirely. Course 
 Jenson is tricky give you short weight and Ludelmeyer is 
 a shiftless old Dutch hog. But same time, I mean let's keep 
 the trade in the family whenever it is convenient, see how I 
 mean? " 
 
 " I see." 
 
 " Well, guess it's about time to turn in." 
 
 He yawned, went out to look at the thermometer, slammed 
 the door, patted her head, unbuttoned his waistcoat, yawned, 
 wound the clock, went down to look at the furnace, yawned, 
 and clumped up-stairs to bed, casually scratching his thick 
 woolen undershirt. 
 
 Till he bawled, " Aren't you ever coming up to bed? " she 
 sat unmoving. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 SHE had tripped into the meadow to teach the lambs a pretty 
 educational dance and found that the lambs were wolves. 
 There was no way out between their pressing gray shoulders. 
 She was surrounded by fangs and sneering eyes. 
 
 She could not go on enduring the hidden derision. She 
 wanted to flee. She wanted to hide in the generous indifference 
 of cities. She practised saying to Kennicott, " Think perhaps 
 I'll run down to St. Paul for a few days." But she could 
 not trust herself to say it carelessly; could not abide his 
 certain questioning. 
 
 Reform the town? All she wanted was to be tolerated! 
 
 She could not look directly at people. She flushed and 
 winced before citizens who a week ago had been amusing 
 objects of study, and in their good-mornings she heard a cruel 
 sniggering. 
 
 She encountered Juanita Haydock at Ole Jensen's grocery. 
 She besought, " Oh, how do you do! Heavens, what beautiful 
 celery that is! " 
 
 " Yes, doesn't it look fresh. Harry simply has to have his 
 celery on Sunday, drat the man! " 
 
 Carol hastened out of the shop exulting, " She didn't make 
 fun of me. ... Did she? " 
 
 In a week she had recovered from consciousness of in- 
 security, of shame and whispering notoriety, but she kept her 
 habit of avoiding people. She walked the streets with her head 
 down. When she spied Mrs. McGanum or Mrs. Dyer ahead 
 she crossed over with an elaborate pretense of looking at a 
 billboard. Always she was acting, for the benefit of every one 
 she saw and for the benefit of the ambushed leering eyes 
 which she did not see. 
 
 She perceived that Vida Sherwin had told the truth. Whether 
 she entered a store, or swept the back porch, or stood at the 
 bay-window in the living-room, the village peeped at her. 
 Once she had swung along the street triumphant in making 
 
 99 
 
ioo MAIN STREET 
 
 a home. Now she glanced at each house, and felt, when she 
 was safely home, that she had won past a thousand enemies 
 armed with ridicule. She told herself that her sensitiveness 
 was preposterous, but daily she was thrown into panic. She 
 saw curtains slide back into innocent smoothness. Old women 
 who had been entering their houses slipped out again to stare 
 at her in the wintry quiet she could hear them tiptoeing 
 on their porches. When she had for a blessed hour forgotten 
 the searchlight, when she was scampering through a chill dusk, 
 happy in yellow windows against gray night, her heart checked 
 as she realized that a head covered with a shawl was thrust 
 up over a snow-tipped bush to watch her. 
 
 She admitted that she was taking herself too seriously; that 
 villagers gape at every one. She became placid, and thought 
 well of her philosophy. But next morning she had a shock 
 of shame as she entered Ludelmeyer's. The grocer, his clerk, 
 and neurotic Mrs. Dave Dyer had been giggling about some- 
 thing. They halted, looked embarrassed, babbled about onions. 
 Carol felt guilty. That evening when Kennicott took her to 
 call on the crochety Lyman Casses, their hosts seemed flustered 
 at their arrival. Kennicott jovially hooted, " What makes you 
 so hang-dog, Lym? " The Casses tittered feebly. 
 
 Except Dave Dyer, Sam Clark, and Raymle Wutherspoon, 
 there were no merchants of whose welcome Carol was certain. 
 She knew that she read mockery into greetings but she could 
 not control her suspicion, could not rise from her psychic col- 
 lapse. She alternately raged and flinched at the superiority of 
 the merchants. They did not know that they were being rude, 
 but they meant to have it understood that they were prosperous 
 and " not scared of no doctor's wife." They often said, " One 
 man's as good as another and a darn sight better." This 
 motto, however, they did not commend to farmer customers 
 who had had crop failures. The Yankee merchants were 
 crabbed; and Ole Jenson, Ludelmeyer, and Gus Dahl, from the 
 " Old Country," wished to be taken for Yankees. James 
 Madison Rowland, born in New Hampshire, and Ole Jenson, 
 born in Sweden, both proved that they were free American 
 citizens by grunting, " I don't know whether I got any or not," 
 or "Well, you can't expect me to get it delivered by noon." 
 
 It was good form for the customers to fight back. Juanita 
 Haydock cheerfully jabbered, " You have it there by twelve or 
 I'll snatch that fresh delivery-boy bald-headed." But Carol 
 
MAIN STREET 101 
 
 had never been able to play the game of friendly rudeness; 
 and now she was certain that she never would learn it. She 
 formed the cowardly habit of going to Axel Egge's. 
 
 Axel was not respectable and rude. He was still a foreigner, 
 and he expected to remain one. His manner was heavy and 
 uninterrogative. His establishment was more fantastic than 
 any cross-roads store. No one save Axel himself could find 
 anything. A part of the assortment of children's stockings 
 was under a blanket on a shelf, a part in a tin ginger-snap box, 
 the rest heaped like a nest of black-cotton snakes upon a flour- 
 barrel which was surrounded by brooms, Norwegian Bibles, 
 dried cod for ludfisk, boxes of apricots, and a pair and a half 
 of lumbermen's rubber-footed boots. The place was crowded 
 with Scandinavian farmwives, standing aloof in shawls and 
 ancient fawn-colored leg o' mutton jackets, awaiting the return 
 of their lords. They spoke Norwegian or Swedish, and looked 
 at Carol uncomprehendingly. They were a relief to her 
 they were not whispering that she was a poseur. 
 
 But what she told herself was that Axel Egge's was "so 
 picturesque and romantic." 
 
 It was in the matter of clothes that she was most self- 
 conscious. 
 
 When she dared to go shopping in her new checked suit with 
 the black-embroidered sulphur collar, she had as good as in- 
 vited all of Gopher Prairie (which interested itself in nothing 
 so intimately as in new clothes and the cost thereof) to in- 
 vestigate her. It was a smart suit with lines unfamiliar to the 
 dragging yellow and pink frocks of the town. The Widow 
 Bogart's stare, from her porch, indicated, " Well I never saw 
 anything like that before! " Mrs. McGanum stopped Carol 
 at the notions shop to hint, " My, that's a nice suit wasn't 
 it terribly expensive? " The gang of boys in front of the 
 drug store commented, " Hey, Pudgie, play you a game of 
 checkers on that dress." Carol could not endure it. She 
 drew her fur coat over the suit and hastily fastened the buttons, 
 while the boys snickered. 
 
 ii 
 
 No group angered her quite so much as these staring young 
 roues. 
 
 She had tried to convince herself that the village, with its 
 
102 MAIN STREET 
 
 fresh air, its lakes for fishing and swimming, was healthier than 
 the artificial city. But she was sickened by glimpses of the 
 gang of boys from fourteen to twenty who loafed before Dyer's 
 Drug Store, smoking cigarettes, displaying " fancy " shoes and 
 purple ties and coats of diamond-shaped buttons, whistling 
 the Hoochi-Koochi and catcalling, " Oh, you baby-doll " at 
 every passing girl. 
 
 She saw them playing pool in the stinking room behind Del 
 Snafflin's barber shop, and shaking dice in " The Smoke House," 
 and gathered in a snickering knot to listen to the " juicy 
 stories " of Bert Tybee, the bartender of the Minniemashie 
 House. She heard them smacking moist lips over every love- 
 scene at the Rosebud Movie Palace. At the counter of the 
 Greek Confectionery Parlor, while they ate dreadful messes 
 of decayed bananas, acid cherries, whipped cream, and gelat- 
 inous ice-cream, they screamed to one another, " Hey, lemme 
 'lone," " Quit dog-gone you, looka what you went and done, 
 you almost spilled my glass swater," " Like hell I did," " Hey, 
 gol darn your hide, don't you go sticking your coffin nail in 
 my i-scream," " Oh you Batty, how juh like dancing with Tillie 
 McGuire, last night? Some squeezing, heh, kid? " 
 
 By diligent consultation of American fiction she discovered 
 that this was the only virile and amusing manner in which 
 boys could function; that boys who were not compounded of 
 the gutter and the mining-camp were mollycoddles and un- 
 happy. She had taken this for granted. She had studied the 
 boys pityingly, but impersonally. It had not occurred to her 
 that they might touch her. 
 
 Now she was aware that they knew all about her ; that they 
 were waiting for some affectation over which they could guffaw. 
 No schoolgirl passed their observation-posts more flushingly 
 than did Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. In shame she knew that they 
 glanced appraisingly at her snowy overshoes, speculating about 
 her legs. Theirs were not young eyes there was no youth 
 in all the town, she agonized. They were born old, grim and 
 old and spying and censorious. 
 
 She cried again that their youth was senile and cruel on the 
 day when she overheard Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock. 
 
 Cyrus N. Bogart, son of the righteous widow who lived 
 across the alley, was at this time a boy of fourteen or fifteen. 
 Carol had already seen quite enough of Cy Bogart. On her 
 first evening in Gopher Prairie Cy had appeared at the head 
 
MAIN STREET 103 
 
 of a " charivari," banging immensely upon a discarded auto- 
 mobile fender. His companions were yelping in imitation of 
 coyotes. Kennicott had felt rather complimented; had gone 
 out and distributed a dollar. But Cy was a capitalist in 
 charivaris. He returned with an entirely new group, and this 
 time there were three automobile fenders and a carnival rattle. 
 When Kennicott again interrupted his shaving, Cy piped, 
 " Naw, you got to give us two dollars," and he got it. A week 
 later Cy rigged a tic-tac to a window of the living-room, and 
 the tattoo out of the darkness frightened Carol into screaming. 
 Since then, in four months, she had beheld Cy hanging a cat, 
 stealing melons, throwing tomatoes at the Kennicott house, and 
 making ski-tracks across the lawn, and had heard him ex- 
 plaining the mysteries of generation, with great audibility and 
 dismaying knowledge. He was, in fact, a museum specimen 
 of what a small town, a well-disciplined public school, a tra- 
 dition of hearty humor, and a pious mother could produce from 
 the material of a courageous and ingenious mind. 
 
 Carol was afraid of him. Far from protesting when he set 
 his mongrel on a kitten, she worked hard at not seeing him. 
 
 The Kennicott garage was a shed littered with paint-cans, 
 tools, a lawn-mower, and ancient wisps of hay. Above it was 
 a loft which Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock, young brother of 
 Harry, used as a den, for smoking, hiding from whippings, 
 and planning secret societies. They climbed to it by a ladder 
 on the alley side of the shed. 
 
 This morning of late January, two or three weeks after 
 Vida's revelations, Carol had gone into the stable-garage to 
 find a hammer. Snow softened her step. She heard voices 
 in the loft above her: 
 
 " Ah gee, lez oh, lez go down the lake and swipe some 
 mushrats out of somebody's traps," Cy was yawning. 
 
 " And get our ears beat off! " grumbled Earl Haydock. 
 
 " Gosh, these cigarettes are dandy. 'Member when we were 
 just kids, and used to smoke corn-silk and hayseed? " 
 
 "Yup. Gosh! " 
 
 Spit. Silence. 
 
 " Say Earl, ma says if you chew tobacco you get consump- 
 tion." 
 
 " Aw rats, your old lady is a crank." 
 
 " Yuh, that's so." Pause. " But she says she knows a fella 
 that did." 
 
104 MAIN STREET 
 
 " Aw, gee whiz, didn't Doc Kennicott used to chew tobacco 
 all the time before he married this-here girl from the Cities? 
 
 He used to spit Gee! Some shot! He could hit a tree 
 
 ten feet off." 
 
 This was news to the girl from the Cities. 
 
 " Say, how is she? " continued Earl. 
 
 "Huh? How's who?" 
 
 " You know who I mean, smarty." 
 
 A tussle, a thumping of loose boards, silence, weary nar- 
 ration from Cy: 
 
 " Mrs. Kennicott? Oh, she's all right, I guess." Relief to 
 Carol, below. " She gimme a hunk o' cake, one time. But 
 Ma says she's stuck-up as hell. Ma's always talking about 
 her. Ma says if Mrs. Kennicott thought as much about the 
 doc as she does about her clothes, the doc wouldn't look so 
 peaked." 
 
 Spit. Silence. 
 
 " Yuh. Juanita's always talking about her, too," from Earl. 
 "She says Mrs. Kennicott thinks she knows it all. Juanita 
 says she has to laugh till she almost busts every time she 
 sees Mrs. Kennicott peerading along the street with that ' take 
 a look I'm a swell skirt ' way she's got. But gosh, I don't 
 pay no attention to Juanita. She's meaner 'n a crab." 
 
 " Ma was telling somebody that she heard that Mrs. Ken- 
 nicott claimed she made forty dollars a week when she was 
 on some job in the Cities, and Ma says she knows 
 posolutely that she never made but eighteen a week Ma says 
 that when she's lived here a while she won't go round making 
 a fool of herself, pulling that bighead stuff on folks that know 
 a whole lot more than she does. They're all laughing up their 
 sleeves at her." 
 
 " Say, jever notice how Mrs. Kennicott fusses around the 
 house? Other evening when I was coming over here, she'd 
 forgot to pull down the curtain, and I watched her for ten 
 minutes. Jeeze, you'd 'a' died laughing. She was there all 
 alone, and she must V spent five minutes getting a picture 
 straight. It was funny as hell the way she'd stick out her finger 
 to straighten the picture deedle-dee, see my tunnin' 'ittle 
 finger, oh my, ain't I cute, what a fine long tail my cat's got! " 
 
 " But say, Earl, she's some good-looker, just the same, and 
 O Ignatz! the glad rags she must of bought for her wedding. 
 Jever notice these low-cut dresses and these thin shimmy-shirts 
 
MAIN STREET 105 
 
 she wears? I had a good squint at 'em when they were out 
 on the line with the wash. And some ankles she's got, heh? " 
 
 Then Carol fled. 
 
 In her innocence she had not known that the whole town 
 could discuss even her garments, her body. She felt that she 
 was being dragged naked down Main Street. 
 
 The moment it was dusk she pulled down the window-shades, 
 all the shades, flush with the sill, but beyond them she felt 
 moist fleering eyes. 
 
 in 
 
 She remembered, and tried to forget, and remembered more 
 sharply the vulgar detail of her husband's having observed the 
 ancient customs of the land by chewing tobacco. She would 
 have preferred a prettier vice gambling or a mistress. For 
 these she might have found a luxury of forgiveness. She could 
 not remember any fascinatingly wicked hero of fiction who 
 chewed tobacco. She asserted that it proved him to be a man 
 of the bold free West. She tried to align him with the hairy- 
 chested heroes of the motion-pictures. She curled on the couch, 
 a pallid softness in the twilight, and fought herself, and lost the 
 battle. Spitting did not identify him with rangers riding the 
 buttes; it merely bound him to Gopher Prairie to Nat Hicks 
 the tailor and Bert Tybee the bartender. 
 
 " But he gave it up for me. Oh, what does it matter! We're 
 all filthy in some things. I think of myself as so superior, 
 but I do eat and digest, I do wash my dirty paws and scratch. 
 I'm not a cool slim goddess on a column. There aren't any! 
 He gave it up for me. He stands by me, believing that every 
 one loves me. He's the Rock of Ages in a storm of meanness 
 that's driving me mad. ... it will drive me mad." 
 
 All evening she sang Scotch ballads to Kennicott, and when 
 she noticed that he was chewing an unlighted cigar she smiled 
 maternally at his secret. 
 
 She could not escape asking (in the exact words and mental 
 intonations which a thousand million women, dairy wenches 
 and mischief-making queens, had used before her, and which 
 a million million women will know hereafter), "Was it all 
 a horrible mistake, my marrying him? " She quieted the 
 doubt without answering it. 
 
106 MAIN STREET 
 
 IV 
 
 Kennicott had taken her north to Lac-qui-Meurt, in the Big 
 Woods. It was the entrance to a Chippewa Indian reservation, 
 a sandy settlement among Norway pines on the shore of a 
 huge snow-glaring lake. She had her first sight of his mother, 
 except the glimpse at the wedding. Mrs. Kennicott had a 
 hushed and delicate breeding which dignified her woodeny over- 
 scrubbed cottage with its worn hard cushions in heavy rockers. 
 She had never lost the child's miraculous power of wonder. 
 She asked questions about books and cities. She murmured: 
 
 " Will is a dear hard-working boy but he's inclined to be too 
 serious, and you've taught him how to play. Last night I 
 heard you both laughing about the old Indian basket-seller, 
 and I just lay in bed and enjoyed your happiness." 
 
 Carol forgot her misery-hunting in this solidarity of family 
 life. She could depend upon them; she was not battling alone. 
 Watching Mrs. Kennicott flit about the kitchen she was better 
 able to translate Kennicott himself. He was matter-of-fact, 
 yes, and incurably mature. He didn't really play ; he let Carol 
 play with him. But he had his mother's genius for trusting, 
 her disdain for prying, her sure integrity. 
 
 From the two days at Lac-qui-Meurt Carol drew confidence 
 in herself, and she returned to Gopher Prairie in a throbbing 
 calm like those golden drugged seconds when, because he is 
 for an instant free from pain, a sick man revels in living. 
 
 A bright hard winter day, the wind shrill, black and silver 
 clouds booming across the sky, everything in panicky motion 
 during the brief light. They struggled against the surf of wind, 
 through deep snow. Kennicott was cheerful. He hailed Loren 
 Wheeler, " Behave yourself while I been away? " The editor 
 bellowed, " B' gosh you stayed so long that all your patients 
 have got well! " and importantly took notes for the Dauntless 
 about their journey. Jackson Elder cried, " Hey, folks! How's 
 tricks up North? " Mrs. McGanum waved to them from her 
 porch. 
 
 " They're glad to see us. We mean something here. These 
 people are satisfied. Why can't I be? But can I sit back 
 all my life and be satisfied with ' Hey, folks '? They want 
 shouts on Main Street, and I want violins in a paneled room. 
 Why ? 
 
MAIN STREET 107 
 
 Vida Sherwin ran in after school a dozen times. She was 
 tactful, torrentially anecdotal. She had scuttled about town 
 and plucked compliments: Mrs. Dr. Westlake had pronounced 
 Carol a " very sweet, bright, cultured young woman," and 
 Brad Bemis, the tinsmith at Clark's Hardware Store, had de- 
 clared that she was " easy to work for and awful easy to 
 look at." 
 
 But Carol could not yet take her in. She resented this 
 outsider's knowledge of her shame. Vida was not too long 
 tolerant. She hinted, " You're a great brooder, child. Buck up 
 now. The town's quit criticizing you, almost entirely. Come 
 with me to the Thanatopsis Club. They have some of the 
 best papers, and current-events discussions so interesting." 
 
 In Vida's demands Carol felt a compulsion, but she was too 
 listless to obey. 
 
 It was Bea Sorenson who was really her confidante. 
 
 However charitable toward the Lower Classes she may have 
 thought herself, Carol had been reared to assume that servants 
 belong to a distinct and inferior species. But she discovered 
 that Bea was extraordinarily like girls she had loved in college, 
 and as a companion altogether superior to the young matrons 
 of the Jolly Seventeen. Daily they became more frankly two 
 girls playing at housework. Bea artlessly considered Carol 
 the most beautiful and accomplished lady in the country; she 
 was always shrieking, " My, dot's a swell hat! " or, " Ay t'ink 
 all dese ladies yoost die when dey see how elegant you do 
 your hair! " But it was not the humbleness of a servant, nor 
 the hypocrisy of a slave; it was the admiration of Freshman 
 for Junior. 
 
 They made out the day's menus together. Though they 
 began with propriety, Carol sitting by the kitchen table and 
 Bea at the sink or blacking the stove, the conference was 
 likely to end with both of them by the table, while Bea gurgled 
 over the ice-man's attempt to kiss her, or Carol admitted, 
 " Everybody knows that the doctor is lots more clever than 
 Dr. McGanum." When Carol came in from marketing, Bea 
 plunged into the hall to take off her coat, rub her frosted 
 hands, and ask, " Vos dere lots of folks up-town today? " 
 This was the welcome upon which Carol depended. 
 
io8 MAIN STREET 
 
 VI 
 
 Through her weeks of cowering there was no change in 
 her surface life. No one save Vida was aware of her agonizing. 
 On her most despairing days she chatted to women on the 
 street, in stores. But without the protection of Kennicott's 
 presence she did not go to the Jolly Seventeen; she delivered 
 herself to the judgment of the town only when she went shop- 
 ping and on the ritualistic occasions of formal afternoon calls, 
 when Mrs. Lyman Cass or Mrs. George Edwin Mott, with 
 clean gloves and minute handkerchiefs and sealskin card-cases 
 and countenances of frozen approbation, sat on the edges of 
 chairs and inquired, " Do you find Gopher Prairie pleasing? " 
 When they spent evenings of social profit-and-loss at the Hay- 
 docks 7 or the Dyers 7 she hid behind Kennicott, playing the 
 simple bride. 
 
 Now she was unprotected. Kennicott had taken a patient 
 to Rochester for an operation. He would be away for two 
 or three days. She had not minded; she would loosen the 
 matrimonial tension and be a fanciful girl for a time. But 
 now that he was gone the house was listeningly empty. Bea 
 was out this afternoon presumably drinking coffee and talk- 
 ing about " fellows " with her cousin Tina. It was the day 
 for the monthly supper and evening-bridge of the Jolly Seven- 
 teen, but Carol dared not go. 
 
 She sat alone. 
 
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, 
 
 109 
 
no MAIN STREET 
 
 moved the tray. " Some time 111 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 finger- 
 tip 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. 
 
 n 
 
 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 con- 
 
MAIN STREET in 
 
 tent 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 knowl- 
 edge and freedom were one. But she had delayed so long in 
 finding that seed. Could she do something with this Thana- 
 topsis 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 
 
ii2 MAIN STREET 
 
 executive as Will, I think I could endure even Gopber 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 wUl 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 tiiis 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." 
 
 in 
 
 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 in- 
 escapable. 
 
 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 show- 
 ing 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. 
 L The houses were black specks on a white sheet. Her heart 
 
MAIN STREET 113 
 
 shivered with that still loneliness as her body shivered with 
 the wind. 
 
 She ran back into the huddle of streets, all the while pro- 
 testing 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 frivo- 
 lous, 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 darks 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 aban- 
 doned 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 indus- 
 tries 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 
 
114 MAIN STREET 
 
 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 win- 
 dows 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 bob- 
 sled 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 
 
MAIN STREET 115 
 
 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 de- 
 parture 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 
 
ii6 MAIN STREET 
 
 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 some- 
 body 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 
 
MAIN STREET 117 
 
 welcoming gesture which assumed that she was her own coun- 
 selor, 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, Bjorn- 
 quist ' 
 
 " '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. 
 
u8 MAIN STREET 
 
 " ' So you like my looks, eh? ' I says, kind of innocent. 
 
 " l What difference does that make? Want you to saw that 
 wood before Saturday, 7 he says, real sharp. Common work- 
 man 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 wist- 
 ful 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 Bjorn- 
 stam'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 Bjorn- 
 stam, 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 
 
MAIN STREET 1*9 
 
 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 crib- 
 bage, 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 un- 
 laced 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 per- 
 forated 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. 
 
120 MAIN STREET 
 
 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 
 toaight? 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 sell- 
 ing 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 
 
MAIN STREET 121 
 
 Well, I don't remember all of it but Oh, sure! And 
 
 there's that c I met a little country boy who ' I don't 
 
 remember exactly how it goes, but the chorus ends up, l 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 Jensen'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 battle- 
 ments with queens. But the celebrated cinema jester's con- 
 ceit of dropping toads into a soup-plate flung her into unwill- 
 ing 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 darks. 
 
122 MAIN STREET 
 
 She played quietly and reasonably badly. She had no opinions 
 on anything more polemic than woolen union-suits, a topic on 
 which Mrs. Rowland 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 hus- 
 bands. 
 
 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 honey- 
 moon 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, 
 7 think we're a pretty good bunch! " 
 
MAIN STREET 123 
 
 " 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 manufac- 
 turer, 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." 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 SHE had often been invited to the weekly meetings of the 
 Thanatopsis, the women's study club, but she had put it off. 
 The Thanatopsis was, Vida Sherwin promised, " such a cozy 
 group, and yet it puts you in touch with all the intellectual 
 thoughts that are going on everywhere." 
 Early in March Mrs. Westlake, wife of the veteran physician, 
 marched into Carol's living-room like an amiable old pussy 
 and suggested, " My dear, you really must come to the 
 Thanatopsis this afternoon. Mrs. Dawson is going to be leader 
 and the poor soul is frightened to death. She wanted me to 
 get you to come. She says she's sure you will brighten up 
 the meeting with your knowledge of books and writings. 
 (English poetry is our topic today.) So shoo! Put on your 
 coat! " 
 
 " English poetry? Really? I'd love to go. I didn't realize 
 you were reading poetry." 
 
 " Oh, we're not so slow! " 
 
 Mrs. Luke Dawson, wife of the richest man in town, gaped 
 at them piteously when they appeared. Her expensive frock 
 of beaver-colored satin with rows, plasters, and pendants of 
 solemn brown beads was intended for a woman twice her size. 
 She stood wringing her hands in front of nineteen folding 
 chairs, in her front parlor with its faded photograph of Minne- 
 haha Falls in 1890, its " colored enlargement " of Mr. Dawson, 
 its bulbous lamp painted with sepia cows and mountains and 
 standing on a mortuary marble column. 
 
 She creaked, " O Mrs. Kennicott, I'm in such a fix. I'm 
 supposed to lead the discussion, and I wondered would you 
 come and help? " 
 
 " What poet do you take up today? " demanded Carol, in 
 her library tone of " What book do you wish to take out? " 
 
 " Why, the English ones." 
 
 " Not all of them? " 
 
 "W-why yes. We're learning all of European Literature 
 
 124 
 
MAIN STREET 125 
 
 this year. The club gets such a nice magazine, Ctdture Hints, 
 and we follow its programs. Last year our subject was Men 
 and Women of the Bible, and next year we'll probably take 
 up Furnishings and China. My, it does make a body hustle 
 to keep up with all these new culture subjects, but it is im- 
 proving. So will you help us with the discussion today? " 
 
 On her way over Carol had decided to use the Thanatopsis 
 as the tool with which to liberalize the town. She had im- 
 mediately conceived enormous enthusiasm; she had chanted, 
 " These are the real people. When the housewives, who bear 
 the burdens, are interested in poetry, it means something. I'll 
 work with them for them anything! " 
 
 Her enthusiasm had become watery even before thirteen 
 women resolutely removed their overshoes, sat down meatily, 
 ate peppermints, dusted their fingers, folded their hands, com- 
 posed their lower thoughts, and invited the naked muse of 
 poetry to deliver her most improving message. They had 
 greeted Carol affectionately, and she tried to be a daughter 
 to them. But she felt insecure. Her chair was out in the 
 open, exposed to their gaze, and it was a hard-slatted, quivery, 
 slippery church-parlor chair, likely to collapse publicly and 
 without warning. It was impossible to sit on it without folding 
 the hands and listening piously. 
 
 She wanted to kick the chair and run. It would make a 
 magnificent clatter. 
 
 She saw that Vida Sherwin was watching her. She pinched 
 her wrist, as though she were a noisy child in church, and 
 when she was decent and cramped again, she listened. 
 
 Mrs. Dawson opened the meeting by sighing, " I'm sure 
 I'm glad to see you all here today, and I understand that the 
 ladies have prepared a number of very interesting papers, this 
 is such an interesting subject, the poets, they have been an 
 inspiration for higher thought, in fact wasn't it Reverend Ben- 
 lick who said that some of the poets have been as much an 
 inspiration as a good many of the ministers, and so we shall 
 be glad to hear " 
 
 The poor lady smiled neuralgically, panted with fright, 
 scrabbled about the small oak table to find her eye-glasses, 
 and continued, " We will first have the pleasure of hearing 
 Mrs. Jenson on the subject ' Shakespeare and Milton.' " 
 
 Mrs. Ole Jenson said that Shakespeare was born in 1564 
 and died 1616. He lived in London, England, and in Stratford- 
 
126 MAIN STREET 
 
 on-Avon, which many American tourists loved to visit, a lovely 
 town with many curios and old houses well worth examination. 
 Many people believed that Shakespeare was the greatest play- 
 wright who ever lived, also a fine poet. Not much was known 
 about his life, but after all that did not really make so much 
 difference, because they loved to read his numerous plays, 
 several of the best known of which she would now criticize. 
 
 Perhaps the best known of his plays was " The Merchant of 
 Venice," having a beautiful love story and a fine appreciation 
 of a woman's brains, which a woman's club, even those who 
 did not care to commit themselves on the question of suffrage, 
 ought to appreciate. (Laughter.) Mrs. Jenson was sure that 
 she, for one, would love to be like Portia. The play was 
 about a Jew named Shylock, and he didn't want his daughter 
 to marry a Venice gentleman named Antonio 
 
 Mrs. Leonard Warren, a slender, gray, nervous woman, 
 president of the Thanatopsis and wife of the Congregational 
 pastor, reported the birth and death dates of Byron, Scott, 
 Moore, Burns; and wound up: 
 
 " Burns was quite a poor boy and he did not enjoy the 
 advantages we enjoy today, except for the advantages of the 
 fine old Scotch kirk where he heard the Word of God preached 
 more fearlessly than even in the finest big brick churches in 
 the big and so-called advanced cities of today, but he did not 
 have our educational advantages and Latin and the other 
 treasures of the mind so richly strewn before the, alas, too 
 ofttimes inattentive feet of our youth who do not always 
 sufficiently appreciate the privileges freely granted to every 
 American boy rich or poor. Burns had to work hard and was 
 sometimes led by evil companionship into low habits. But 
 it is morally instructive to know that he was a good student 
 and educated himself, in striking contrast to the loose ways 
 and so-called aristocratic society-life of Lord Byron, on which 
 I have just spoken. And certainly though the lords and earls 
 of his day may have looked down upon Burns as a humble 
 person, many of us have greatly enjoyed his pieces about the 
 mouse and other rustic subjects, with their message of humble 
 beauty I am so sorry I have not got the time to quote some 
 of them." 
 
 Mrs. George Edwin Mott gave ten minutes to Tennyson 
 and Browning. 
 
 Mrs. Nat Hicks, a wry-faced, curiously sweet woman, so 
 
MAIN STREET 127 
 
 awed by her betters that Carol wanted to kiss her, completed 
 the day's grim task by a paper on " Other Poets." The other 
 poets worthy of consideration were Coleridge, Wordsworth, 
 Shelley, Gray, Mrs. Hemans, and Kipling. 
 
 Miss Ella Stowbody obliged with a recital of " The Reces- 
 sional " and extracts from " Lalla Rookh." By request, she 
 gave " An Old Sweetheart of Mine " as encore. 
 
 Gopher Prairie had finished the poets. It was ready for 
 the next week's labor: English Fiction and Essays. 
 
 Mrs. Dawson besought, " Now we will have a discussion of 
 the papers, and I am sure we shall all enjoy hearing from one 
 who we hope to have as a new member, Mrs. Kennicott, who 
 with her splendid literary training and all should be able to 
 give us many pointers and many helpful pointers." 
 
 Carol had warned herself not to be so " beastly super- 
 cilious." She had insisted that in the belated quest of these 
 work-stained women was an aspiration which ought to stir her 
 tears. " But they're so self-satisfied. They think they're 
 doing Burns a favor. They don't believe they have a l belated 
 quest.' They're sure that they have culture salted and hung 
 up." It was out of this stupor of doubt that Mrs. Dawson's 
 summons roused her. She was in a panic. How could she 
 speak without hurting them? 
 
 Mrs. Champ Perry leaned over to stroke her hand and 
 whisper, " You look tired, dearie. Don't you talk unless you 
 want to." 
 
 Affection flooded Carol; she was on her feet, searching for 
 words and courtesies: 
 
 "The only thing in the way of suggestion I know 
 
 you are following a definite program, but I do wish that now 
 you've had such a splendid introduction, instead of going on 
 with some other subject next year you could return and take up 
 the poets more in detail. Especially actual quotations even 
 though their lives are so interesting and, as Mrs. Warren said, 
 so morally instructive. And perhaps there are several poets 
 not mentioned today whom it might be worth while considering 
 Keats, for instance, and Matthew Arnold and Rossetti and 
 Swinburne. Swinburne would be such a well, that is, such 
 a contrast to life as we all enjoy it in our beautiful Middle- 
 west " 
 
 She saw that Mrs. Leonard Warren was not with her. She 
 captured her by innocently continuing: 
 
128 MAIN STREET 
 
 " Unless perhaps Swinburne tends to be, uh, more outspoken 
 than you, than we really like. What do you think, Mrs. 
 Warren? 
 
 The pastor's wife decided, "Why, you've caught my very 
 thoughts, Mrs. Kennicott. Of course I have never read Swin- 
 burne, but years ago, when he was in vogue, I remember Mr. 
 Warren saying that Swinburne (or was it Oscar Wilde? but 
 anyway:) he said that though many so-called intellectual 
 people posed and pretended to find beauty in Swinburne, there 
 can never be genuine beauty without the message from the 
 heart. But at the same time I do think you have an excellent 
 idea, and though we have talked about Furnishings and China 
 as the probable subject for next year, I believe that it would 
 be nice if the program committee would try to work in another 
 day entirely devoted to English poetry! In fact, Madame 
 Chairman, I so move you." 
 
 When Mrs. Dawson's coffee and angePs-food had helped them 
 to recover from the depression caused by thoughts of Shake- 
 speare's death they all told Carol that it was a pleasure to 
 have her with them. The membership committee retired to 
 the sitting-room for three minutes and elected her a member. 
 
 And she stopped being patronizing. 
 
 She wanted to be one of them. They were so loyal and 
 kind. It was they who would carry out her aspiration. Her 
 campaign against village sloth was actually begun! On what 
 specific reform should she first loose her army? During the 
 gossip after the meeting Mrs. George Edwin Mott remarked 
 that the city hall seemed inadequate for the splendid modern 
 Gopher Prairie. Mrs. Nat Hicks timidly wished that the 
 young people could have free dances there the lodge dances 
 were so exclusive. The city hall. That was it! Carol hurried 
 home. 
 
 She had not realized that Gopher Prairie was a city. From 
 Kennicott she discovered that it was legally organized with a 
 mayor and city-council and wards. She was delighted by the 
 simplicity of voting one's self a metropolis. Why not? 
 
 She was a proud and patriotic citizen, all evening. 
 
 n 
 
 She examined the city hall, next morning. She had re- 
 membered it only as a bleak inconspicuousness. She found it 
 
MAIN STREET 129 
 
 a liver-colored frame coop half a block from Main Street. The 
 front was an unrelieved wall of clapboards and dirty windows. 
 It had an unobstructed view of a vacant lot and Nat Hicks's 
 tailor shop. It was larger than the carpenter shop beside it, 
 but not so well built. 
 
 No one was about. She walked into the corridor. On one 
 side was the municipal court, like a country school; on the 
 other, the room of the volunteer fire company, with a Ford 
 hose-cart and the ornamental helmets used in parades; at 
 the end of the hall, a filthy two-cell jail, now empty but smell- 
 ing of ammonia and ancient sweat. The whole second story 
 was a large unfinished room littered with piles of folding 
 chairs, a lime-crusted mortar-mixing box, and the skeletons of 
 Fourth of July floats covered with decomposing plaster shields 
 and faded red, white, and blue bunting. At the end was an 
 abortive stage. The room was large enough for the community 
 dances which Mrs. Nat Hicks advocated. But Carol was after 
 something bigger than dances. 
 
 In the afternoon she scampered to the public library. 
 
 The library was open three afternoons and four evenings a 
 week. It was housed in an old dwelling, sufficient but un- 
 attractive. Carol caught herself picturing pleasanter reading- 
 rooms, chairs for children, an art collection, a librarian young 
 enough to experiment. 
 
 She berated herself, " Stop this fever of reforming every- 
 thing! I will be satisfied with the library! The city hall is 
 enough for a beginning. And it's really an excellent library. 
 It's it isn't so bad. . . . Is it possible that I am to 
 find dishonesties and stupidity in every human activity I en- 
 counter? In schools and business and government and every- 
 thing? Is there never any contentment, never any rest? " 
 
 She shook her head as though she were shaking off water, 
 and hastened into the library, a young, light, amiable presence, 
 modest in unbuttoned fur coat, blue suit, fresh organdy collar, 
 and tan boots roughened from scuffling snow. Miss Villets 
 stared at her, and Carol purred, " I was so sorry not to see 
 you at the Thanatopsis yesterday. Vida said you might come." 
 
 " Oh. You went to the Thanatopsis. Did you enjoy it? " 
 
 " So much. Such good papers on the poets." Carol lied 
 resolutely. " But I did think they should have had you give 
 one of the papers on poetry! " 
 
 " Well Of course I'm not one of the bunch that seem to 
 
130 MAIN STREET 
 
 have the time to take and run the club, and if they prefer 
 to have papers on literature by other ladies who have no 
 literary training after all, why should I complain? What 
 am I but a city employee! " 
 
 " You're not! You're the one person that does that does 
 
 oh, you do so much. Tell me, is there, uh Who are the 
 
 people who control the club? " 
 
 Miss Villets emphatically stamped a date in the front of 
 " Frank on the Lower Mississippi " for a small flaxen boy, 
 glowered at him as though she were stamping a warning on 
 his brain, and sighed: 
 
 " I wouldn't put myself forward or criticize any one for the 
 world, and Vida is one of my best friends, and such a splendid 
 teacher, and there is no one in town more advanced and in- 
 terested in all movements, but I must say that no matter 
 who the president or the committees are, Vida Sherwin seems 
 to be behind them all the time, and though she is always 
 telling me about what she is pleased to call my ( fine work 
 in the library,' I notice that I'm not often called on for papers, 
 though Mrs. Lyman Cass once volunteered and told me that 
 she thought my paper on ' The Cathedrals of England ' was 
 the most interesting paper we had, the year we took up English 
 
 and French travel and architecture. But And of course 
 
 Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Warren are very important in the club, 
 as you might expect of the wives of the superintendent of 
 schools and the Congregational pastor, and indeed they are 
 both very cultured, but No, you may regard me as en- 
 tirely unimportant. I'm sure what I say doesn't matter a bit! " 
 
 " You're much too modest, and I'm going to tell Vida so, 
 and, uh, I wonder if you can give me just a teeny bit of your 
 time and show me where the magazine files are kept? " 
 
 She had won. She was profusely escorted to a room like a 
 grandmother's attic, where she discovered periodicals devoted 
 to house-decoration and town-planning, with a six-year file of 
 the National Geographic. Miss Villets blessedly left her alone. 
 Humming, fluttering pages with delighted fingers, Carol sat 
 cross-legged on the floor, the magazines in heaps about her. 
 
 She found pictures of New England streets: the dignity of 
 Falmouth, the charm of Concord, Stockbridge and Farmington 
 and Hillhouse Avenue. The fairy-t>ook suburb of Forest Hills 
 on Long Island. Devonshire cottages and Essex manors and 
 a Yorkshire High Street and Port Sunlight. The Arab village 
 
MAIN STREET 131 
 
 ef Djeddah an intricately chased jewel-box. A town in Cali- 
 fornia which had changed itself from the barren brick fronts 
 and slatternly frame sheds of a Main Street to a way which 
 led the eye down a vista of arcades and gardens. 
 
 Assured that she was not quite mad in her belief that a 
 small American town might be lovely, as well as useful in 
 buying wheat and selling plows, she sat brooding, her thin 
 fingers playing a tattoo on her cheeks. She saw in Gopher 
 Prairie a Georgian city hall: warm brick walls with white 
 shutters, a fanlight, a wide hall and curving stair. She saw it 
 the common home and inspiration not only of the town but 
 of the country about. It should contain the court-room (she 
 couldn't get herself to put in a jail), public library, a collection 
 of excellent prints, rest-room and model kitchen for farmwives, 
 theater, lecture room, free community ballroom, farm-bureau, 
 gymnasium. Forming about it and influenced by it, as 
 mediaeval villages gathered about the castle, she saw a new 
 Georgian town as graceful and beloved as Annapolis or that 
 bowery Alexandria to which Washington rode. 
 
 All this the Thanatopsis Club was to accomplish with no 
 difficulty whatever, since its several husbands were the con- 
 trollers of business and politics. She was proud of herself for 
 this practical view. 
 
 She had taken only half an hour to change a wire-fenced 
 potato-plot into a walled rose-garden. She hurried out to ap- 
 prize Mrs. Leonard Warren, as president of the Thanatopsis, 
 of the miracle which had been worked. 
 
 m 
 
 At a quarter to three Carol had left home; at half-past four 
 she had created the Georgian town; at a quarter to five she 
 was in the dignified poverty of the Congregational parsonage, 
 her enthusiasm pattering upon Mrs. Leonard Warren like sum- 
 mer rain upon an old gray roof; at two minutes to five a town 
 of demure courtyards and welcoming dormer windows had 
 been erected; and at two minutes past five the entire town 
 was as flat as Babylon. 
 
 Erect in a black William and Mary chair against gray and 
 speckly-brown volumes of sermons and Biblical commentaries 
 and Palestine geographies upon long pine shelves, her neat 
 black shoes firm on a rag-rug, herself as correct and low-toned 
 
132 MAIN STREET 
 
 as her background, Mrs. Warren listened without comment till 
 Carol was quite through, then answered delicately: 
 
 " Yes, I think you draw a very nice picture of what might 
 easily come to pass some day. I have no doubt that such 
 villages will be found on the prairie some day. But if I might 
 make just the least little criticism: it seems to me that you 
 are wrong in supposing either that the city hall would be the 
 proper start, or that the Thanatopsis would be the right in- 
 strument. After all, it's the churches, isn't it, that are the 
 real heart of the community. As you may possibly know, my 
 husband is prominent in Congregational circles all through the 
 state for his advocacy of church-union. He hopes to see all 
 the evangelical denominations joined in one strong body, op- 
 posing Catholicism and Christian Science, and properly guiding 
 all movements that make for morality and prohibition. Here, 
 the combined churches could afford a splendid club-house, 
 maybe a stucco and half-timber building with gargoyles and 
 all sorts of pleasing decorations on it, which, it seems to me, 
 would be lots better to impress the ordinary class of people 
 than just a plain old-fashioned colonial house, such as you 
 describe. And that would be the proper center for all educa- 
 tional and pleasurable activities, instead of letting them fall 
 into the hands of the politicians." 
 
 " I don't suppose it will take more than thirty or forty 
 years for the churches to get together? " Carol said inno- 
 cently. 
 
 " Hardly that long even; things are moving so rapidly. So 
 it would be a mistake to make any other plans." 
 
 Carol did not recover her zeal till two days after, when she 
 tried Mrs. George Edwin Mott, wife of the superintendent of 
 schools. 
 
 Mrs. Mott commented, " Personally, I am terribly busy with 
 dressmaking and having the seamstress in the house and all, 
 but it would be splendid to have the other members of the 
 Thanatopsis take up the question. Except for one thing: First 
 and foremost, we must have a new schoolbuilding. Mr. Mott 
 says they are terribly cramped." 
 
 Carol went to view the old building. The grades and the 
 high school were combined in a damp yellow-brick structure 
 with the narrow windows of an antiquated jail a hulk which 
 expressed hatred and compulsory training. She conceded Mrs. 
 Mott's demand so violently that for two days she dropped her 
 
MAIN STREET 133 
 
 own campaign. Then she built the school and city hall to- 
 gether, as the center of the reborn town. 
 
 She ventured to the lead-colored dwelling of Mrs. Dave Dyer. 
 Behind the mask of winter-stripped vines and a wide porch 
 only a foot above the ground, the cottage was so impersonal 
 that Carol could never visualize it. Nor could she remember 
 anything that was inside it. But Mrs. Dyer was personal 
 enough. With Carol, Mrs. Rowland, Mrs. McGanum, and 
 Vida Sherwin she was a link between the Jolly Seventeen and 
 the serious Thanatopsis (in contrast to Juanita Hay dock, who 
 unnecessarily boasted of being a " lowbrow " and publicly 
 stated that she would "see herself in jail before she'd write 
 any darned old club papers "). Mrs. Dyer was superfeminine 
 in the kimono in which she received Carol. Her skin was fine, 
 pale, soft, suggesting a weak voluptuousness. At afternoon- 
 coffees she had been rude but now she addressed Carol as 
 " dear," and insisted on being called Maud. Carol did not 
 quite know why she was uncomfortable in this talcum-powder 
 atmosphere, but she hastened to get into the fresh air of her 
 plans. 
 
 Maud Dyer granted that the city hall wasn't " so very nice," 
 yet, as Dave said, there was no use doing anything about it 
 till they received an appropriation from the state and com- 
 bined a new city hall with a national guard armory. Dave 
 had given verdict, " What these mouthy youngsters that hang 
 around the pool-room need is universal military training. Make 
 men of 'em." 
 
 Mrs. Dyer removed the new schoolbuilding from the city 
 hall: 
 
 " Oh, so Mrs. Mott has got you going on her school craze! 
 She's been dinging at that till everybody's sick and tired. What 
 she really wants is a big office for her dear bald-headed Gawge 
 to sit around and look important in. Of course I admire 
 Mrs. Mott, and I'm very fond of her, she's so brainy, even 
 if she does try to butt in and run the Thanatopsis, but I must 
 say we're sick of her nagging. The old building was good 
 enough for us when we were kids! I hate these would-be 
 women politicians, don't you? " 
 
134 MAIN STREET 
 
 rv 
 
 The first week of March had given promise of spring and 
 stirred Carol with a thousand desires for lakes and fields and 
 roads. The snow was gone except for filthy woolly patches 
 under trees; the thermometer leaped in a day from wind-bitten 
 chill to itchy warmth. As soon as Carol was convinced that 
 even in this imprisoned North, spring could exist again, the 
 snow came down as abruptly as a paper storm in a theater; 
 the northwest gale flung it up in a half-blizzard; and with 
 her hope of a glorified town went hope of summer meadows. 
 
 But a week later, though the snow was everywhere in slushy 
 heaps, the promise was unmistakable. By the invisible hints 
 in air and sky and earth which had aroused her every year 
 through ten thousand generations she knew that spring was 
 coming. It was not a scorching, hard, dusty day like the 
 treacherous intruder of a week before, but soaked with languor, 
 softened with a milky light. Rivulets were hurrying in each 
 alley; a calling robin appeared by magic on the crab-apple 
 tree in the Rowlands' yard. Everybody chuckled, " Looks 
 like winter is going," and " This '11 bring the frost out of the 
 roads have the autos out pretty soon now wonder what kind 
 of bass-fishing we'll get this summer ought to be good crops 
 this year." 
 
 Each evening Kennicott repeated, "We better not take off 
 our Heavy Underwear or the storm windows too soon might 
 be 'nother spell of cold got to be careful 'bout catching cold 
 wonder if the coal will last through? " 
 
 The expanding forces of life within her choked the desire 
 for reforming. She trotted through the house, planning the 
 spring cleaning with Bea. When she attended her second 
 meeting of the Thanatopsis she said nothing about remaking 
 the town. She listened respectably to statistics on Dickens, 
 Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Scott, Hardy, Lamb, 
 De Quincey, a nd Mrs. Humphry Ward, who, it seemed, con- 
 stituted the writers of English Fiction and Essays. 
 
 Not till she inspected the rest-room did she again become 
 a fanatic. She had often glanced at the store-building which 
 had been turned into a refuge in which farmwives could wait 
 while their husbands transacted business. She had heard Vida 
 Sherwin and Mrs. Warren caress the virtue of the Thanatopsis 
 in establishing the rest-room and in sharing with the city 
 
MAIN STREET 135 
 
 council the expense of maintaining it. But she had never en- 
 tered it till this March day. 
 
 She went in impulsively; nodded at the matron, a plump 
 worthy widow named Nodelquist, and at a couple of farm- 
 women who were meekly rocking. The rest-room resembled 
 a second-hand store. It was furnished with discarded patent 
 rockers, lopsided reed chairs, a scratched pine table, a gritty 
 straw mat, old steel engravings of milkmaids being morally 
 amorous under willow-trees, faded chromes of roses and fish, 
 and a kerosene stove for warming lunches. The front window 
 was darkened by torn net curtains and by a mound of geran- 
 iums and rubber-plants. 
 
 While she was listening to Mrs. Nodelquist's account of how 
 many thousands of farmers' wives used the rest-room every 
 year, and how much they " appreciated the kindness of the 
 ladies in providing them with this lovely place, and all free," 
 she thought, " Kindness nothing! The kind-ladies' husbands 
 get the farmers' trade. This is mere commercial accommoda- 
 tion. And it's horrible. It ought to be the most charming 
 room in town, to comfort women sick of prairie kitchens. 
 Certainly it ought to have a clear window, so that they can 
 see the metropolitan life go by. Some day I'm going to make 
 a better rest-room a club-room. Why! I've already planned 
 that as part of my Georgian town hall! " 
 
 So it chanced that she was plotting against the peace of the 
 Thanatopsis at her third meeting (which covered Scandinavian, 
 Russian, and Polish Literature, with remarks by Mrs. Leonard 
 Warren on the sinful paganism of the Russian so-called 
 church). Even before the entrance of the coffee and hot rolls 
 Carol seized on Mrs. Champ Perry, the kind and ample- 
 bosomed pioneer woman who gave historic dignity to the 
 modern matrons of the Thanatopsis. She poured out her 
 plans. Mrs. Perry nodded and stroked Carol's hand, but at 
 the end she sighed: 
 
 " I wish I could agree with you, dearie. I'm sure you're 
 one of the Lord's anointed (even if we don't see you at the 
 Baptist Church as often as we'd like to)! But I'm afraid 
 you're too tender-hearted. When Champ and I came here 
 we teamed-it with an ox-cart from Sauk Centre to Gopher 
 Prairie, and there was nothing here then but a stockade and 
 a few soldiers and some log cabins. When we wanted salt pork 
 and gunpowder, we sent out a man on horseback, and probably . 
 
I 3 6 MAIN STREET 
 
 he was shot dead by the Injuns before he got back. We 
 ladies of course we were all farmers at first we didn't expect 
 any rest-room in those days. My, we'd have thought the one 
 they have now was simply elegant! My house was roofed 
 with hay and it leaked something terrible when it rained 
 only dry place was under a shelf. 
 
 " And when the town grew up we thought the new city 
 hall was real fine. And I don't see any need for dance-halls. 
 Dancing isn't what it was, anyway. We used to dance modest, 
 and we had just as much fun as all these young folks do 
 now with their terrible Turkey Trots and hugging and all. 
 But if they must neglect the Lord's injunction that young girls 
 ought to be modest, then I guess they manage pretty well at 
 the K. P. Hall and the Oddfellows', even if some of the lodges 
 don't always welcome a lot of these foreigners and hired 
 help to all their dances. And I certainly don't see any 
 need of a farm-bureau or this domestic science demonstration 
 you talk about. In my day the boys learned to farm by honest 
 sweating, and every gal could cook, or her ma learned her 
 how across her knee! Besides, ain't there a county agent at 
 Wakamin? He comes here once a fortnight, maybe. That's 
 enough monkeying with this scientific farming Champ says 
 there's nothing to it anyway. 
 
 "And as for a lecture hall haven't we got the churches? 
 Good deal better to listen to a good old-fashioned sermon than 
 a lot of geography and books and things that nobody needs 
 to know more 'n enough heathen learning right here in the 
 Thanatopsis. And as for trying to make a whole town in this 
 
 Colonial architecture you talk about I do love nice things ; 
 
 to this day I run ribbons into my petticoats, even if Champ 
 Perry does laugh at me, the old villain! But just the same 
 I don't believe any of us old-timers would like to see the town 
 that we worked so hard to build being tore down to make a 
 place that wouldn't look like nothing but some Dutch story- 
 book and not a bit like the place we loved. And don't you think 
 it's sweet now? All the trees and lawns? And such comfy 
 houses, and hot-water heat and electric lights and telephones 
 and cement walks and everything? Why, I thought every- 
 body from the Twin Cities always said it was such a beautiful 
 town! " 
 
 Carol forswore herself; declared that Gopher Prairie had 
 the color of Algiers and the gaiety of Mardi Gras. 
 
MAIN STREET 137 
 
 Yet the next afternoon she was pouncing on Mrs. Lyman 
 Cass, the hook-nosed consort of the owner of the flour-mill. 
 
 Mrs. Cass's parlor belonged to the crammed- Victorian school, 
 as Mrs. Luke Dawson's belonged to the bare- Victorian. It was 
 furnished on two principles: First, everything must resemble 
 something else. A rocker had a back like a lyre, a near-leather 
 seat imitating tufted cloth, and arms like Scotch Presbyterian 
 lions; with knobs, scrolls, shields, and spear-points on un- 
 expected portions of the chair. The second principle of the 
 crammed- Victorian school was that every inch of the interior 
 must be filled with useless objects. 
 
 The walls of Mrs. Cass's parlor were plastered with " hand- 
 painted " pictures, " buckeye " pictures, of birch-trees, news- 
 boys, puppies, and church-steeples on Christmas Eve; with a 
 plaque depicting the Exposition Building in Minneapolis, burnt- 
 wood portraits of Indian chiefs of no tribe in particular, a 
 pansy-decked poetic motto, a Yard of Roses, and the banners of 
 the educational institutions attended by the Casses' two sons 
 Chicopee Falls Business College and McGillicuddy University. 
 One small square table contained a card-receiver of painted 
 china with a rim of wrought and gilded lead, a Family Bible, 
 Grant's Memoirs, the latest novel by Mrs. Gene Stratton 
 Porter, a wooden model of a Swiss chalet which was also a bank 
 for dimes, a polished abalone shell holding one black-headed 
 pin and one empty spool, a velvet pin-cushion in a gilded 
 metal slipper with " Souvenir of Troy, N. Y." stamped on the 
 toe, and an unexplained red glass dish which had warts. 
 
 Mrs. Cass's first remark was, " I must show you all my 
 pretty things and art objects." 
 
 She piped, after Carol's appeal: 
 
 " I see. You think the New England villages and Colonial 
 houses are so much more cunning than these Middlewestern 
 towns. I'm glad you feel that way. You'll be interested to 
 know I was born in Vermont." 
 
 "And don't you think we ought to try to make Gopher 
 Prai 
 
 " My gracious no! We can't afford it. Taxes are much too 
 high as it is. We ought to retrench, and not let the city council 
 
 spend another cent. Uh Don't you think that was a grand 
 
 paper Mrs. Westlake read about Tolstoy? I was so glad 
 she pointed out how all his silly socialistic ideas failed." 
 
 What Mrs. Cass said was what Kennicott said, that evening. 
 
138 MAIN STREET 
 
 Not in twenty years would the council propose or Gopher 
 Prairie vote the funds for a new city hall. 
 
 Carol had avoided exposing her plans to Vida Sherwin. She 
 was shy of the big-sister manner; Vida would either laugh 
 at her or snatch the idea and change it to suit herself. But 
 there was no other hope. When Vida came in to tea Carol 
 sketched her Utopia. 
 
 Vida was soothing but decisive: 
 
 " My dear, you're all off. I would like to see it: a real 
 gardeny place to shut out the gales. But it can't be done. 
 What could the clubwomen accomplish? " 
 
 " Their husbands are the most important men in town. 
 They are the town! " 
 
 " But the town as a separate unit is not the husband of the 
 Thanatopsis. If you knew the trouble we had in getting the 
 city council to spend the money and cover the pumping-station 
 with vines! Whatever you may think of Gopher Prairie 
 women, they're twice as progressive as the men." 
 
 " But can't the men see the ugliness? " 
 
 " They don't think it's ugly. And how can you prove it? 
 Hatter of taste. Why should they like what a Boston architect 
 likes? " 
 
 " What they like is to sell prunes! " 
 
 " Well, why not? Anyway, the point is that you have to 
 work from the inside, with what we have, rather than from 
 the outside, with foreign ideas. The shell ought not to be 
 forced on the spirit. It can't be! The bright shell has to 
 grow out of the spirit, and express it. That means waiting. 
 If we keep after the city council for another ten years they may 
 vote the bonds for a new school." 
 
 " I refuse to believe that if they saw it the big men would 
 be too tight-fisted to spend a few dollars each for a building 
 think! dancing and lectures and plays, all done co-opera- 
 tively! " 
 
 " You mention the word ' co-operative ' to the merchants and 
 they'll lynch you! The one thing they fear more than mail- 
 order houses is that farmers' co-operative movements may get 
 started." 
 
 " The secret trails that lead to scared pocket-books"! Always, 
 
MAIN STREET 
 
 in everything! And I don't have any of the fine melodrama 
 of fiction: the dictagraphs and speeches by torchlight. I'm 
 merely blocked by stupidity. Oh, I know I'm a fool. I dream 
 of Venice, and I live in Archangel and scold because the 
 Northern seas aren't tender-colored. But at least they sha'n't 
 
 keep me from loving Venice, and sometime I'll run away 
 
 All right. No more." 
 She flung out her hands in a gesture of renunciation. 
 
 VI 
 
 Early May; wheat springing up in blades like grass; corn 
 and potatoes being planted ; the land humming. For two days 
 there had been steady rain. Even in town the roads were a 
 furrowed welter of mud, hideous to view and difficult to cross. 
 Main Street was a black swamp from curb to curb ; on residence 
 streets the grass parking beside the walks oozed gray water. 
 It was prickly hot, yet the town was barren under the bleak 
 sky. Softened neither by snow nor by waving boughs the 
 houses squatted and scowled, revealed in their unkempt harsh- 
 ness. 
 
 As she dragged homeward Carol looked with distaste at her 
 clay-loaded rubbers, the smeared hem of her skirt. She passed 
 Lyman Cass's pinnacled, dark-red, hulking house. She waded 
 a streaky yellow pool. This morass was not her home, she 
 insisted. Her home, and her beautiful town, existed in her 
 mind. They had already been created. The task was done. 
 What she really had been questing was some one to share them 
 with her. Vida would not; Kennicott could not. 
 
 Some one to share her refuge. 
 
 Suddenly she was thinking of Guy Pollock. 
 
 She dismissed him. He was too cautious. She needed a 
 spirit as young and unreasonable as her own. And she would 
 never find it. Youth would never come singing. She was 
 beaten. 
 
 Yet that same evening she had an idea which solved the 
 rebuilding of Gopher Prairie. 
 
 Within ten minutes she was jerking the old-fashioned bell- 
 pull of Luke Dawson. Mrs. Dawson opened the door and 
 peered doubtfully about the edge of it. Carol kissed her 
 cheek, and frisked into the lugubrious sitting-room. 
 
 "Well, well, you're a sight for sore eyes! " chuckled Mr. 
 
140 MAIN STREET 
 
 Dawson, dropping his newspaper, pushing his spectacles back 
 on his forehead. 
 
 " You seem so excited," sighed Mrs. Dawson. 
 
 "I am! Mr. Dawson, aren't you a millionaire? " 
 
 He cocked his head, and purred, " Well, I guess if I cashed 
 in on all my securities and farm-holdings and my interests in 
 iron on the Mesaba and in Northern timber and cut-over lands, 
 I could push two million dollars pretty close, and I've made 
 every cent of it by hard work and having the sense to not go 
 out and spend every " 
 
 " I think I want most of it from you! " 
 
 The Dawsons glanced at each other in appreciation of the 
 jest; and he chirped, "You're worse than Reverend Benlick! 
 He don't hardly ever strike me for more than ten dollars 
 at a time! " 
 
 " I'm not joking. I mean it! Your children in the Cities are 
 grown-up and well-to-do. You don't want to die and leave 
 your name unknown. Why not do a big, original thing? Why 
 not rebuild the whole town? Get a great architect, and have 
 him plan a town that would be suitable to the prairie. Perhaps 
 he'd create some entirely new form of architecture. Then tear 
 down all these shambling buildings " 
 
 Mr. Dawson had decided that she really did mean it. He 
 wailed, " Why, that would cost at least three or four million 
 dollars! " 
 
 " But you alone, just one man, have two of those millions! " 
 
 " Me? Spend all my hard-earned cash on building houses 
 for a lot of shiftless beggars that never had the sense to save 
 their money? Not that I've ever been mean. Mama could 
 always have a hired girl to do the work when we could find 
 one. But her and I have worked our fingers to the bone and 
 spend it on a lot of these rascals ? " 
 
 " Please! Don't be angry! I just mean I mean Oh, 
 
 not spend all of it, of course, but if you led off the list, and 
 the others came in, and if they heard you talk about a more 
 attractive town " 
 
 "Why now, child, youVe got a lot of notions. Besides, 
 what's the matter with the town? Looks good to me. I've 
 had people that have traveled all over the world tell me time 
 and again that Gopher Prairie is the prettiest place in the 
 Middlewest. Good enough for anybody. Certainly good 
 enough for Mama and me. Besides! Mama and me are plan- 
 
MAIN STREET 141 
 
 ning to go out to Pasadena and buy a bungalow and live 
 there." 
 
 VII 
 
 She had met Miles Bjornstam on the street. For the second 
 of welcome encounter this workman with the bandit mustache 
 and the muddy overalls seemed nearer than any one else to 
 the credulous youth which she was seeking to fight beside her, 
 and she told him, as a cheerful anecdote, a little of her story. 
 
 He grunted, " I never thought I'd be agreeing with Old Man 
 Dawson, the penny-pinching old land-thief and a fine briber 
 he is, too. But you got the wrong slant. You aren't one of 
 the people yet. You want to do something for the town. I 
 don't! I want the town to do something for itself. We don't 
 want old Dawson's money not if it's a gift, with a string. 
 We'll take it away from him, because it belongs to us. You 
 got to get more iron and cussedness into you. Come join us 
 cheerful bums, and some day when we educate ourselves and 
 quit being bums we'll take things and run 'em straight." 
 
 He had changed from her friend to a cynical man in over- 
 alls. She could not relish the autocracy of " cheerful bums." 
 
 She forgot him as she tramped the outskirts of town. 
 
 She had replaced the city hall project by an entirely new 
 and highly exhilarating thought of how little was done for 
 these unpicturesque poor. 
 
 vm 
 
 The spring of the plains is not a reluctant virgin but brazen 
 and soon away. The mud roads of a few days ago are powdery 
 dust and the puddles beside them have hardened into lozenges 
 of black sleek earth like cracked patent leather. 
 
 Carol was panting as she crept to the meeting of the Thana- 
 topsis program committee which was to decide the subject for 
 next fall and winter. 
 
 Madam Chairman (Miss Ella Stowbody in an oyster- 
 colered blouse) asked if there was any new business. 
 
 Carol rose. She suggested that the Thanatopsis ought to 
 help the poor of the town. She was ever so correct and modern. 
 She did not, she said, want charity for them, but a chance of 
 self-help; an employment bureau, direction in washing babies 
 
i 4 2 MAIN STREET 
 
 and making pleasing stews, possibly a municipal fund for home- 
 building. " What do you think of my plans, Mrs. Warren? " 
 she concluded. 
 
 Speaking judiciously, as one related to the church by mar- 
 riage, Mrs. Warren gave verdict: 
 
 " I'm sure we're all heartily in accord with Mrs. Kennicott 
 in feeling that wherever genuine poverty is encountered, it is 
 not only noblesse oblige but a joy to fulfil our duty to the less 
 fortunate ones. But I must say it seems to me we should 
 lose the whole point of the thing by not regarding it as charity. 
 Why, that's the chief adornment of the true Christian and the 
 church! The Bible has laid it down for our guidance. ' Faith, 
 Hope, and Charity, 9 it says, and, ' The poor ye have with ye 
 always,' which indicates that there never can be anything to 
 these so-called scientific schemes for abolishing charity, never! 
 And isn't it better so? I should hate to think of a world in 
 which we were deprived of all the pleasure of giving. Besides, 
 if these shiftless folks realize they're getting charity, and not 
 something to which they have a right, they're so much more 
 grateful." 
 
 " Besides," snorted Miss Ella Stowbody, " they've been fool- 
 ing you, Mrs. Kennicott. There isn't any real poverty here. 
 Take that Mrs. Steinhof you speak of: I send her our washing 
 whenever there's too much for our hired girl I must have 
 sent her ten dollars' worth the past year alone! I'm sure Papa 
 would never approve of a city home-building fund. Papa says 
 these folks are fakers. Especially all these tenant farmers 
 that pretend they have so much trouble getting seed and ma- 
 chinery. Papa says they simply won't pay their debts. He 
 says he's sure he hates to foreclose mortgages, but it's the only 
 way to make them respect the law." 
 
 " And then think of all the clothes we give these people! " 
 said Mrs. Jackson Elder. 
 
 Carol intruded again. " Oh yes. The clothes. I was going 
 to speak of that. Don't you think that when we give clothes 
 to the poor, if we do give them old ones, we ought to mend 
 them first and make them as presentable as we can? Next 
 Christmas when the Thanatopsis makes its distribution, 
 wouldn't it be jolly if we got together and sewed on the clothes, 
 and trimmed hats, and made them " 
 
 " Heavens and earth, they have more time than we have ! 
 They ought to be mighty good and grateful to get anything, 
 
MAIN STREET 143 
 
 no matter what shape it's in. I know I'm not going to sit 
 and sew for that lazy Mrs. Vopni, with all I've got to do! " 
 snapped Ella Stowbody. 
 
 They were glaring at Carol. She reflected that Mrs. Vopni, 
 whose husband had been killed by a train, had ten children. 
 
 But Mrs. Mary Ellen Wilks was smiling. Mrs. Wilks was 
 the proprietor of Ye Art Shoppe and Magazine and Book Store, 
 and the reader of the small Christian Science church. She 
 made it all clear: 
 
 " If this class of people had an understanding of Science and 
 that we are the children of God and nothing can harm us, 
 they wouldn't be in error and poverty." 
 
 Mrs. Jackson Elder confirmed, " Besides, it strikes me the 
 club is already doing enough, with tree-planting and the anti- 
 fly campaign and the responsibility for the rest-room to say 
 nothing of the fact that we've talked of trying to get the 
 railroad to put in a park at the station! " 
 
 " I think so too! " said Madam Chairman. She glanced 
 uneasily at Miss Sherwin. " But what do you think, Vida? " 
 
 Vida smiled tactfully at each of the committee, and an- 
 nounced, "Well, I don't believe we'd better start anything 
 more right now. But it's been a privilege to hear Carol's dear 
 generous ideas, hasn't it! Oh! There is one thing we must 
 decide on at once. We must get together and oppose any move 
 on the part of the Minneapolis clubs to elect another State 
 Federation president from the Twin Cities. And this Mrs. 
 Edgar Potbury they're putting forward I know there are 
 people who think she's a bright interesting speaker, but I 
 regard her as very shallow. What do you say to my writing 
 to the Lake Ojibawasha Club, telling them that if their district 
 will support Mrs. Warren for second vice-president, we'll sup- 
 port their Mrs. Hagelton (and such a dear, lovely, cultivated 
 woman, too) for president." 
 
 "Yes! We ought to show up those Minneapolis folks! " 
 Ella Stowbody said acidly. " And oh, by the way, we must 
 oppose this movement of Mrs. Potbury's to have the state clubs 
 come out definitely in favor of woman suffrage. Women 
 haven't any place in politics. They would lose all their dainti- 
 ness and charm if they became involved in these horried plots 
 and log-rolling and all this awful political stuff about scandal 
 and personalities and so on." 
 
 All save one nodded. They interrupted the formal 
 
144 MAIN STREET 
 
 business-meeting to discuss Mrs. Edgar Potbury's husband, 
 Mrs. Potbury's income, Mrs. Potbury's sedan, Mrs. Potbury's 
 residence, Mrs. Potbury's oratorical style, Mrs. Potbury's man- 
 darin evening coat, Mrs. Potbury's coiffure, and Mrs. Potbury's 
 altogether reprehensible influence on the State Federation of 
 Women's Clubs. 
 
 Before the program committee adjourned they took three 
 minutes to decide which of the subjects suggested by the 
 magazine Culture Hints, Furnishings and China, or The Bible 
 as Literature, would be better for the coming year. There 
 was one annoying incident. Mrs. Dr. Kennicott interfered 
 and showed off again. She commented, " Don't you think 
 that we already get enough of the Bible in our churches and 
 Sunday Schools? " 
 
 Mrs. Leonard Warren, somewhat out of order but much 
 more out of temper, cried, "Well upon my word! I didn't 
 suppose there was any one who felt that we could get enough 
 of the Bible! I guess if the Grand Old Book has withstood 
 the attacks of infidels for these two thousand years it is worth 
 our slight consideration! " 
 
 " Oh, I didn't mean " Carol begged. Inasmuch as she 
 
 did mean, it was hard to be extremely lucid. " But I wish, 
 instead of limiting ourselves either to the Bible, or to anecdotes 
 about the Brothers Adam's wigs, which Culture Hints seems 
 to regard as the significant point about furniture, we could 
 study some of the really stirring ideas that are springing up 
 today whether it's chemistry or anthropology or labor prob- 
 lems the things that are going to mean so terribly much." 
 
 Everybody cleared her polite throat. 
 
 Madam Chairman inquired, " Is there any other discussion? 
 Will some one make a motion to adopt the suggestion of Vida 
 Sherwin to take up Furnishings and China? " 
 
 It was adopted, unanimously. 
 
 " Checkmate! " murmured Carol, as she held up her hand. 
 
 Had she actually believed that she could plant a seed of 
 liberalism in the blank wall of mediocrity? How had she 
 fallen into the folly of trying to plant anything whatever in a 
 wall so smooth and sun-glazed, and so satisfying to the happy 
 sleepers within? 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 ONE week of authentic spring, one rare sweet week of May, 
 one tranquil moment between the blast of winter and the charge 
 of summer. Daily Carol walked from town into flashing 
 country hysteric with new life. 
 
 One enchanted hour when she returned to youth and a 
 belief in the possibility of beauty. 
 
 She had walked northward toward the upper shore of Plover 
 Lake, taking to the railroad track, whose directness and dry- 
 ness make it the natural highway for pedestrians on the 
 plains. She stepped from tie to tie, in long strides. At each 
 road-crossing she had to crawl over a cattle-guard of sharpened 
 timbers. She walked the rails, balancing with arms extended, 
 cautious heel before toe. As she lost balance her body bent 
 over, her arms revolved wildly, and when she toppled she 
 laughed aloud. 
 
 The thick grass beside the track, coarse and prickly with 
 many burnings, hid canary-yellow buttercups and the mauve 
 petals and woolly sage-green coats of the pasque flowers. The 
 branches of the kinnikinic brush were red and smooth as 
 lacquer on a saki bowl. 
 
 She ran down the gravelly embankment, smiled at children 
 gathering flowers in a little basket, thrust a handful of the 
 soft pasque flowers into the bosom of her white blouse. Fields 
 of springing wheat drew her from the straight propriety of the 
 railroad and she crawled through the rusty barbed-wire fence. 
 She followed a furrow between low wheat blades and a field of 
 rye which showed silver lights as it flowed before the wind. 
 She found a pasture by the lake. So sprinkled was the pasture 
 with rag-baby blossoms and the cottony herb of Indian tobacco 
 that it spread out like a rare old Persian carpet of cream 
 and rose and delicate green. Under her feet the rough grass 
 made a pleasant crunching. Sweet winds blew from the sunny 
 lake beside her, and small waves sputtered on the meadowy 
 shore. She leaped a tiny creek bowered in pussy-willow buds. 
 
 i45 
 
146 MAIN STREET 
 
 She was nearing a frivolous grove of birch and poplar and 
 wild plum trees. 
 
 The poplar foliage had the downiness of a Corot arbor; 
 the green and silver trunks were as candid as the birches, as 
 slender and lustrous as the limbs of a Pierrot. The cloudy 
 white blossoms of the plum trees filled the grove with a 
 springtime mistiness which gave an illusion of distance. 
 
 She ran into the wood, crying out for joy of freedom regained 
 after winter. Choke-cherry blossoms lured her from the outer 
 sun-warmed spaces to depths of green stillness, where a sub- 
 marine light came through the young leaves. She walked 
 pensively along an abandoned road. She found a moccasin- 
 flower beside a lichen-covered log. At the end of the road 
 she saw the open acres dipping rolling fields bright with 
 wheat. 
 
 " I believe! The woodland gods still live! And out there, 
 the great land. It's beautiful as the mountains. What do 
 I care for Thanatopsises? " 
 
 She came out on the prairie, spacious under an arch of boldly 
 cut clouds. Small pools glittered. Above a marsh red-winged 
 blackbirds chased a crow in a swift melodrama of the air. 
 On a hill was silhouetted a man following a drag. His horse 
 bent its neck and plodded, content. 
 
 A path took her to the Corinth road, leading back to town. 
 Dandelions glowed in patches amidst the wild grass by the 
 way. A stream golloped through a concrete culvert beneath 
 the road. She trudged in healthy weariness. 
 
 A man in a bumping Ford rattled up beside her, hailed, 
 " Give you a lift, Mrs. Kennicott? " 
 
 " Thank you. It's awfully good of you, but I'm enjoying the 
 walk." 
 
 " Great day, by golly. I seen some wheat that must of 
 been five inches high. Well, so long." 
 
 She hadn't the dimmest notion who he was, but his greeting 
 warmed her. This countryman gave her a companionship 
 which she had never (whether by her fault or theirs or neither) 
 been able to find in the matrons and commercial lords of the 
 town. 
 
 Half a mile from town, in a hollow between hazelnut bushes 
 and a brook, she discovered a gipsy encampment: a covered 
 wagon, a ' tent, a bunch of pegged-out horses. A broad- 
 shouldered man was squatted on his heels, holding a frying- 
 
MAIN STREET 147 
 
 pan over a camp-fire. He looked toward her. He was Miles 
 Bjornstam. 
 
 " Well, well, what you doing out here? " he roared. " Come 
 have a hunk o' bacon. Pete! Hey, Pete! " 
 
 A tousled person came from behind the covered wagon. 
 
 " Pete, here's the one honest-to-God lady in my bum town. 
 Come on, crawl in and set a couple minutes, Mrs. Kennicott. 
 I'm hiking off for all summer." 
 
 The Red Swede staggered up, rubbed his cramped knees, 
 lumbered to the wire fence, held the strands apart for her. 
 She unconsciously smiled at him as she went through. Her 
 skirt caught on a barb; he carefully freed it. 
 
 Beside this man in blue flannel shirt, baggy khaki trousers, 
 uneven suspenders, and vile felt hat, she was small and 
 exquisite. 
 
 The surly Pete set out an upturned bucket for her. She 
 lounged on it, her elbows on her knees. "Where are you 
 going? " she asked. 
 
 "Just starting off for the summer, horse-trading." Bjorn- 
 stam chuckled. His red mustache caught the sun. " Regular 
 hoboes and public benefactors we are. Take a hike like this 
 every once in a while. Sharks on horses. Buy 'em from 
 farmers and sell 'em to others. We're honest frequently. 
 Great time. Camp along the road. I was wishing I had a 
 
 chance to say good-by to you before I ducked out but 
 
 Say, you better come along with us." 
 
 "I'd like to." 
 
 " While you're playing mumblety-peg with Mrs. Lym Cass, 
 Pete and me will be rambling across Dakota, through the 
 Bad Lands, into the butte country, and when fall comes, 
 we'll be crossing over a pass of tie Big Horn Mountains, 
 maybe, and camp in a snow-storm, quarter of a mile right 
 straight up above a lake. Then in the morning we'll lie snug 
 in our blankets and look up through the pines at an eagle. 
 How'd it strike you? Heh? Eagle soaring and soaring all 
 day big wide sky " 
 
 " Don't! Or I will go with you, and I'm afraid there might 
 be some slight scandal. Perhaps some day I'll do it. Good-by." 
 
 Her hand disappeared in his blackened leather glove. From 
 the turn in the road she waved at him. She walked on more 
 soberly now, and she was lonely. 
 
 But the wheat and grass were sleek velvet under the sun- 
 
I 4 8 MAIN STREET 
 
 set; the prairie clouds were tawny gold; and she swung happily 
 into Main Street. 
 
 Through the first days of June she drove with Kennicott on 
 his calls. She identified him with the virile land ; she admired 
 him as she saw with what respect the farmers obeyed him. 
 She was out in the early chill, after a hasty cup of coffee, 
 reaching open country as the fresh sun came up in that 
 unspoiled world. Meadow larks called from the tops of thin 
 split fence-posts. The wild roses smelled clean. 
 
 As they returned in late afternoon the low sun was a 
 solemnity of radial bands, like a heavenly fan of beaten gold; 
 the limitless circle of the grain was a green sea rimmed with 
 fog, and the willow wind-breaks were palmy isles. 
 
 Before July the close heat blanketed them. The tortured 
 earth cracked. Farmers panted through corn-fields behind 
 cultivators and the sweating flanks of horses. While she waited 
 for Kennicott in the car, before a farmhouse, the seat burned 
 her fingers and her head ached with the glare on fenders and 
 hood. 
 
 A black thunder-shower was followed by a dust storm which 
 turned the sky yellow with the hint of a coming tornado. 
 Impalpable black dust far-borne from Dakota covered the 
 inner sills of the closed windows. 
 
 The July heat was ever more stifling. They crawled along 
 Main Street by day; they found it hard to sleep at night. They 
 brought mattresses down to the living-room, and thrashed and 
 turned by the open window. Ten times a night they talked of 
 going out to soak themselves with the hose and wade through 
 the dew, but they were too listless to take the trouble. On 
 cool evenings, when they tried to go walking, the gnats ap- 
 peared in swarms which peppered their faces and caught in 
 their throats. 
 
 She wanted the Northern pines, the Eastern sea, but Kenni- 
 cott declared that it would be " kind of hard to get away, just 
 now" The Health and Improvement Committee of the 
 Thanatopsis asked her to take part in the anti-fly campaign, 
 and she toiled about town persuading householders to use the 
 fly-traps furnished by the club, or giving out money prizes to 
 fly-swatting children. She was loyal enough but not ardent, 
 
MAIN STREET 149 
 
 and without ever quite intending to, she began to neglect the 
 task as heat sucked at her strength. 
 
 Kennicott and she motored North and spent a week with 
 his mother that is, Carol spent it with his mother, while he 
 fished for bass. 
 
 The great event was their purchase of a summer cottage, 
 down on Lake Minniemashie. 
 
 Perhaps the most amiable feature of life in Gopher Prairie 
 was the summer cottages. They were merely two-room 
 shanties, with a seepage of broken-down chairs, peeling veneered 
 tables, chromos pasted on wooden walls, and inefficient kerosene 
 stoves. They were so thin-walled and so close together that 
 you could and did hear a baby being spanked in the fifth 
 cottage off. But they were set among elms and lindens on a 
 bluff which looked across the lake to fields of ripened wheat 
 sloping up to green woods. 
 
 Here the matrons forgot social jealousies, and sat gossiping 
 in gingham; or, in old bathing-suits, surrounded by hysterical 
 children, they paddled for hours. Caro^ joined them; she 
 ducked shrieking small boys, and helped babies construct sand- 
 basins for unfortunate minnows. She liked Juanita Haydock 
 and Maud Dyer when she helped them make picnic-supper 
 for the men, who came motoring out from town each evening. 
 She was easier and more natural with them. In the debate 
 as to whether there should be veal loaf or poached egg on hash, 
 she had no chance to be heretical and oversensitive. 
 
 They danced sometimes, in the evening; they had a minstrel 
 show, with Kennicott surprisingly good as end-man; always 
 they were encircled by children wise in the lore of woodchucks 
 and gophers and rafts and willow whistles. 
 
 If they could have continued this normal barbaric life Carol 
 would have been the most enthusiastic citizen of Gopher 
 Prairie. She was relieved to be assured that she did not want 
 bookish conversation alone; that she did not expect the town 
 to become a Bohemia. She was content now. She did not 
 criticize. 
 
 But in September, when the year was at its richest, custom 
 dictated that it was time to return to town; to remove the 
 children from the waste occupation of learning the earth, and 
 send them back to lessons about the number of potatoes which 
 (in a delightful world untroubled by commission-houses or 
 shortages in freight-cars) William sold to John. The women 
 
150 MAIN STREET 
 
 who had cheerfully gone bathing all summer looked doubtful 
 when Carol begged, " Let's keep up an outdoor life this winter, 
 let's slide and skate." Their hearts shut again till spring, and 
 the nine months of cliques and radiators and dainty refresh- 
 ments began all over. 
 
 m 
 
 Carol had started a salon. 
 
 Since Kennicott, Vida Sherwin, and Guy Pollock were her 
 only lions, and since Kennicott would have preferred Sam 
 Clark to all the poets and radicals in the entire world, her 
 private and self-defensive clique did not get beyond one 
 evening dinner for Vida and Guy, on her first wedding an- 
 niversary; and that dinner did not get beyond a controversy 
 regarding Raymie Wutherspoon's yearnings. 
 
 Guy Pollock was the gentlest person she had found here. 
 He spoke of her new jade and cream frock naturally, not 
 jocosely; he held her chair for her as they sat down to dinner; 
 and he did not, like Kennicott, interrupt her to shout, " Oh 
 say, speaking of that, I heard a good story today." But Guy 
 was incurably hermit. He sat late and talked hard, and did 
 not come again. 
 
 Then she met Champ Perry in the post-office and decided 
 that in the history of the pioneers was the panacea for Gopher 
 Prairie, for all of America. We have lost their sturdiness, she 
 told herself. We must restore the last of the veterans to power 
 and follow them on the backward path to the integrity of 
 Lincoln, to the gaiety of settlers dancing in a saw-mill. 
 
 She read in the records of the Minnesota Territorial Pio- 
 neers that only sixty years ago, not so far back as the birth 
 of her own father, four cabins had composed Gopher Prairie. 
 The log stockade which Mrs. Champ Perry was to find when 
 she trekked in was built afterward by the soldiers as a defense 
 against the Sioux. The four cabins were inhabited by Maine 
 Yankees who had come up the Mississippi to St. Paul and 
 driven north over virgin prairie into virgin woods. They 
 ground their own corn; the men-folks shot ducks and pigeons 
 and prairie chickens; the new breakings yielded the turnip- 
 like rutabagas, which they ate raw and boiled and baked and 
 raw again. For treat they had wild plums and crab-apples and 
 tiny wild strawberries. 
 
MAIN STREET 151 
 
 Grasshoppers came darkening the sky, and in an hour ate 
 the farmwife's garden and the farmer's coat. Precious horses, 
 painfully brought from Illinois, were drowned in bogs or 
 stampeded by the fear of blizzards. Snow blew through the 
 chinks of new-made cabins, and Eastern children, with flowery 
 muslin dresses, shivered all winter and in summer were red 
 and black with mosquito bites. Indians were everywhere; they 
 camped in dooryards, stalked into kitchens to demand dough- 
 nuts, came with rifles across their backs into schoolhouses and 
 begged to see the pictures in the geographies. Packs of timber- 
 wolves treed the children; and the settlers found dens of rattle- 
 snakes, killed fifty, a hundred, in a day. 
 
 Yet it was a buoyant life. Carol read enviously in the 
 admirable Minnesota chronicles called " Old Rail Fence Cor- 
 ners " the reminiscence of Mrs. Mahlon Black, who settled in 
 Stillwater in 1848: 
 
 " There was nothing to parade over in those days. We took 
 it as it came and had happy lives. . . . We would all 
 gather together and in about two minutes would be having 
 a good time playing cards or dancing. . . . We used to 
 waltz and dance contra dances. None of these new jigs and 
 not wear any clothes to speak of. We covered our hides in 
 those days; no tight skirts like now. You could take three or 
 four steps inside our skirts and then not reach the edge. One 
 of the boys would fiddle a while and then some one would 
 spell him and he could get a dance. Sometimes they would 
 dance and fiddle too." 
 
 She reflected that if she could not have ballrooms of gray 
 and rose and crystal, she wanted to be swinging across a 
 puncheon-floor with a dancing fiddler. This smug in-between 
 town, which had exchanged " Money Musk " for phonographs 
 grinding out ragtime, it was neither the heroic old nor the 
 sophisticated new. Couldn't she somehow, some yet un- 
 imagined how, turn it back to simplicity? 
 
 She herself knew two of the pioneers: the Perrys. Champ 
 Perry was the buyer at the grain-elevator. He weighed wagons 
 of wheat on a rough platform-scale, in the cracks of which the 
 kernels sprouted every spring. Between times he napped in 
 the dusty peace of his office. 
 
 She called on the Perrys at their rooms above Rowland & 
 Gould's grocery. 
 
 When they were already old they had lost the money, 
 
152 MAIN STREET 
 
 which they had invested in an elevator. They had given up 
 their beloved yellow brick house and moved into these rooms 
 over a store, which were the Gopher Prairie equivalent of a 
 flat. A broad stairway led from the street to the upper hall, 
 along which were the doors of a lawyer's office, a dentist's, 
 a photographer's "studio," the lodge-rooms of the Affiliated 
 Order of Spartans and, at the back, the Perrys' apartment. 
 
 They received her (their first caller in a month) with aged 
 fluttering tenderness. Mrs. Perry confided, " My, it's a shame 
 we got to entertain you in such a cramped place. And there 
 ain't any water except that ole iron sink outside in the hall, 
 but still, as I say to Champ, beggars can't be choosers. 'Sides, 
 the brick house was too big for me to sweep, and it was way 
 out, and it's nice to be living down here among folks. Yes, 
 
 we're glad to be here. But Some day, maybe we can 
 
 have a house of our own again. We're saving up Oh, 
 
 dear, if we could have our own home! But these rooms are 
 real nice, ain't they! " 
 
 As old people will, the world over, they had moved as much 
 as possible of their familiar furniture into this small space. 
 Carol had none of the superiority she felt toward Mrs. Lyman 
 Cass's plutocratic parlor. She was at home here. She noted 
 with tenderness all the makeshifts: the darned chair-arms, the 
 patent rocker covered with sleazy cretonne, the pasted strips 
 of paper mending the birch-bark napkin-rings labeled " Papa " 
 and " Mama." 
 
 She hinted of her new enthusiasm. To find one of the 
 " young folks " who took them seriously, heartened the Perrys, 
 and she easily drew from them the principles by which Gopher 
 Prairie should be born again should again become amusing 
 to live in. 
 
 This was their philosophy complete ... in the era of 
 aeroplanes and syndicalism: 
 
 The Baptist Church (and, somewhat less, the Methodist, 
 Congregational, and Presbyterian Churches) is the perfect, the 
 divinely ordained standard in music, oratory, philanthropy, and 
 ethics. "We don't need all this new-fangled science, or this 
 terrible Higher Criticism that's ruining our young men in 
 colleges. What we need is to get back to the true Word of 
 God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to have 
 it preached to us." 
 
 The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party of Blaine and 
 
MAIN STREET 153 
 
 McKinley, is the agent of the Lord and of the Baptist Church 
 in temporal affairs. 
 
 All socialists ought to be hanged. 
 
 " Harold Bell Wright is a lovely writer, and he teaches sucK 
 good morals in his novels, and folks say he's made prett' near 
 a million dollars out of 'em." 
 
 People who make more than ten thousand a year or less 
 than eight hundred are wicked. 
 
 Europeans are still wickeder. 
 
 It doesn't hurt any to drink a glass of beer on a warm day, 
 but anybody who touches wine is headed straight for hell. 
 
 Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be. 
 
 Nobody needs drug-store ice cream; pie is good enough for 
 anybody. 
 
 The farmers want too much for their wheat. 
 
 The owners of the elevator-company expect too much for the 
 salaries they pay. 
 
 There would be no more trouble or discontent in the world 
 if everybody worked as hard as Pa did when he cleared our 
 first farm. 
 
 IV 
 
 Carol's hero-worship dwindled to polite nodding, and the 
 nodding dwindled to a desire to escape, and she went home 
 with a headache. 
 
 Next day she saw Miles Bjornstam on the street. 
 
 " Just back from Montana. Great summer. Pumped my 
 lungs chuck-full of Rocky Mountain air. Now for another 
 whirl at sassing the bosses of Gopher Prairie." She smiled at 
 him, and the Perrys faded, the pioneers faded, till they were 
 but daguerreotypes in a black walnut cupboard. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 SHE tried, more from loyalty than from desire, to call upon 
 the Perrys on a November evening when Kennicott was away. 
 They were not at home. 
 
 Like a child who has no one to play with she loitered through 
 the dark hall. She saw a light under an office door. She 
 knocked. To the person who opened she murmured, " Do you 
 happen to know where the Perrys are? " She realized that 
 it was Guy Pollock. 
 
 " I'm awfully sorry, Mrs. Kennicott, but I don't know. 
 Won't you come in and wait for them " 
 
 " W-why " she observed, as she reflected that in Gopher 
 
 Prairie it is not decent to call on a man; as she decided that 
 no, really, she wouldn't go in; and as she went in. 
 
 " I didn't know your office was up here." 
 
 " Yes, office, town-house, and chateau in Picardy. But you 
 can't see the chateau and town-house (next to the Duke of 
 Sutherland's). They're beyond that inner door. They are a 
 cot and a wash-stand and my other suit and the blue crepe tie 
 you said you liked." 
 
 " You remember my saying that? " 
 
 " Of course. I always shall. Please try this chair." 
 
 She glanced about the rusty office gaunt stove, shelves 
 of tan law-books, desk-chair filled with newspapers so long 
 sat upon that they were in holes and smudged to grayness. 
 There were only two things which suggested Guy Pollock. On 
 the green felt of the table-desk, between legal blanks and a 
 clotted inkwell, was a cloissone vase. On a swing shelf was a 
 row of books unfamiliar to Gopher Prairie: Mosher editions 
 of the poets, black and red German novels, a Charles Lamb in 
 crushed levant. 
 
 Guy did not sit down. He quartered the office, a grayhound 
 on the scent; a grayhound with glasses tilted forward on his 
 thin nose, and a silky indecisive brown mustache. He had a 
 golf jacket of jersey, worn through at the creases in the sleeves. 
 She noted that he did not apologize for it, as Kennicott would 
 have done. 
 
 154 
 
MAIN STREET 155 
 
 He made conversation: " I didn't know you were a bosom 
 friend of the Perrys. Champ is the salt of the earth but some- 
 how I can't imagine him joining you in symbolic dancing, or 
 making improvements on the Diesel engine." 
 
 " No. He's a dear soul, bless him, but he belongs in the 
 National Museum, along with General Grant's sword, and 
 
 I'm Oh, I suppose I'm seeking for a gospel that will 
 
 evangelize Gopher Prairie." 
 
 " Really? Evangelize it to what? " 
 
 " To anything that's definite. Seriousness or frivolousness or 
 both. I wouldn't care whether it was a laboratory or a carni- 
 val. But it's merely safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the 
 matter with Gopher Prairie? " 
 
 " Is anything the matter with it? Isn't there perhaps some- 
 thing the matter with you and me? (May I join you in the 
 honor of having something the matter?) " 
 
 " (Yes, thanks.) No, I think it's the town." 
 
 " Because they enjoy skating more than biology? " 
 
 " But I'm not only more interested in biology than the Jolly 
 Seventeen, but also in skating! I'll skate with them, or 
 slide, or throw snowballs, just as gladly as talk with you." 
 
 (" Oh no! ") 
 
 (" Yes! ) But they want to stay home and embroider." 
 
 " Perhaps. I'm not defending the town. It's merely 
 
 I'm a confirmed doubter of myself. (Probably I'm conceited 
 about my lack of conceit!) Anyway, Gopher Prairie isn't 
 particularly bad. It's like all villages in all countries. Most 
 places that have lost the smell of earth but not yet acquired 
 the smell of patchouli or of factory-smoke are just as sus- 
 picious and righteous. I wonder if the small town isn't, with 
 some lovely exceptions, a social appendix? Some day these 
 dull market- towns may be as obsolete as monasteries. I can 
 imagine the farmer and his local store-manager going by 
 monorail, at the end of the day, into a city more charming 
 than any William Morris Utopia music, a university, clubs 
 for loafers like me. (Lord, how I'd like to have a real club! ) " 
 
 She asked impulsively, " You, why do you stay here? " 
 
 " I have the Village Virus." 
 
 " It sounds dangerous." 
 
 " It is. More dangerous than the cancer that will certainly 
 get me at fifty unless I stop this smoking. The Village Virus 
 is the germ which it's extraordinarily like the hook-worm it 
 
156 MAIN STREET 
 
 infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces. 
 You'll find it epidemic among lawyers and doctors and ministers 
 and college-bred merchants all these people who have had a 
 glimpse of the world that thinks and laughs, but have returned 
 to their swamp. I'm a perfect example. But I sha'n't pester 
 you with my dolors." 
 
 " You won't. And do sit down, so I can see you." 
 
 He dropped into the shrieking desk-chair. He looked 
 squarely at her; she was conscious of the pupils of his eyes; of 
 the fact that he was a man, and lonely. They were embarrassed. 
 They elaborately glanced away, and were relieved as he went 
 on: 
 
 "The diagnosis of my Village Virus is simple enough. I 
 was born in an Ohio town about the same size as Gopher 
 Prairie, and much less friendly. It'd had more generations in 
 which to form an oligarchy of respectability. Here, a stranger 
 is taken in if he is correct, if he likes hunting and motoring and 
 God and our Senator. There, we didn't take in even our own 
 till we had contemptuously got used to them. It was a red- 
 brick Ohio town, and the trees made it damp, and it smelled of 
 rotten apples. The country wasn't like our lakes and prairie. 
 There were small stuffy corn-fields and brick-yards and greasy 
 oil-wells. 
 
 " I went to a denominational college and learned that since 
 dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to 
 explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try 
 to catch us disobeying it. From college I went to New York, 
 to the Columbia Law School. And for four years I lived. 
 Oh, I won't rhapsodize about New York. It was dirty and 
 noisy and breathless and ghastly expensive. But compared with 
 
 the moldy academy in which I had been smothered ! I 
 
 went to symphonies twice a week. I saw Irving and Terry 
 and Duse and Bernhardt, from the top gallery. I walked in 
 Gramercy Park. And I read, oh, everything. 
 
 " Through a cousin I learned that Julius Flickerbaugh was 
 sick and needed a partner. I came here. Julius got well. He 
 didn't like my way of loafing five hours and then doing my 
 work (really not so badly) in one. We parted. 
 
 " When I first came here I swore I'd ' keep up my interests/ 
 Very lofty ! I read Browning, and went to Minneapolis for the 
 theaters. I thought I was ' keeping up.' But I guess the 
 Village Virus had me already. I was reading four copies of 
 
MAIN STREET 157 
 
 cheap fiction-magazines to one poem. I'd put off the Min- 
 neapolis trips till I simply had to go there on a lot of legal 
 matters. 
 
 "A few years ago I was talking to a patent lawyer from 
 
 Chicago, and I realized that I'd always felt so superior 
 
 to people like Julius Flickerbaugh, but I saw that I was as 
 provincial and behind-the- times as Julius. (Worse! Julius 
 plows through the Literary Digest and the Outlook faithfully, 
 while I'm turning over pages of a book by Charles Flandrau 
 that I already know by heart.) 
 
 "I decided to leave here. Stern resolution. Grasp the 
 world. Then I found that the Village Virus had me, absolute.* 
 I didn't want to face new streets and younger men real com- 
 petition. It was too easy to go on making out conveyances 
 
 and arguing ditching cases. So That's all of the biography 
 
 of a living dead man, except the diverting last chapter, the lies 
 about my having been ' a tower of strength and legal wisdom * 
 which some day a preacher will spin over my lean dry body." 
 
 He looked down at his table-desk, fingering the starry 
 enameled vase. 
 
 She could not comment. She pictured herself running across 
 the room to pat his hair. She saw that his lips were firm, 
 under his soft faded mustache. She sat still, and maundered, 
 " I know. The Village Virus. Perhaps it will get me. Some 
 
 day I'm going Oh, no matter. At least, I am making you 
 
 talk! Usually you have to be polite to my garrulousness, but 
 now I'm sitting at your feet." 
 
 " It would be rather nice to have you literally sitting at my 
 feet, by a fire." 
 
 " Would you have a fireplace for me? " 
 
 " Naturally! Please don't snub me now! Let the old man 
 rave. How old are you, Carol? " 
 
 "Twenty-six, Guy." 
 
 " Twenty-six ! I was just leaving New York, at twenty-six. 
 I heard Patti sing, at twenty-six. And now I'm forty-seven. I 
 feel like a child, yet I'm old enough to be your father. So it's 
 decently paternal to imagine you curled at my feet. ... Of 
 course I hope it isn't, but we'll reflect the morals of Gopher 
 Prairie by officially announcing that it is! . . . These stand- 
 ards that you and I live up to! There's one thing that's the 
 matter with Gopher Prairie, at least with the ruling-class 
 (there is a ruling-class, despite all our professions of democ- 
 
158 MAIN STREET 
 
 racy). And the penalty we tribal rulers pay is that our sub- 
 jects watch us every minute. We can't get wholesomely drunk 
 and relax. We have to be so correct about sex morals, and 
 inconspicuous clothes, and doing our commercial trickery only 
 in the traditional ways, that none of us can live up to it, and we 
 become horribly hypocritical. Unavoidably. The widow-rob- 
 bing deacon of fiction can't help being hypocritical. The 
 widows themselves demand it! They admire his unctuousness. 
 And look at me. Suppose I did dare to make love to some 
 exquisite married woman. I wouldn't admit it to myself. I 
 giggle with the most revolting salaciousness over La Vie Paris- 
 ienne, when I get hold of one in Chicago, yet I shouldn't even 
 try to hold your hand. I'm broken. It's the historical Anglo- 
 Saxon way of making life miserable. . . . Oh, my dear, I 
 haven't talked to anybody about myself and all our selves for 
 years." 
 
 " Guy! Can't we do something with the town? Really? " 
 
 " No, we can't! " He disposed of it like a judge ruling out 
 an improper objection; returned to matters less uncomfortably 
 energetic: "Curious. Most troubles are unnecessary. We 
 have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep 
 warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just 
 for pleasure wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes. Here 
 in Gopher Prairie we've cleared the fields, and become soft, 
 so we make ourselves unhappy artificially, at great expense and 
 exertion: Methodists disliking Episcopalians, the man with 
 the Hudson laughing at the man with the flivver. The worst 
 is the commercial hatred the grocer feeling that any man who 
 doesn't deal with him is robbing him. What hurts me is that 
 it applies to lawyers and doctors (and decidedly to their wives! ) 
 as much as to grocers. The doctors you know about that 
 how your husband and Westlake and Gould dislike one 
 another." 
 
 "No! I won't admit it!" 
 
 He grinned. 
 
 " Oh, maybe once or twice, when Will has positively known 
 of a case where Doctor where one of the others has con- 
 tinued to call on patients longer than necessary, he has 
 laughed about it, but " 
 
 He still grinned. 
 
 " No, really! And when you say the wives of the doctors 
 share these jealousies Mrs. McGanum and I haven't any 
 
MAIN STREET 159 
 
 particular crush on each other; she's so stolid. But her 
 mother, Mrs. Westlake nobody could be sweeter." 
 
 " Yes, I'm sure she's very bland. But I wouldn't tell her my 
 heart's secrets if I were you, my dear. I insist that there's 
 only one professional-man's wife in this town who doesn't 
 plot, and that is you, you blessed, credulous outsider! " 
 
 " I won't be cajoled! I won't believe that medicine, the 
 priesthood of healing, can be turned into a penny-picking 
 business." 
 
 " See here: Hasn't Kennicott ever hinted to you that you'd 
 better be nice to some old woman because she tells her friends 
 which doctor to call in? But I oughtn't to " 
 
 She remembered certain remarks which Kennicott had of- 
 fered regarding the Widow Bogart. She flinched, looked at 
 Guy beseechingly. 
 
 He sprang up, strode to. her with a nervous step, smoothed 
 her hand. She wondered if she ought to be offended by his 
 caress. Then she wondered if he liked her hat, the new 
 Oriental turban of rose and silver brocade. 
 
 He dropped her hand. His elbow brushed her shoulder. He 
 flitted over to the desk-chair, his thin back stooped. He 
 picked up the cloisonne vase. Across it he peered at her 
 with such loneliness that she was startled. But his eyes faded 
 into impersonality as he talked of the jealousies of Gopher 
 Prairie. He stopped himself with a sharp, " Good Lord, 
 Carol, you're not a jury. You are within your legal rights 
 in refusing to be subjected to this summing-up. I'm a tedious 
 old fool analyzing the obvious, while you're the spirit of re- 
 bellion. Tell me your side. What is Gopher Prairie to you? " 
 
 "A bore! " 
 
 " Can I help? " 
 
 " How could you? " 
 
 " I don't know. Perhaps by listening. I haven't done that 
 
 tonight. But normally Can't I be the confidant of 
 
 the old French plays, the tiring-maid with the mirror and the 
 loyal ears? " 
 
 " Oh, what is there to confide? The people are savorless 
 and proud of it. And even if I liked you tremendously, I 
 couldn't talk to you without twenty old hexes watching, whis- 
 pering." 
 
 " But you will come talk to me, once in a while? " 
 
 " I'm not sure that I shall. I'm trying to develop my own 
 
160 MAIN STREET 
 
 large capacity for dullness and contentment. I've failed at 
 every positive thing Fve tried. I'd better l settle down/ as 
 they call it, and be satisfied to be nothing." 
 
 " Don't be cynical. It hurts me, in you. It's like blood on 
 the wing of a humming-bird." 
 
 " I'm not a humming-bird. I'm a hawk; a tiny leashed 
 hawk, pecked to death by these large, white, flabby, wormy 
 hens. But I am grateful to you for confirming me in the faith. 
 And I'm going home!" 
 
 " Please stay and have some coffee with me." 
 
 " I'd like to. But they've succeeded in terrorizing me. I'm 
 afraid of what people might say." 
 
 " I'm not afraid of that. I'm only afraid of what you might 
 say! " He stalked to her; took her unresponsive hand. 
 " Carol! You have been happy here tonight? (Yes. I'm 
 begging!)" 
 
 She squeezed his hand quickly, then snatched hers away. 
 She had but little of the curiosity of the flirt, and none of the 
 intrigante's joy in furtiveness. If she was the naive girl, Guy 
 Pollock was the clumsy boy. He raced about the office; he 
 rammed his fists into his pockets. He stammered, " I I I 
 
 Oh, the devil ! Why do I awaken from smooth dustiness 
 
 to this jagged rawness? I'll make I'm going to trot 
 
 down the hall and bring in the Dillons, and we'll all have coffee 
 or something." 
 
 " The Dillons? " 
 
 " Yes. Really quite a decent young pair Harvey Dillon 
 and his wife. He's a dentist, just come to town. They live in a 
 room behind his office, same as I do here. They don't know 
 much of anybody " 
 
 " Fve heard of them. And I've never thought to call. I'm 
 horribly ashamed. Do bring them " 
 
 She stopped, for no very dear reason, but his expression 
 said, her faltering admitted, that they wished they had never 
 mentioned the Dillons. With spurious enthusiasm he said, 
 " Splendid! I will." From the door he glanced at her, curled 
 in the peeled leather chair. He slipped out, came back with 
 Dr. and Mrs. Dillon. 
 
 The four of them drank rather bad coffee which Pollock 
 made on a kerosene burner. They laughed, and spoke of 
 Minneapolis, and were tremendously tactful; and Carol 
 started for home, through the November wind. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 SHE was marching home. 
 
 "No. I couldn't fall in love with him. I like him, very 
 much. But he's too much of a recluse. Could I kiss him? 
 
 No! No! Guy Pollock at twenty-six I could have kissed 
 
 him then, maybe, even if I were married to some one else, and 
 probably I'd have been glib in persuading myself that ' it wasn't 
 really wrong.' 
 
 " The amazing thing is that I'm not more amazed at my- 
 self. I, the virtuous young matron. Am I to be trusted? 
 If the Prince Charming came 
 
 " A Gopher Prairie housewife, married a year, and yearning 
 for a 'Prince Charming' like a bachfisch of sixteen! They 
 say that marriage is a magic change. But I'm not changed. 
 
 "Rllf- 
 
 JL-J UC 
 
 "No! I wouldn't want to fall in love, even if the Prince did 
 come. I wouldn't want to hurt Will. I am fond of Will. I 
 am! He doesn't stir me, not any longer. But I depend on 
 him. He is home and children. 
 
 " I wonder when we will begin to have children? I do 
 want them. 
 
 " I wonder whether I remembered to tell Bea to have 
 hominy tomorrow, instead of oatmeal? She will have gone to 
 bed by now. Perhaps I'll be up early enough 
 
 " Ever so fond of Will. I wouldn't hurt him, even if I had 
 to lose the mad love. If the Prince came I'd look once at him, 
 and run. Darn fast! Oh, Carol, you are not heroic nor 
 fine. You are the immutable vulgar young female. 
 
 " But I'm not the faithless wife who enjoys confiding that 
 she's ' misunderstood.' Oh, I'm not, I'm not! 
 
 "Am I? 
 
 " At least I didn't whisper to Guy about Will's faults and 
 his blindness to my remarkable soul. I didn't! Matter of 
 fact, Will probably understands me perfectly! If only if 
 he would just back me up in rousing the town. 
 
 " How many, how incredibly many wives there must be who 
 tingle over the first Guy Pollock who smiles at them. No! I 
 
 161 
 
i6a MAIN STREET 
 
 will not be one of that herd of y earners! The coy virgin 
 brides. Yet probably if the Prince were young and dared to 
 face life 
 
 " I'm not half as well oriented as that Mrs. Dillon. So 
 obviously adoring her dentist! And seeing Guy only as an 
 eccentric fogy. 
 
 "They weren't silk, Mrs. Dillon's stockings. They were 
 lisle. Her legs are nice and slim. But no nicer than mine. I 
 hate cotton tops on silk stockings. . . . Are my ankles get- 
 ting fat? I will not have fat ankles! 
 
 " No. I am fond of Will. His work one farmer he pulls 
 through diphtheria is worth all my yammering for a castle in 
 Spain. A castle with baths. 
 
 " This hat is so tight. I must stretch it. Guy liked it. 
 
 " There's the house. I'm awfully chilly. Time to get out the 
 fur coat. I wonder if I'll ever have a beaver coat? Nutria is 
 not the same thing! Beaver glossy. Like to run my fingers 
 over it. Guy's mustache like beaver. How utterly absurd! 
 
 " I am, I am fond of Will, and Can't I ever find another 
 
 word than ' fond '? 
 
 "He's home. He'll think I was out late. 
 
 " Why can't he ever remember to pull down the shades? Cy 
 Bogart and all the beastly boys peeping in. But the poor 
 dear, he's absent-minded about minute minush whatever the 
 word is. He has so much worry and work, while I do nothing 
 but jabber to Bea. 
 
 " I mustn't forget the hominy " 
 
 She was flying into the hall. Kennicott looked up from the 
 Journal of the American Medical Society. 
 
 "Hello! What time did you get back? " she cried. 
 
 " About nine. You been gadding. Here it is past eleven! " 
 Good-natured yet not quite approving. 
 
 " Did it feel neglected? " 
 
 " Well, you didn't remember to close the lower draft in the 
 furnace." 
 
 " Oh, I'm so sorry. But I don't often forget things like 
 that, do I? " 
 
 She dropped into his lap and (after he had jerked back his 
 head to save his eye-glasses, and removed the glasses, and 
 settled her in a position less cramping to his legs, and casually 
 cleared his throat) he kissed her amiably, and remarked: 
 
 " Nope, I must say you're fairly good about things like that. 
 
MAIN STREET 163 
 
 I wasn't kicking. I just meant I wouldn't want the fire to go 
 out on us. Leave that draft open and the fire might burn up 
 and go out on us. And the nights are beginning to get pretty 
 cold again. Pretty cold on my drive. I put the side-curtains 
 up, it was so chilly. But the generator is working all right 
 now." 
 
 " Yes. It is chilly. But I feel fine after my walk." 
 
 " Go walking? " ' 
 
 " I went up to see the Perrys." By a definite act of will she 
 added the truth: " They weren't in. And I saw Guy Pollock. 
 Dropped into his office." 
 
 " Why, you haven't been sitting and chinning with him 
 till eleven o'clock? " 
 
 " Of course there were some other people there and 
 
 Will! What do you think of Dr. Westlake? " 
 
 "Westlake? Why?" 
 
 " I noticed him on the street today." 
 
 "Was he limping? If the poor fish would have his teeth 
 X-rayed, I'll bet nine and a half cents he'd find an abscess 
 there. ' Rheumatism ' he calls it. Rheumatism, hell! He's 
 behind the times. Wonder he doesn't bleed himself! Wellllllll 
 
 " A profound and serious yawn. " I hate to break up the 
 
 party, but it's getting late, and a doctor never knows when 
 he'll get routed out before morning." (She remembered that 
 he had given this explanation, in these words, not less than 
 thirty times in the year.) " I guess we better be trotting up 
 to bed. I've wound the clock and looked at the furnace. Did 
 you lock the front door when you came in? " 
 
 They trailed up-stairs, after he had turned out the lights and 
 twice tested the front door to make sure it was fast. 
 While they talked they were preparing for bed. Carol still 
 sought to maintain privacy by undressing behind the screen 
 of the closet door. Kennicott was not so reticent. Tonight, as 
 every night, she was irritated by having to push the old plush 
 chair out of the way before she could open the closet door. 
 Every time she opened the door she shoved the chair. Ten 
 times an hour. But Kennicott liked to have the chair in the 
 room, and there was no place for it except in front of the 
 closet. 
 
 She pushed it, felt angry, hid her anger. Kennicott was 
 yawning, more portentously. The room smelled stale. She 
 shrugged and became chatty: 
 
164 MAIN STREET 
 
 "You were speaking of Dr. Westlake. Tell me you've 
 never summed him up: Is he really a good doctor? " 
 
 " Oh yes, he's a wise old coot." 
 
 (" There! You see there is no medical rivalry. Not in my 
 house! " she said triumphantly to Guy Pollock.) 
 
 She hung her silk petticoat on a closet hook, and went on, 
 " Dr. Westlake is so gentle and scholarly " 
 
 " Well, I don't know as I'd say he was such a whale of a 
 scholar. I've always had a suspicion he did a good deal of 
 four-flushing about that. He likes to have people think he 
 keeps up his French and Greek and Lord knows what all; and 
 he's always got an old Dago book lying around the sitting-room, 
 but I've got a hunch he reads detective stories 'bout like the 
 rest of us. And I don't know where he'd ever learn so dog- 
 gone many languages anyway! He kind of lets people assume 
 he went to Harvard or Berlin or Oxford or somewhere, but I 
 looked him up in the medical register, and he graduated from 
 a hick college in Pennsylvania, 'way back in 1861 ! " 
 
 " But this is the important thing: Is he an honest doctor? " 
 
 " How do you mean i honest '? Depends on what you 
 mean." 
 
 " Suppose you were sick. Would you call him in? Would 
 you let me call him in? " 
 
 "Not if I were well enough to cuss and bite, I wouldn't! 
 No, sir! I wouldn't have the old fake in the house. Makes 
 me tired, his everlasting palavering and soft-soaping. He's 
 all right for an ordinary bellyache or holding some fool woman's 
 hand, but I wouldn't call him in for an honest-to-God illness, 
 not much I wouldn't, 0-sir ! You know I don't do much back- 
 biting, but same time I'll tell you, Carrrie: I've never 
 
 got over being sore at Westlake for the way he treated Mrs. 
 Jonderquist. Nothing the matter with her, what she really 
 needed was a rest, but Westlake kept calling on her and calling 
 on her for weeks, almost every day, and he sent her a good 
 big fat bill, too, you can bet! I never did forgive him for that. 
 Nice decent hard-working people like the Jonderquists! " 
 
 In her batiste nightgown she was standing at the bureau en- 
 gaged in the invariable rites of wishing that she had a real 
 dressing-table with a triple mirror, of bending toward the 
 streaky glass and raising her chin to inspect a pin-head mole 
 on her throat, and finally of brushing her hair. In rhythm to 
 the strokes she went on: 
 
MAIN STREET 1165 
 
 " But, Will, there isn't any of what you might call financial 
 rivalry between you and the partners Westlake and Mc- 
 Ganum is there? " 
 
 He flipped into bed with a solemn back-somersault and a 
 ludicrous kick of his heels as he tucked his legs under the 
 blankets. He snorted, " Lord no! I never begrudge any man 
 a nickel he can get away from me fairly." 
 
 " But is Westlake fair? Isn't he sly? " 
 
 " Sly is the word. He's a fox, that boy! " 
 
 She saw Guy Pollock's grin in the mirror. She flushed. 
 
 Kennicott, with his arms behind his head, was yawning: 
 
 " Yump. He's smooth, too smooth. But I bet I make prett' 
 near as much as Westlake and McGanum both together, though 
 I've never wanted to grab more than my just share. If any- 
 body wants to go to the partners instead of to me, that's his 
 business. Though I must say it makes me tired when West- 
 lake gets hold of the Dawsons. Here Luke Dawson had been 
 coming to me for every toeache and headache and a lot of 
 little things that just wasted my time, and then when his 
 grandchild was here last summer and had summer-complaint, I 
 suppose, or something like that, probably you know, the time 
 you and I drove up to Lac-qui-Meurt why, Westlake got hold 
 of Ma Dawson, and scared her to death, and made her think 
 the kid had appendicitis, and, by golly, if he and McGanum 
 didn't operate, and holler their heads off about the terrible 
 adhesions they found, and what a regular Charley and Will 
 Mayo they were for classy surgery. They let on that if they'd 
 waited two hours more the kid would have developed peritonitis, 
 and God knows what all; and then they collected a nice fat 
 hundred and fifty dollars. And probably they'd have charged 
 three hundred, if they hadn't been afraid of me! I'm no hog, 
 but I certainly do hate to give old Luke ten dollars' worth of 
 advice for a dollar and a half, and then see a hundred and 
 fifty go glimmering. And if I can't do a better 'pendectomy 
 than either Westlake or McGanum, I'll eat my hat! " 
 
 As she crept into bed she was dazzled by Guy's blazing 
 grin. She experimented: 
 
 " But Westlake is cleverer than his son-in-law, don't you 
 think? " 
 
 " Yes, Westlake may be old-fashioned and all that, but 
 he's got a certain amount of intuition, while McGanum goes 
 into everything bull-headed, and butts his way through like 
 
166 MAIN STREET 
 
 a damn yahoo, and tries to argue his patients into having 
 whatever he diagnoses them as having! About the best thing 
 Mac can do is to stick to baby-snatching. He's just about 
 on a par with this bone-pounding chiropractor female, Mrs. 
 Mattie Gooch." 
 
 " Mrs. Westlake and Mrs. McGanum, though they're nice. 
 They've been awfully cordial to me." 
 
 "Well, no reason why they shouldn't be, is there? Oh, 
 they're nice enough though you can bet your bottom dollar 
 they're both plugging for their husbands all the time, trying 
 to get the business. And I don't know as I call it so damn 
 cordial in Mrs. McGanum when I holler at her on the street 
 and she nods back like she had a sore neck. Still, she's all 
 right. It's Ma Westlake that makes the mischief, pussyfooting 
 around all the time. But I wouldn't trust any Westlake out 
 of the whole lot, and while Mrs. McGanum seems square 
 enough, you don't never want to forget that she's Westlake's 
 daughter. You bet! " 
 
 ".What about Dr. Gould? Don't you think he's worse than 
 either Westlake or McGanum? He's so cheap drinking, and 
 playing pool, and always smoking cigars in such a cocky 
 way " 
 
 " That's all right now! Terry Gould is a good deal of a tin- 
 horn sport, but he knows a lot about medicine, and don't you 
 forget it for one second! " 
 
 She stared down Guy's grin, and asked more cheerfully, " Is 
 he honest, too? " 
 
 " Ooooooooooo! Gosh I'm sleepy! " He burrowed beneath 
 the bedclothes in a luxurious stretch, and came up like a diver, 
 shaking his head, as he complained, " How's that? Who? 
 Terry Gould honest? Don't start me laughing I'm too nice 
 and sleepy! I didn't say he was honest. I said he had savvy 
 enough to find the index in ' Gray's Anatomy,' which is more 
 than McGanum can do! But I didn't say anything about his 
 being honest. He isn't. Terry is crooked as a dog's hind leg. 
 He's done me more than one dirty trick. He told Mrs. 
 Glorbach, seventeen miles out, that I wasn't up-to-date in 
 obstetrics. Fat lot of good it did him! She came right in 
 and told me! And Terry's lazy. He'd let a pneumonia patient 
 choke rather than interrupt a poker game." 
 
 " Oh no. I can't believe " 
 
 "Well now, I'm telling you! " 
 
MAIN STREET 167 
 
 " Does he play much poker? Dr. Dillon told me that Dr. 
 Gould wanted him to play " 
 
 " Dillon told you what? Where'd you meet Dillon? He's 
 just come to town." 
 
 " He and his wife were at Mr. Pollock's tonight." 
 
 " Say, uh, what'd you think of them? Didn't Dillon strike 
 you as pretty light- waisted? " 
 
 " Why no. He seemed intelligent. I'm sure he's much more 
 wide-awake than our dentist." 
 
 " Well now, the old man is a good dentist. He knows his 
 
 business. And Dillon I wouldn't cuddle up to the Dillons 
 
 too close, if I were you. All right for Pollock, and that's none 
 
 of our business, but we I think I'd just give the Dillons 
 
 the glad hand and pass 'em up." 
 
 " But why? He isn't a rival." 
 
 " That's all right! " Kennicott was aggressively awake 
 now. " He'll work right in with Westlake and McGanum. 
 Matter of fact, I suspect they were largely responsible for his 
 locating here. They'll be sending him patients, and he'll send! 
 all that he can get hold of to them. I don't trust anybody 
 that's too much hand-in-glove with Westlake. You give Dillon 
 a shot at some fellow that's just bought a farm here and drifts 
 into town to get his teeth looked at, and after Dillon gets 
 through with him, you'll see him edging around to Westlake 
 and McGanum, every time! " 
 
 Carol reached for her blouse, which hung on a chair by 
 the bed. She draped it about her shoulders, and sat up study- 
 ing Kennicott, her chin in her hands. In the gray light from 
 the small electric bulb down the hall she could see that he was 
 frowning. 
 
 " Will, this is I must get this straight. Some one said to 
 me the other day that in towns like this, even more than in 
 cities, all the doctors hate each other, because of the 
 money " 
 
 " Who said that? " 
 
 " It doesn't matter." 
 
 " I'll bet a hat it was your Vida Sherwin. She's a brainy 
 woman, but she'd be a damn sight brainier if she kept her 
 mouth shut and didn't let so much of her brains ooze out 
 that way." 
 
 "Will! O Will! That's horrible! Aside from the vul- 
 garity : Some ways, Vida is my best friend. Even if 
 
168 MAIN STREET 
 
 she had said it. Which, as a matter of fact, she didn't." 
 
 He reared up his thick shoulders, in absurd pink and green 
 flannelette pajamas. He sat straight, and irritatingly snapped 
 his fingers, and growled: 
 
 " Well, if she didn't say it, let's forget her. Doesn't make 
 any difference who said it, anyway. The point is that you 
 believe it. God! To think you don't understand me any 
 better than that! Money! " 
 
 (" This is the first real quarrel we've ever had," she was 
 agonizing.) 
 
 He thrust out his long arm and snatched his wrinkly vest 
 from a chair. He took out a cigar, a match. He tossed the 
 vest on the floor. He lighted the cigar and puffed savagely. 
 He broke up the match and snapped the fragments at the foot- 
 board. 
 
 She suddenly saw the foot-board of the bed as the foot- 
 stone of the grave of love. 
 
 The room was drab-colored and ill-ventilated Kennicott 
 did not " believe in opening the windows so darn wide that you 
 heat all outdoors." The stale air seemed never to change. In 
 the light from the hall they were two lumps of bedclothes 
 with shoulders and tousled heads attached. 
 
 She begged, " I didn't mean to wake you up, dear. And 
 please don't smoke. You've been smoking so much. Please 
 go back to sleep. I'm sorry." 
 
 " Being sorry 's all right, but I'm going to tell you one or 
 two things. This falling for anybody's say-so about medical 
 jealousy and competition is simply part and parcel of your 
 usual willingness to think the worst you possibly can of us 
 poor dubs in Gopher Prairie. Trouble with women like you 
 is, you always want to argue. Can't take things the way they 
 are. Got to argue. Well, I'm not going to argue about this 
 in any way, shape, manner, or form. Trouble with you is, 
 you don't make any effort to appreciate us. You're so damned 
 superior, and think the city is such a hell of a lot finer place, 
 and you want us to do what you want, all the time " 
 
 " That's not true! It's I who make the effort. It's they 
 it's you who stand back and criticize. I have to come over 
 to the town's opinion; I have to devote myself to their in- 
 terests. They can't even see my interests, to say nothing of 
 adopting them. I get ever so excited about their old Lake 
 Minniemashie and the cottages, but they simply guffaw (in 
 
MAIN STREET 169 
 
 that lovely friendly way you advertise so much) if I speak 
 of wanting to see Taormina also." 
 
 " Sure, Tormina, whatever that is some nice expensive 
 millionaire colony, I suppose. Sure; that's the idea; champagne 
 taste and beer income; and make sure that we never will have 
 more than a beer income, too! " 
 
 " Are you by any chance implying that I am not econom- 
 ical? " 
 
 "Well, I hadn't intended to, but since you bring it up 
 yourself, I don't mind saying the grocery bills are about twice 
 what they ought to be." 
 
 " Yes, they probably are. I'm not economical. I can't be. 
 Thanks to you! " 
 
 " Where d' you get that < thanks to you '? " 
 
 " Please don't be quite so colloquial or shall I say vidgar? " 
 
 " I'll be as damn colloquial as I want to. How do you get 
 that ' thanks to you '? Here about a year ago you jump me 
 for not remembering to give you money. Well, I'm reasonable. 
 I didn't blame you, and I said I was to blame. But have 
 I ever forgotten it since practically? " 
 
 "No. You haven't practically! But that isn't it. I 
 ought to have an allowance. I will, too! I must have an 
 agreement for a regular stated amount, every month." 
 
 "Fine idea! Of course a doctor gets a regular stated 
 amount! Sure! A thousand one month and lucky if he 
 makes a hundred the next." 
 
 "Very well then, a percentage. Or something else. No 
 matter how much you vary, you can make a rough average 
 for " 
 
 " But what's the idea? What are you trying to get at? 
 Mean to say I'm unreasonable? Think I'm so unreliable and 
 tightwad that you've got to tie me down with a contract? 
 By God, that hurts! I thought I'd been pretty generous and 
 decent, and I took a lot of pleasure thinks I, ' she'll be tickled 
 when I hand her over this twenty ' or fifty, or whatever it 
 was; and now seems you been wanting to make it a kind of 
 alimony. Me, like a poor fool, thinking I was liberal all the 
 while, and you " 
 
 " Please stop pitying yourself! You're having a beautiful 
 time feeling injured. I admit all you say. Certainly. You've 
 given me money both freely and amiably. Quite as if I were 
 your mistress! " 
 
170 MAIN STREET 
 
 " Carrie! " 
 
 " I mean it! What was a magnificent spectacle of generosity 
 to you was humiliation to me. You gave me money gave it 
 to your mistress, if she was complaisant, and then you -" 
 
 " Carrie! " 
 
 " (Don't interrupt me! ) then you felt you'd discharged 
 all obligation. Well, hereafter I'll refuse your money, as a gift. 
 Either I'm your partner, in charge of the household department 
 of our business, with a regular budget for it, or else I'm 
 nothing. If I'm to be a mistress, I shall choose my lovers. Oh, 
 I hate it I hate it this smirking and hoping for money and 
 then not even spending it on jewels as a mistress has a right 
 to, but spending it on double-boilers and socks for you! 
 Yes indeed! You're generous! You give me a dollar, right 
 out the only proviso is that I must spend it on a tie for you! 
 And you give it when and as you wish. How can I be any- 
 thing but uneconomical? " 
 
 " Oh well, of course, looking at it that way " 
 
 " I can't shop around, can't buy in large quantities, have 
 to stick to stores where I have a charge account, good deal 
 of the time, can't plan because I don't know how much money 
 I can depend on. That's what I pay for your charming sen- 
 timentalities about giving so generously. You make me " 
 
 " Wait! Wait! You know you're exaggerating. You never 
 thought about that mistress stuff till just this minute! Matter 
 of fact, you never have ' smirked and hoped for money.' But 
 all the same, you may be right. You ought to run the house- 
 hold as a business. I'll figure out a definite plan tomorrow, 
 and hereafter you'll be on a regular amount or percentage, with 
 your own checking account." 
 
 " Oh, that is decent of you! " She turned toward him, 
 trying to be affectionate. But his eyes were pink and unlovely 
 in the flare of tjie match with which he lighted his dead and 
 malodorous cigar. His head drooped, and a ridge of flesh 
 scattered with pale small bristles bulged out under his chin. 
 
 She sat in abeyance till he croaked: 
 
 " No. 'Tisn't especially decent. It's just fair. And God 
 knows I want to be fair. But I expect others to be fair, too. 
 And you're so high and mighty about people. Take Sam 
 Clark; best soul that ever lived, honest and loyal and a damn 
 good fellow " 
 
 (" Yes, and a good shot at ducks, don't forget that! ") 
 
MAIN STREET 171 
 
 (" Well, and he is a good shot, too! ) Sam drops around in 
 the evening to sit and visit, and by golly just because he 
 takes a dry smoke and rolls his cigar around in his mouth, and 
 maybe spits a few times, you look at him as if he was a hog. 
 Oh, you didn't know I was onto you, and I certainly hope 
 Sam hasn't noticed it, but I never miss it." 
 
 " I have felt that way. Spitting ugh! But I'm sorry you 
 caught my thoughts. I tried to be nice; I tried to hide them." 
 
 " Maybe I catch a whole lot more than you think I do! " 
 
 " Yes, perhaps you do." 
 
 "And d' you know why Sam doesn't light his cigar when 
 he's here? " 
 
 " Why? " 
 
 " He's so darn afraid you'll be offended if he smokes. You 
 scare him. Every time he speaks of the weather you jump 
 him because he ain't talking about poetry or Gertie Goethe? 
 or some other highbrow junk. You've got him so leery he 
 scarcely dares to come here." 
 
 " Oh, I am sorry. (Though I'm sure it's you who are exag- 
 gerating now.") 
 
 " Well now, I don't know as I am! And I can tell you one 
 thing: if you keep on you'll manage to drive away every friend 
 I've got." 
 
 " That would be horrible of me. You know I don't mean 
 
 to Will, what is it about me that frightens Sam if I 
 
 do frighten him." 
 
 " Oh, you do, all right! 'Stead of putting his legs up on 
 another chair, and unbuttoning his vest, and telling a good 
 story or maybe kidding me about something, he sits on the 
 edge of his chair and tries to make conversation about politics, 
 and he doesn't even cuss, and Sam's never real comfortable 
 unless he can cuss a little! " 
 
 " In other words, he isn't comfortable unless he can behave 
 like a peasant in a mud hut! " 
 
 " Now that'll be about enough of that! You want to know 
 how you scare him? First you deliberately fire some question 
 at him that you know darn well he can't answer any fool 
 could see you were experimenting with him and then you 
 shock him by talking of mistresses or something, like you were 
 doing just now " 
 
 " Of course the pure Samuel never speaks of such erring 
 ladies in his private conversations! " 
 
172 MAIN STREET 
 
 "Not when there's ladies around! You can bet your life 
 on that! " 
 
 " So the impurity lies in failing to pretend that " 
 
 " Now we won't go into all that eugenics or whatever damn 
 fad you choose to call it. As I say, first you shock him, and 
 then you become so darn flighty that nobody can follow you. 
 Either you want to dance, or you bang the piano, or else you 
 get moody as the devil and don't want to talk or anything 
 else. If you must be temperamental, why can't you be that 
 way by yourself? " 
 
 " My dear man, there's nothing I'd like better than to be 
 by myself occasionally! To have a room of my own! I 
 suppose you expect me to sit here and dream delicately and 
 satisfy my f temperamentality ' while you wander in from the 
 bathroom with lather all over your face, and shout, i Seen my 
 brown pants? ' " 
 
 "Huh! " He did not sound impressed. He made no an- 
 swer. He turned out of bed, his feet making one solid thud 
 on the floor. He marched from the room, a grotesque figure 
 in baggy union-pajamas. She heard him drawing a drink of 
 water at the bathroom tap. She was furious at the con- 
 temptuousness of his exit. She snuggled down in bed, and' 
 looked away from him as he returned. He ignored her. As 
 he flumped into bed he yawned, and casually stated: 
 
 " Well, you'll have plenty of privacy when we build a new 
 house." 
 
 "When! " 
 
 " Oh, I'll build it all right, don't you fret! But of course 
 I don't expect any credit for it." 
 
 Now it was she who grunted " Huh! " and ignored him, 
 and felt independent and masterful as she shot up out of bed, 
 turned her back on him, fished a lone and petrified chocolate 
 out of her glove-box in the top right-hand drawer of the 
 bureau, gnawed at it, found that it had cocoanut filling, said 
 " Damn! " wished that she had not said it, so that she might 
 be superior to his colloquialism, and hurled the chocolate into 
 the wastebasket, where it made an evil and mocking clatter 
 among the debris of torn linen collars and toothpaste box. 
 Then, in great dignity and self-dramatization, she returned to 
 bed. 
 
 All this time he had been talking on, embroidering his as- 
 sertion that he " didn't expect any credit." She was reflecting 
 
MAIN STREET 173 
 
 that he was a rustic, that she hated him, that she had been 
 insane to marry him, that she had married him only because 
 she was tired of work, that she must get her long gloves 
 cleaned, that she would never do anything more for him, and 
 that she mustn't forget his hominy for breakfast. She was 
 roused to attention by his storming: 
 
 " I'm a fool to think about a new house. By the time I 
 get it built you'll probably have succeeded in your plan to get 
 me completely in Dutch with every friend and every patient 
 I've got." 
 
 She sat up with a bounce. She said coldly, "Thank you 
 very much for revealing your real opinion of me. If that's the 
 way you feel, if I'm such a hindrance to you, I can't stay 
 under this roof another minute. And I am perfectly well able 
 to earn my own living. I will go at once, and you may get a 
 divorce at your pleasure! What you want is a nice sweet cow 
 of a woman who will enjoy having your dear friends talk about 
 the weather and spit on the floor! " 
 
 "Tut! Don't be a fool! " 
 
 "You will very soon find out whether I'm a fool or not! 
 I mean it! Do you think I'd stay here one second after I 
 found out that I was injuring you? At least I have enough 
 sense of justice not to do that." 
 
 " Please stop flying off at tangents, Carrie. This " 
 
 " Tangents? Tangents! Let me tell you " 
 
 " isn't a theater-play; it's a serious effort to have us 
 
 get together on fundamentals. We've both been cranky, and 
 said a lot of things we didn't mean. I wish we were a couple o' 
 bloomin' poets and just talked about roses and moonshine, but 
 we're human. All right. Let's cut out jabbing at each other. 
 Let's admit we both do fool things. See here: You know you 
 feel superior to folks. You're not as bad as I say, but you're 
 not as good as you say not by a long shot! What's the reason 
 you're so superior? Why can't you take folks as they are? " 
 
 Her preparations for stalking out of the Doll's House were 
 not yet visible. She mused: 
 
 " I think perhaps it's my childhood." She halted. When 
 she went on her voice had an artificial sound, her words the 
 bookish quality of emotional meditation. " My father was the 
 tenderest man in the world, but he did feel superior to ordinary 
 
 people. Well, he was ! And the Minnesota Valley I used 
 
 to sit there on the cliffs above Mankato for hours at a time, 
 
174 MAIN STREET 
 
 my chin in my hand, looking way down the valley, wanting to 
 write poems. The shiny tilted roofs below me, and the river, 
 and beyond it the level fields in the mist, and the rim of 
 
 palisades across It held my thoughts in. I lived, in the 
 
 valley. But the prairie all my thoughts go flying off into the 
 big space. Do you think it might be that? " 
 
 " Urn, well, maybe, but Carrie, you always talk so 
 
 much about getting all you can out of life, and not letting 
 the years slip by, and here you deliberately go and deprive 
 yourself of a lot of real good home pleasure by not enjoying 
 people unless they wear frock coats and trot out " 
 
 (" Morning clothes. Oh. Sorry. Didn't mean t' interrupt 
 you.") 
 
 " to a lot of tea-parties. Take Jack Elder. You think 
 
 Jack hasn't got any ideas about anything but manufacturing 
 and the tariff on lumber. But do you know that Jack is 
 nutty about music? He'll put a grand-opera record on the 
 
 phonograph and sit and listen to it and close his eyes Or 
 
 you take Lym Cass. Ever realize what a well-informed man 
 he is? " 
 
 " But is he? Gopher Prairie calls anybody ' well-informed ' 
 who's been through the State Capitol and heard about Glad- 
 stone." 
 
 "Now I'm telling you! Lym reads a lot solid stuff his- 
 tory. Or take Mart Mahoney, the garageman. He's got a lot 
 of Perry prints of famous pictures in his office. Or old Bing- 
 ham Playfair, that died here 'bout a year ago lived seven miles 
 out. He was a captain in the Civil War, and knew General 
 Sherman, and they say he was a miner in Nevada right along- 
 side of Mark Twain. You'll find these characters in all these 
 small towns, and a pile of savvy in every single one of them, 
 if you just dig for it." 
 
 "I know. And I do love them. Especially people like 
 Champ Perry. But I can't be so very enthusiastic over the 
 smug cits like Jack Elder." 
 
 " Then I'm a smug cit, too, whatever that is." 
 
 " No, you're a scientist. Oh, I will try and get the music 
 out of Mr. Elder. Only, why can't he let it come out, instead 
 of being ashamed of it, and always talking about hunting dogs? 
 But I will try. Is it all right now? " 
 
 " Sure. But there's one other thing. You might give me 
 some attention, too! " 
 
MAIN STREET 175 
 
 "That's unjust! You have everything I am! " 
 
 " No, I haven't. You think you respect me you always 
 hand out some spiel about my being so * useful.' But you 
 never think of me as having ambitions, just as much as you 
 have! " 
 
 " Perhaps not. I think of you as being perfectly satisfied." 
 
 "Well, I'm not, not by a long shot! I don't want to be 
 a plug general practitioner all my life, like Westlake, and die 
 in harness because I can't get out of it, and have 'em say, 
 ' He was a good fellow, but he couldn't save a cent.' Not that 
 I care a whoop what they say, after I've kicked in and can't 
 hear 'em, but I want to put enough money away so you and 
 I can be independent some day, and not have to work unless 
 I feel like it, and I want to have a good house by golly, I'll 
 have as good a house as anybody in this town! and if we 
 want to travel and see your Tormina or whatever it is, why 
 we can do it, with enough money in our jeans so we won't 
 have to take anything off anybody, or fret about our old age. 
 You never worry about what might happen if we got sick and 
 didn't have a good fat wad salted away, do you! " 
 
 " I don't suppose I do." 
 
 " Well then, I have to do it for you. And if you think for 
 one moment I want to be stuck in this burg all my life, and 
 not have a chance to travel and see the different points of 
 interest and all that, then you simply don't get me. I want 
 to have a squint at the world, much's you do. Only, I'm prac- 
 tical about it. First place, I'm going to make the money 
 I'm investing in good safe farmlands. Do you understand 
 why now? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Will you try and see if you can't think of me as something 
 more than just a dollar-chasing roughneck? " 
 
 " Oh, my dear, I haven't been just! I am difficile. And 
 I won't call on the Dillons! And if Dr. Dillon is working 
 for Westlake and McGanum, I hate him! " 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 THAT December she was in love with her husband. 
 
 She romanticized herself not as a great reformer but as the 
 wife of a country physician. The realities of the doctor's house- 
 hold were colored by her pride. 
 
 Late at night, a step on the wooden porch, heard through 
 her confusion of sleep; the storm-door opened; fumbling over 
 the inner door-panels ; the buzz of the electric bell. Kennicott 
 muttering " Gol darn it," but patiently creeping out of bed, 
 remembering to draw the covers up to keep her warm, feeling 
 for slippers and bathrobe, clumping down-stairs. 
 
 From below, half-heard in her drowsiness, a colloquy in the 
 pidgin-German of the farmers who have forgotten the Old 
 Country language without learning the new: 
 
 " Hello, Barney, wass willst du? " 
 
 " Morgen, doctor. Die Frau ist ja awful sick. All night she 
 been having an awful pain in de belly." 
 
 " How long she been this way? Wie lang, eh? " 
 
 " I dunno, maybe two days." 
 
 " Why didn't you come for me yesterday, instead of waking 
 me up out of a sound sleep? Here it is two o'clock! So spat 
 warum, eh? " 
 
 " Nun aber, I know it, but she got soch a lot vorse last eve- 
 ning. I t'ought maybe all de time it go avay, but it got a lot 
 vorse." 
 
 " Any fever? " 
 
 " Veil ja, I t'ink she got fever." 
 
 " Which side is the pain on? " 
 
 " Huh? " 
 
 " Das Schmertzdie Weh which side is it on? Here? " 
 
 " So. Right here it is." 
 
 " Any rigidity there? " 
 
 " Huh? " 
 
 " Is it rigid stiff I mean, does the belly feel hard to the 
 fingers? " 
 
 176 
 
MAIN STREET 177 
 
 " I dunno. She ain't said yet." 
 
 " What she been eating? " 
 
 " Veil, I t'ink about vot ve alwis eat, maybe corn beef and 
 cabbage and sausage, und so welter. Doc, sie weint immer, all 
 the time she holler like hell. I vish you come." 
 
 " Well, all right, but you call me earlier, next time. Look 
 here, Barney, you better install a 'phone telephone haben. 
 Some of you Dutchmen will be dying one of these days before 
 you can fetch the doctor." 
 
 The door closing. Barney's wagon the wheels silent in the 
 snow, but the wagon-body rattling. Kennicott clicking the 
 receiver-hook to rouse the night telephone-operator, giving a 
 number, waiting, cursing mildly, waiting again, and at last 
 growling, " Hello, Gus, this is the doctor. Say, uh, send me 
 up a team. Guess snow's too thick for a machine. Going 
 eight miles south. All right. Huh? The hell I will! Don't 
 you go back to sleep. Huh? Well, that's all right now, you 
 didn't wait so very darn long. All right, Gus; shoot her 
 along. By! " 
 
 His step on the stairs; his quiet moving about the frigid 
 room while he dressed; his abstracted and meaningless cough. 
 She was supposed to be asleep ; she was too exquisitely drowsy 
 to break the charm by speaking. On a slip of paper laid on 
 the bureau she could hear the pencil grinding against the 
 marble slab he wrote his destination. He went out, hungry, 
 chilly, unprotesting; and she, before she fell asleep again, loved 
 him for his sturdiness, and saw the drama of his riding by 
 night to the frightened household on the distant farm; pictured 
 children standing at a window, waiting for him. He suddenly 
 had in her eyes the heroism of a wireless operator on a ship 
 in a collision; of an explorer, fever-clawed, deserted by his 
 bearers, but going on jungle going 
 
 At six, when the light faltered in as through ground glass 
 and bleakly identified the chairs as gray rectangles, she heard 
 his step on the porch; heard him at the furnace: the rattle 
 of shaking the grate, the slow grinding removal of ashes, the 
 shovel thrust into the coal-bin, the abrupt clatter of the coal 
 as it flew into the fire-box, the fussy regulation of drafts the 
 daily sounds of a Gopher Prairie life, now first appealing to 
 her as something brave and enduring, many-colored and free. 
 She visioned the fire-box: flames turned to lemon and metallic 
 gold as the coal-dust sifted over them; thin twisty flutters of 
 
178 MAIN STREET 
 
 purple, ghost flames which gave no light, slipping up between 
 the dark banked coals. 
 
 It was luxurious in bed, and the house would be warm for 
 her when she rose, she reflected. What a worthless cat she 
 was! What were her aspirations beside his capability? 
 
 She awoke again as he dropped into bed. 
 
 " Seems just a few minutes ago that you started out! " 
 
 "I've been away four hours. I've operated a woman for 
 appendicitis, in a Dutch kitchen. Came awful close to losing 
 her, too, but I pulled her through all right. Close squeak. 
 Barney says he shot ten rabbits last Sunday." 
 
 He was instantly asleep one hour of rest before he had to 
 be up and ready for the farmers who came in early. She 
 marveled that in what was to her but a night-blurred moment, 
 he should have been in a distant place, have taken charge of a 
 strange house, have slashed a woman, saved a life. 
 
 What wonder he detested the lazy Westlake and McGanum! 
 How could the easy Guy Pollock understand this skill and 
 endurance? 
 
 Then Kennicott was grumbling, " Seven-fifteen! Aren't you 
 ever going to get up for breakfast? " and he was not a hero- 
 scientist but a rather irritable and commonplace man who 
 needed a shave. They had coffee, griddle-cakes, and sausages, 
 and talked about Mrs. McGanum's atrocious alligator-hide 
 belt. Night witchery and morning disillusion were alike 
 forgotten in the march of realities and days. 
 
 Familiar to the doctor's wife was the man with an injured 
 leg, driven in from the country on a Sunday afternoon and 
 brought to the house. He sat in a rocker in the back of a 
 lumber-wagon, his face pale from the anguish of the jolting. 
 His leg was thrust out before him, resting on a starch-box and 
 covered with a leather-bound horse-blanket. His drab cou- 
 rageous wife drove the wagon, and she helped Kennicott sup- 
 port him as he hobbled up the steps, into the house. 
 
 " Fellow cut his leg with an ax pretty bad gash Halvor 
 Nelson, nine miles out," Kennicott observed. 
 
 Carol fluttered at the back of the room, childishly excited 
 when she was sent to fetch towels and a basin of water. 
 Kennicott lifted the farmer into a chair and chuckled, " There 
 
MAIN STREET 179 
 
 we are, Halvor! We'll have you out fixing fences and drinking 
 aquavit in a month." The farmwife sat on the couch, expres- 
 sionless, bulky in a man's dogskin coat and unplumbed layers 
 of jackets. The flowery silk handkerchief which she had worn 
 over her head now hung about her seamed neck. Her white 
 wool gloves lay in her lap. 
 
 Kennicott drew from the injured leg the thick red " German 
 sock," the innumerous other socks of gray and white wool, then 
 the spiral bandage. The leg was of an unwholesome dead 
 white, with the black hairs feeble and thin and flattened, and 
 the scar a puckered line of crimson. Surely, Carol shuddered, 
 this was not human flesh, the rosy shining tissue of the amorous 
 poets. 
 
 Kennicott examined the scar, smiled at Halvor and his wife, 
 chanted, " Fine, b' gosh! Couldn't be better! " 
 
 The Nelsons looked deprecating. The farmer nodded a cue 
 to his wife and she mourned: 
 
 " Veil, how much ve going to owe you, doctor? " 
 
 " I guess it'll be Let's see: one drive out and two calls. 
 
 I guess it'll be about eleven dollars in all, Lena." 
 
 " I dunno ve can pay you yoost a little w'ile, doctor." 
 
 Kennicott lumbered over to her, patted her shoulder, roared, 
 " Why, Lord love you, sister, I won't worry if I never get it! 
 You pay me next fall, when you get your crop. . 
 Carrie! Suppose you or Bea could shake up a cup of coffee 
 and some cold lamb for the Nelsons? They got a long cold 
 drive ahead." 
 
 in 
 
 He had been gone since morning; her eyes ached with read- 
 ing; Vida Sherwin could not come to tea. She wandered 
 through the house, empty as the bleary street without. The 
 problem of " Will the doctor be home in time for supper, or 
 shall I sit down without him? " was important in the house- 
 hold. Six was the rigid, the canonical supper-hour, but at 
 half-past six he had not come. Much speculation with Bea: 
 Had the obstetrical case taken longer than he had expected? 
 Had he been called somewhere else? Was the snow much 
 heavier out in the country, so that he should have taken a 
 buggy, or even a cutter, instead of the car? Here in town it 
 had melted a lot, but still 
 
i8o MAIN STREET 
 
 A honking, a shout, the motor engine raced before it was 
 shut off. 
 
 She hurried to the window. The car was a monster at rest 
 after furious adventures. The headlights blazed on the clots 
 of ice in the road so that the tiniest lumps gave mountainous 
 shadows, and the taillight cast a circle of ruby on the snow 
 behind. Kennicott was opening the door, crying, " Here we 
 are, old girl ! Got stuck couple times, but we made it, by golly, 
 we made it, and here we be! Come on! Food! Eatin's! " 
 
 She rushed to him, patted his fur coat, the long hairs smooth 
 but chilly to her fingers. She joyously summoned Bea, " All 
 right! He's here! Well sit right down! " 
 
 IV 
 
 There were, to inform the doctor's wife of his successes, no 
 clapping audiences nor book-reviews nor honorary degrees. 
 But there was a letter written by a German farmer recently 
 moved from Minnesota to Saskatchewan: 
 
 Dear sor, as you haf bin treading mee for a fue Weaks dis 
 Somer and seen wat is rong wit mee so in Regarding to dat i wont 
 to tank you. the Doctor heir say wat shot bee rong wit mee and 
 day give mee som Madsin but it diten halp mee like wat you dit. 
 Now day glaim dat i Woten Neet aney Madsin ad all wat you 
 tink? 
 
 Well i haven ben tacking aney ting for about one &. l / 2 Mont but 
 i dont get better so i like to heir Wat you tink about it i feel like 
 dis Disconfebil feeling around the Stomac after eating and dat 
 Pain around Heard and down the arm and about 3 to Zy 2 Hour 
 after Eating i feel weeak like and dissy and a dull Hadig. Now 
 you gust lett mee know Wat you tink about mee, i do Wat you say. 
 
 She encountered Guy Pollock at the drug store. He looked 
 at her as though he had a right to; he spoke softly. "I 
 haven't see you, the last few days." 
 
 " No. I've been out in the country with Will several times. 
 
 He's so Do you know that people like you and me can 
 
 never understand people like him? We're a pair of hyper- 
 critical loafers, you and I, while he quietly goes and does 
 things." 
 
 She nodded and smiled and was very busy about purchasing 
 boric acid. He stared after her, and slipped away. 
 
MAIN STREET 181 
 
 When she found that he was gone she was slightly dis- 
 concerted. 
 
 She could at times agree with Kennicott that the shaving- 
 and-corsets familiarity of married life was not dreary vulgarity 
 but a wholesome frankness; that artificial reticences might 
 merely be irritating. She was not much disturbed when for 
 hours he sat about the living-room in his honest socks. But 
 she would not listen to his theory that " all this romance stuff 
 is simply moonshine elegant when you're courting, but no 
 use busting yourself keeping it up all your life." 
 
 She thought of surprises, games, to vary the days. She 
 knitted an astounding purple scarf, which she hid under his 
 supper plate. (When he discovered it he looked embarrassed, 
 and gasped, " Is today an anniversary or something? Gosh, 
 I'd forgotten it! ") 
 
 Once she filled a thermos bottle with hot coffee, a corn-flakes 
 box with cookies just baked by Bea, and bustled to his office 
 at three in the afternoon. She hid her bundles in the hall and 
 peeped in. 
 
 The office was shabby. Kennicott had inherited it from a 
 medical predecessor, and changed it only by adding a white 
 enameled operating-table, a sterilizer, a Roentgen-ray ap- 
 paratus, and a small portable typewriter. It was a suite of 
 two rooms: a waiting-room with straight chairs, shaky pine 
 table, and those coverless and unknown magazines which are 
 found only in the offices of dentists and doctors. The room 
 beyond, looking on Main Street, was business-office, consulting- 
 room, operating-room, and, in an alcove, bacteriological and 
 chemical laboratory. The wooden floors of both rooms were 
 bare; the furniture was brown and scaly. 
 
 Waiting for the doctor were two women, as still as though 
 they were paralyzed, and a man in a railroad brakeman's 
 uniform, holding his bandaged right hand with his tanned left. 
 They stared at Carol. She sat modestly in a stiff chair, feeling 
 frivolous and out of place. 
 
 Kennicott appeared at the inner door, ushering out 
 a bleached man with a trickle of wan beard, and consoling him, 
 "All right, Dad. Be careful about the sugar, and mind the 
 diet I gave you. Gat the prescription filled, and come in and 
 
182 MAIN STREET 
 
 see me next week. Say, uh, better, uh, better not drink too 
 much beer. All right, Dad." 
 
 His voice was artificially hearty. He looked absently at 
 Carol. He was a medical machine now, not a domestic machine. 
 " What is it, Carrie? " he droned. 
 
 " No hurry. Just wanted to say hello." 
 
 "Well " " 
 
 Self-pity because he did not divine that this was a surprise 
 party rendered her sad and interesting to herself, and she had 
 the pleasure of the martyrs in saying bravely to him, " It's 
 nothing special. If you're busy long I'll trot home." 
 
 While she waited she ceased to pity and began to mock her- 
 self. For the first time she observed the waiting-room. Oh 
 yes, the doctor's family had to have obi panels and a wide 
 couch and an electric percolator, but any hole was good enough 
 for sick tired common people who were nothing but the one 
 means and excuse for the doctor's existing! No. She couldn't 
 blame Kennicott. He was satisfied by the shabby chairs. He 
 put up with them as his patients did. It was her neglected 
 province she who had been going about talking of rebuilding 
 the whole town! 
 
 When the patients were gone she brought in her bundles. 
 
 " What's those? " wondered Kennicott. 
 
 " Turn your back! Look out of the window! " 
 
 He obeyed not very much bored. When she cried " Now! " 
 a feast of cookies and small hard candies and hot coffee was 
 spread on the roll-top desk in the inner room. 
 
 His broad face lightened. " That's a new one on me! Never 
 was more surprised in my life! And, by golly, I believe I am 
 hungry. Say, this is fine." 
 
 When the first exhilaration of the surprise had declined 
 she demanded, "Will! I'm going to refurnish your waiting- 
 room! " 
 
 " What's the matter with it? It's all right." 
 
 " It is not! It's hideous. We can afford to give your 
 patients a better place. And it would be good business." She 
 felt tremendously politic. 
 
 " Rats! I don't worry about the business. You look here 
 
 now: As I told you Just because I like to tuck a few 
 
 dollars away, I'll be switched if I'll stand for your thinking 
 I'm nothing but a dollar-chasing " 
 
 " Stop it! Quick! I'm not hurting your feelings! I'm not 
 
MAIN STREET 183 
 
 criticizing! Fm the adoring least one of thy harem. I just 
 mean " 
 
 Two days later, with pictures, wicker chairs, a rug, she had 
 made the waiting-room habitable; and Kennicott admitted, 
 " Does look a lot better. Never thought much about it. Guess 
 I need being bullied." 
 
 She was convinced that she was gloriously content in her 
 career as doctor's-wife. 
 
 VII 
 
 She tried to free herself from the speculation and disillusion- 
 ment which had been twitching at her ; sought to dismiss all the 
 opinionation of an insurgent era. She wanted to shine upon 
 the veal-faced bristly-bearded Lyman Cass as much as upon 
 Miles Bjornstam or Guy Pollock. She gave a reception for the 
 Thanatopsis Club. But her real acquiring of merit was in call- 
 ing upon that Mrs. Bogart whose gossipy good opinion was so 
 valuable to a doctor. 
 
 Though the Bogart house was next door she had entered 
 it but three times. Now she put on her new moleskin cap, 
 which made her face small and innocent, she rubbed off the 
 traces of a lip-stick and fled across the alley before her ad- 
 mirable resolution should sneak away. 
 
 The age of houses, like the age of men, has small relation 
 to their years. The dull-green cottage of the good Widow 
 Bogart was twenty years old, but it had the antiquity of Cheops, 
 and the smell of mummy-dust. Its neatness rebuked the 
 street. The two stones by the path were painted yellow; the 
 outhouse was so overmodestly masked with vines and lattice 
 that it was not concealed at all; the last iron dog remaining 
 in Gopher Prairie stood among whitewashed conch-shells upon 
 the lawn. The hallway was dismayingly scrubbed; the kitchen 
 was an exercise in mathematics, with problems worked out in 
 equidistant chairs. 
 
 The parlor was kept for visitors. Carol suggested, "Let's 
 sit in the kitchen. Please don't trouble to light the parlor 
 stove." 
 
 " No trouble at all! My gracious, and you coming so seldom 
 and all, and the kitchen is a perfect sight, I try to keep it 
 clean, but Cy will track mud all over it, I've spoken to 
 him about it a hundred times if I've spoken once, no, you 
 
184 MAIN STREET 
 
 sit right there, dearie, and I'll make a fire, no trouble at all, 
 practically no trouble at all." 
 
 Mrs. Bogart groaned, rubbed her joints, and repeatedly 
 dusted her hands while she made the fire, and when Carol tried 
 to help she lamented, "Oh, it doesn't matter; guess I ain't 
 good for much but toil and workin' anyway; seems as though 
 that's what a lot of folks think." 
 
 The parlor was distinguished by an expanse of rag carpet 
 from which, as they entered, Mrs. Bogart hastily picked one 
 sad dead fly. In the center of the carpet was a rug depicting 
 a red Newfoundland dog, reclining in a green and yellow daisy 
 field and labeled " Our Friend." The parlor organ, tall and 
 thin, was adorned with a mirror partly circular, partly square, 
 and partly diamond-shaped, and with brackets holding a pot 
 of geraniums, a mouth-organ, and a copy of "The Oldtime 
 Hymnal." On the center table was a Sears-Roebuck mail-order 
 catalogue, a silver frame with photographs of the Baptist 
 Church and of an elderly clergyman, and an aluminum tray 
 containing a rattlesnake's rattle and a broken spectacle-lens. 
 
 Mrs. Bogart spoke of the eloquence of the Reverend Mr. 
 Zitterel, the coldness of cold days, the price of poplar wood, 
 Dave Dyer's new hair-cut, and Cy Bogart's essential piety. 
 " As I said to his Sunday School teacher, Cy may be a little 
 wild, but that's because he's got so much better brains than a 
 lot of these boys, and this farmer that claims he caught Cy 
 stealing 'beggies, is a liar, and I ought to have the law on 
 him." 
 
 Mrs. Bogart went thoroughly into the rumor that the girl 
 waiter at Billy's Lunch was not all she might be or, rather, 
 was quite all she might be. 
 
 " My lands, what can you expect when everybody knows 
 what her mother was? And if these traveling salesmen would 
 let her alone she would be all right, though I certainly don't 
 believe she ought to be allowed to think she can pull the wool 
 over our eyes. The sooner she's sent to the school for incorrig- 
 ible girls down at Sauk Centre, the better for all and 
 
 Won't you just have a cup of coffee, Carol dearie, I'm sure 
 you won't mind old Aunty Bogart calling you by your first 
 name when you think how long I've known Will, and I was 
 such a friend of his dear lovely mother when she lived here 
 
 and was that fur cap expensive? But Don't you think 
 
 it's awful, the way folks talk in this town? " 
 
MAIN STREET 185 
 
 Mrs. Bogart hitched her chair nearer. Her large face, with 
 its disturbing collection of moles and lone black hairs, wrinkled 
 cunningly. She showed her decayed teeth in a reproving smile, 
 and in the confidential voice of one who scents stale bedroom 
 scandal she breathed: 
 
 " I just don't see how folks can talk and act like they do. 
 You don't know the things that go on under cover. This 
 town why it's only the religious training Fve given Cy that's 
 
 kept him so innocent of things. Just the other day 
 
 I never pay no attention to stories, but I heard it mighty good 
 and straight that Harry Haydock is carrying on with a girl 
 that clerks in a store down in Minneapolis, and poor Juanita 
 not knowing anything about it though maybe it's the judg- 
 ment of God, because before she married Harry she acted up 
 
 with more than one boy Well, I don't like to say it, and 
 
 maybe I ain't up-to-date, like Cy says, but I always believed 
 a lady shouldn't even give names to all sorts of dreadful things, 
 but just the same I know there was at least one case where 
 Juanita and a boy well, they were just dreadful. And 
 
 and Then there's that Ole Jenson the grocer, that thinks 
 
 he's so plaguey smart, and I know he made up to a farmer's 
 
 wife and And this awful man JPjornstam that does chores, 
 
 and Nat Hicks and " 
 
 There was, it seemed, no person in town who was not living a 
 life of shame except Mrs. Bogart, and naturally she resented 
 it. 
 
 She knew. She had always happened to be there. Once, 
 she whispered, she was going by when an indiscreet window- 
 shade had been left up a couple of inches. Once she had 
 noticed a man and woman holding hands, and right at a 
 Methodist sociable! 
 
 " Another thing Heaven knows I never want to start 
 
 trouble, but I can't help what I see from my back steps, 
 and I notice your hired girl Bea carrying on with the grocery 
 boys and all " 
 
 " Mrs. Bogart! I'd trust Bea as I would myself! " 
 
 "Oh, dearie, you don't understand me! I'm sure she's a 
 good girl. I mean she's green, and I hope that none of these 
 horrid young men that there are around town will get her into 
 trouble! It's their parents' fault, letting them run wild and 
 hear evil things. If I had my way there wouldn't be none of 
 them, not boys nor girls neither, allowed to know anything 
 
i86 MAIN STREET 
 
 about about things till they was married. It's terrible the 
 bald way that some folks talk. It just shows and gives away 
 what awful thoughts they got inside them, and there's nothing 
 can cure them except coming right to God and kneeling down 
 like I do at prayer-meeting every Wednesday evening, and 
 saying, * O God, I would be a miserable sinner except for thy 
 grace.' 
 
 " I'd make every last one of these brats go to Sunday School 
 and learn to think about nice things 'stead of about cigarettes 
 and goings-on and these dances they have at the lodges are 
 the worst thing that ever happened to this town, lot of young 
 
 men squeezing girls and finding out Oh, it's dreadful. 
 
 I've told the mayor he ought to put a stop to them and 
 
 ,There was one boy in this town, I don't want to be suspicious 
 or uncharitable but " 
 
 It was half an hour before Carol escaped. 
 
 She stopped on her own porch and thought viciously: 
 
 11 It that woman is on the side of the angels, then I have 
 no choice; I must be on the side of the devil. But isn't she 
 like me? She too wants to ' reform the town ' ! She too 
 criticizes everybody! She too thinks the men are vulgar and 
 limited! Am I like her? This is ghas-tly! " 
 
 That evening she did not merely consent to play cribbage 
 with Kennicott; she urged him to play; and she worked up 
 a hectic interest in land-deals and Sam Clark. 
 
 VIII 
 
 In courtship days Kennicott had shown her a photograph of 
 Nels Erdstrom's baby and log cabin, but she had never seen 
 the Erdstroms. They had become merely "patients of the 
 doctor." Kennicott telephoned her on a mid-December after- 
 noon, "Want to throw your coat on and drive out to Erd- 
 strom's with me? Fairly warm. Nels got the jaundice." 
 
 " Oh yes! " She hastened to put on woolen stockings, high 
 boots, sweater, muffler, cap, mittens. 
 
 The snow was too thick and the ruts frozen too hard for 
 the motor. They drove out in a clumsy high carriage. Tucked 
 over them was a blue woolen cover, prickly to her wrists, and 
 outside of it a buffalo robe, humble and moth-eaten now, used 
 ever since the bison herds had streaked the prairie a few miles 
 Jo the west. 
 
MAIN STREET 187 
 
 The scattered houses between which they passed in town 
 were small and desolate in contrast to the expanse of huge 
 snowy yards and wide street. They crossed the railroad tracks, 
 and instantly were in the farm country. The big piebald 
 horses snorted clouds of steam, and started to trot. The 
 carriage squeaked in rhythm. Kennicott drove with clucks 
 of " There boy, take it easy! " He was thinking. He paid no 
 attention to Carol. Yet it was he who commented, " Pretty 
 nice, over there," as they approached an oak-grove where 
 shifty winter sunlight quivered in the hollow between two 
 snow-drifts. 
 
 They drove from the natural prairie to a cleared district 
 which twenty years ago had been forest. The country seemed 
 to stretch unchanging to the North Pole: low hill, brush- 
 scraggly bottom, reedy creek, muskrat mound, fields with 
 frozen brown clods thrust up through the snow. 
 
 Her ears and nose were pinched; her breath frosted her 
 collar; her fingers ached. 
 
 " Getting colder," she said. 
 
 " Yup." 
 
 That was all their conversation for three miles. Yet she 
 was happy. 
 
 They reached Nels Erdstrom's at four, and with a throb 
 she recognized the courageous venture which had lured her 
 to Gopher Prairie: the cleared fields, furrows among stumps, 
 a log cabin chinked with mud and roofed with dry hay. But 
 Nels had prospered. He used the log cabin as a barn; and 
 a new house reared up, a proud, unwise, Gopher Prairie house, 
 the more naked and ungraceful in its glossy white paint and 
 pink trimmings. Every tree had been cut down. The house 
 was so unsheltered, so battered by the wind, so bleakly thrust 
 out into the harsh clearing, that Carol shivered. But they 
 were welcomed warmly enough in the kitchen, with its crisp 
 new plaster, its" black and nickel range, its cream separator 
 in a corner. 
 
 Mrs. Erdstrom begged her to sit in the parlor, where there 
 was a phonograph and an oak and leather davenport, the 
 prairie farmer's proofs of social progress, but she dropped down 
 by the kitchen stove and insisted, " Please don't mind me." 
 When Mrs. Erdstrom had followed the doctor out of the room 
 Carol glanced in a friendly way at the grained pine cupboard, 
 the framed Lutheran Konfirmations Attest, the traces of fried 
 
i88 MAIN STREET 
 
 eggs and sausages on the dining table against the wall, and a 
 jewel among calendars, presenting not only a lithographic 
 young woman with cherry lips, and a Swedish advertisement 
 of Axel Egge's grocery, but also a thermometer and a match- 
 holder. 
 
 She saw that a boy of four or five was staring at her from 
 the hall; a boy in gingham shirt and faded corduroy trousers, 
 but large-eyed, firm-mouthed, wide-browed. He vanished, then 
 peeped in again, biting his knuckles, turning his shoulder toward 
 her in shyness. 
 
 Didn't she remember what was it? Kennicott sitting be- 
 side her at Fort Snelling, urging, " See how scared that baby 
 is. Needs some woman like you." 
 
 Magic had fluttered about her then magic of sunset and 
 cool air and the curiosity of lovers. She held out her hands as 
 much to that sanctity as to the boy. 
 
 He edged into the room, doubtfully sucking his thumb. 
 
 " Hello/' she said. " What's your name? " 
 
 " Hee, hee, hee! " 
 
 " You're quite right. I agree with you. Silly people like 
 me always ask children their names." 
 
 " Hee, hee, hee! " 
 
 " Come here and I'll tell you the story of well, I don't 
 know what it will be about, but it will have a slim heroine 
 and a Prince Charming." 
 
 He stood stoically while she spun nonsense. His giggling 
 ceased. She was winning him. Then the telephone bell two 
 long rings, one short. 
 
 Mrs. Erdstrom galloped into the room, shrieked into the 
 transmitter, " Veil? Yes, yes, dis is Erdstrom's place! Heh? 
 Oh, you vant de doctor? " 
 
 Kennicott appeared, growled into the telephone: 
 
 "Well, what do you want? Oh, hello Dave; what do you 
 want? Which Morgenroth's? Adolph's? All right. Am- 
 putation? Yuh, I see. Say, Dave, get Gus to harness up and 
 take my surgical kit down there and have him take some 
 chloroform. I'll go straight down from here. May not get 
 home tonight. You can get me at Adolph's. Huh? No, Carrie 
 can give the anesthetic, I guess. G'-by. Huh? No; tell me 
 about that tomorrow too damn many people always listening 
 in on this farmers' line." 
 . He turned to Carol. " Adolph Morgenroth, farmer ten miles 
 
MAIN STREET 189 
 
 southwest of town, got his arm crushed fixing his cow-shed 
 and a post caved in on him smashed him up pretty bad- 
 may have to amputate, Dave Dyer says. Afraid we'll have 
 to go right from here. Darn sorry to drag you clear down 
 there with me " 
 
 " Please do. Don't mind me a bit." 
 
 "Think you could give the anesthetic? Usually have my 
 driver do it." 
 
 " If you'll tell me how." 
 
 " All right. Say, did you hear me putting one over on these 
 goats that are always rubbering in on party-wires? I hope 
 they heard me! Well. . . . Now, Bessie, don't you worry 
 about Nels. He's getting along all right. Tomorrow you or 
 one of the neighbors drive in and get this prescription filled 
 at Dyer's. Give him a teaspoonful every four hours. Good- 
 by. Hel-lo! Here's the little fellow! My Lord, Bessie, it 
 ain't possible this is the fellow that used to be so sickly? Why, 
 say, he's a great big strapping Svenska now going to be bigger 
 'n his daddy! " 
 
 Kennicott's bluffness made the child squirm with a delight 
 which Carol could not evoke. It was a humble wife who 
 followed the busy doctor out to the carriage, and her ambition 
 was not to play Rachmaninoff better, nor to build town halls, 
 but to chuckle at babies. 
 
 The sunset was merely a flush of rose on a dome of silver, 
 with oak twigs and thin poplar branches against it, but a silo 
 on the horizon changed from a red tank to a tower of violet 
 misted over with gray. The purple road vanished, and without 
 lights, in the darkness of a world destroyed, they swayed on 
 toward nothing. 
 
 It was a bumpy cold way to the Morgenroth farm, and 
 she was asleep when they arrived. 
 
 Here was no glaring new house with a proud phonograph, 
 but a low whitewashed kitchen smelling of cream and cabbage. 
 Adolph Morgenroth was lying on a couch in the rarely used 
 dining-room. His heavy work-scarred wife was shaking her 
 hands in anxiety. 
 
 Carol felt that Kennicott would do something magnificent 
 and startling. But he was casual. He greeted the man, " Well, 
 well, Adolph, have to fix you up, eh? " Quietly, to the wife, 
 "Hat die drug store my schwartze bag hier geschickt? So 
 schon. Wie viel Uhr ist 's? Sieben? Nun, lassen uns ein 
 
190 MAIN STREET 
 
 wenig supper zuerst haben. Got any of that good beer left 
 giebt 's noch Bier? " 
 
 He had supped in four minutes. His coat off, his sleeves 
 rolled up, he was scrubbing his hands in a tin basin in the 
 sink, using the bar of yellow kitchen soap. 
 
 Carol had not dared to look into the farther room while 
 she labored over the supper of beer, rye bread, moist corn- 
 beef and cabbage, set on the kitchen table. The man in there 
 was groaning. In her one glance she had seen that his blue 
 flannel shirt was open at a corded tobacco-brown neck, the 
 hollows of which were sprinkled with thin black and gray hairs. 
 He was covered with a sheet, like a corpse, and outside the 
 sheet was his right arm, wrapped in towels stained with blood. 
 
 But Kennicott strode into the other room gaily, and she 
 followed him. With surprising delicacy in his large fingers 
 he unwrapped the towels and revealed an arm which, below 
 the elbow, was a mass of blood and raw flesh. The man bel- 
 lowed. The room grew thick about her; she was very seasick; 
 she fled to a chair in the kitchen. Through the haze of nausea 
 she heard Kennicott grumbling, " Afraid it will have to come 
 off, Adolph. What did you do? Fall on a reaper blade? 
 We'll fix it right up. Carrie! Carol! " 
 
 She couldn't she couldn't get up. Then she was up, her 
 knees like water, her stomach revolving a thousand times a 
 second, her eyes filmed, her ears full of roaring. She couldn't 
 reach the dining-room. She was going to faint. Then she 
 was in the dining-room, leaning against the wall, trying to 
 smile, flushing hot and cold along her chest and sides, while 
 Kennicott mumbled, " Say, help Mrs. Morgenroth and me 
 carry him in on the kitchen table. No, first go out and shove 
 those two tables together, and put a blanket on them and a 
 clean sheet." 
 
 It was salvation to push the heavy tables, to scrub them, 
 to be exact in placing the sheet. Her head cleared; she was 
 able to look calmly in at her husband and the farmwife while 
 they undressed the wailing man, got him into a clean nightgown, 
 and washed his arm. Kennicott came to lay out his instru- 
 ments. She realized that, with no hospital facilities, yet with 
 no worry about it, her husband her husband was going to 
 perform a surgical operation, that miraculous boldness of which 
 one read in stories about famous surgeons. 
 
 She helped them to move Adolph into the kitchen. The 
 
MAIN STREET 191 
 
 man was in suck a funk that he would not use his legs. He 
 was heavy, and smelled of sweat and the stable. But she put 
 her arm about his waist, her sleek head by his chest; she 
 tugged at him; she clicked her tongue in imitation of Kenni- 
 cott's cheerful noises. 
 
 When Adolph was on the table Kennicott laid a hemispheric 
 steel and cotton frame on his face; suggested to Carol, " Now 
 you sit here at his head and keep the ether dripping about 
 this fast, see? I'll watch his breathing. Look who's here! 
 Real anesthetist! Ochsner hasn't got a better one! Class, 
 eh? ... Now, now, Adolph, take it easy. This won't hurt 
 you a bit. Put you all nice and asleep and it won't hurt a 
 bit. Schweig' mall Bald schlaft man grat wie ein Kind. So! 
 So! Bald geht's besser! " 
 
 As she let the ether drip, nervously trying to keep the 
 rhythm that Kennicott had indicated, Carol stared at her hus- 
 band with the abandon of hero-worship. 
 
 He shook his head. " Bad light bad light. Here, Mrs. 
 Morgenroth, you stand right here and hold this lamp. Hier, 
 und dieses dieses lamp halten so I" 
 
 By that streaky glimmer he worked, swiftly, at ease. The 
 room was still. Carol tried to look at him, yet not look at the 
 seeping blood, the crimson slash, the vicious scalpel. The 
 ether fumes were sweet, choking. Her head seemed to be 
 floating away from her body. Her arm was feeble. 
 
 It was not the blood but the grating of the surgical saw on 
 the living bone that broke her, and she knew that she had 
 been fighting off nausea, that she was beaten. She was lost 
 in dizziness. She heard Kennicott's voice: 
 
 " Sick? Trot outdoors couple minutes. Adolph will stay 
 under now." 
 
 She was fumbling at a door-knob which whirled in insulting 
 circles; she was on the stoop, gasping, forcing air into her 
 chest, her head clearing. As she returned she caught the scene 
 as a whole: the cavernous kitchen, two milk-cans a leaden 
 patch by the wall, hams dangling from a beam, bars of light 
 at the stove door, and in the center, illuminated by a small 
 glass lamp held by a frightened stout woman, Dr. Kennicott 
 bending over a body which was humped under a sheet the 
 surgeon, his bare arms daubed with blood, his hands, in pale- 
 yellow rubber gloves, loosening the tourniquet, his face without 
 emotion save when he threw up his head and clucked at the 
 
192 MAIN STREET 
 
 farmwife, " Hold that light steady just a second more nock 
 bios ein wemg." 
 
 "He speaks a vulgar, common, incorrect German of life 
 and death and birth and the soil. I read the French and 
 German of sentimental lovers and Christmas garlands. And 
 I thought that it was I who had the culture! " she worshiped 
 as she returned to her place. 
 
 After a time he snapped, " That's enough. Don't give him 
 any more ether." He was concentrated on tying an artery. 
 His gruffness seemed heroic to her. 
 
 As he shaped the flap of flesh she murmured, " Oh, you are 
 wonderful! " 
 
 He was surprised. " Why, this is a cinch. Now if it had 
 
 been like last week Get me some more water. Now last 
 
 week I had a case with an ooze in the peritoneal cavity, and 
 by golly if it wasn't a stomach ulcer that I hadn't suspected 
 
 and There. Say, I certainly am sleepy. Let's turn in 
 
 here. Too late to drive home. And tastes to me like a storm 
 coming." 
 
 IX 
 
 They slept on a feather bed with their fur coats over them; 
 in the morning they broke ice in the pitcher the vast flowered 
 and gilt pitcher. 
 
 Kennicott's storm had not come. When they set out it was 
 hazy and growing warmer. After a mile she saw that he was 
 studying a dark cloud in the north. He urged the horses to 
 the run. But she forgot his unusual haste in wonder at the 
 tragic landscape. The pale snow, the prickles of old stubble, 
 and the clumps of ragged brush faded into a gray obscurity. 
 Under the hillocks were cold shadows. The willows about a 
 farmhouse were agitated by the rising wind, and the patches of 
 bare wood where the bark had peeled away were white as the 
 flesh of a leper. The snowy slews were of a harsh flatness. 
 The whole land was cruel, and a climbing cloud of slate-edged 
 blackness dominated the sky. 
 
 " Guess we're about in for a blizzard," speculated Kennicott. 
 " We can make Ben McGonegaFs, anyway." 
 
 " Blizzard? Really? Why But still we used to think 
 
 they were fun when I was a girl. Daddy had to stay home 
 from court, and we'd stand at the window and watch the 
 
MAIN STREET 193 
 
 " Not much fun on the prairie. Get lost. Freeze to death. 
 Take no chances." He chirruped at the horses. They were 
 flying now, the carriage rocking on the hard ruts. 
 
 The whole air suddenly crystallized into large damp flakes. 
 The horses and the buffalo robe were covered with snow; her 
 face was wet; the thin butt of the whip held a white ridge. 
 The air became colder. The snowflakes were harder; they 
 shot in level lines, clawing at her face. 
 
 She could not see a hundred feet ahead. 
 
 Kennicott was stern. He bent forward, the reins firm in his 
 coonskin gauntlets. She was certain that he would get through. 
 He always got through things. 
 
 Save for his presence, the world and all normal living disap- 
 peared. They were lost in the boiling snow. He leaned close 
 to bawl, " Letting the horses have their heads. They'll get us 
 home." 
 
 With a terrifying bump they were off the road, slanting with 
 two wheels in the ditch, but instantly they were jerked back 
 as the horses fled on. She gasped. She tried to, and did not, 
 feel brave as she pulled the woolen robe up about her chin. 
 
 They were passing something like a dark wall on the right. 
 " I know that barn! " he yelped. He pulled at the reins. 
 Peeping from the covers she saw his teeth pinch his lower lip, 
 saw him scowl as he slackened and sawed and jerked sharply 
 again at the racing horses. 
 
 They stopped. 
 
 " Farmhouse there. Put robe around you and come on," he 
 cried. 
 
 It was like diving into icy water to climb out of the carriage, 
 but on the ground she smiled at him, her face little and childish 
 and pink above the buffalo robe over her shoulders. In a 
 swirl of flakes which scratched at their eyes like a maniac 
 darkness, he unbuckled the harness. He turned and plodded 
 back, a ponderous furry figure, holding the horses' bridles, 
 Carol's hand dragging at his sleeve. 
 
 They came to the cloudy bulk of a barn whose outer wall was 
 directly upon the road. Feeling along it, he found a gate, led 
 them into a yard, into the barn. The interior was warm. It 
 stunned them with its languid quiet. 
 
 He carefully drove the horses into stalls. 
 
 Her toes were coals of pain. " Let's run for the house," she 
 said. 
 
194 MAIN STREET 
 
 " Can't. Not yet. Might never find it. Might get lost ten 
 feet away from it. Sit over in this stall, near the horses. 
 We'll rush for the house when the blizzard lifts." 
 
 " I'm so stiff! I can't walk! " 
 
 He carried her into the stall, stripped off her overshoes and 
 boots, stopping to blow on his purple fingers as he fumbled 
 at her laces. He rubbed her feet, and covered her with the 
 buffalo robe and horse-blankets from the pile on the feed-box. 
 She was drowsy, hemmed in by the storm. She sighed: 
 
 "You're so strong and yet so skilful and not afraid of 
 blood or storm or " 
 
 " Used to it. Only thing that's bothered me was the chance 
 the ether fumes might explode, last night." 
 
 " I don't understand." 
 
 " Why, Dave, the darn fool, sent me ether, instead of chloro- 
 form like I told him, and you know ether fumes are mighty 
 inflammable, especially with that lamp right by the table. But 
 I had to operate, of course wound chuck-full of barnyard 
 filth that way." 
 
 " You knew all the time that Both you and I might 
 
 have been blown up? You knew it while you were operating? " 
 
 " Sure. Didn't you? Why, what's the matter? " 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 KENNICOTT was heavily pleased by her Christmas presents, 
 and he gave her a diamond bar-pin. But she could not persuade 
 herself that he was much interested in the rites of the morn- 
 ing, in the tree she had decorated, the three stockings she had 
 hung, the ribbons and gilt seals and hidden messages. He 
 said only: 
 
 " Nice way to fix things, all right. What do you say we 
 go down to Jack Elder 's and have a game of five hundred this 
 afternoon? " 
 
 She remembered her father 's Christmas fantasies: the sacred 
 old rag doll at the top of the tree, the score of cheap presents, 
 the punch and carols, the roast chestnuts by the fire, and the 
 gravity with which the judge opened the children's scrawly 
 notes and took cognizance of demands for sled-rides, for opin- 
 ions upon the existence of Santa Claus. She remembered him 
 reading out a long indictment of himself for being a sentimental- 
 ist, against the peace and dignity of the State of Minnesota. 
 She remembered his thin legs twinkling before their sled 
 
 She muttered unsteadily, " Must run up and put on my shoes 
 slippers so cold." In the not very romantic solitude of the 
 locked bathroom she sat on the slippery edge of the tub and 
 wept. 
 
 Kennicott had five hobbies: medicine, land-investment, Carol, 
 motoring, and hunting. It is not certain in what order he 
 preferred them. Solid though his enthusiasms were in the mat- 
 ter of medicine his admiration of this city surgeon, his 
 condemnation of that for tricky ways of persuading country 
 practitioners to bring in surgical patients, his indignation about 
 fee-splitting, his pride in a new X-ray apparatus none of 
 these beatified him as did motoring. 
 
 He nursed his two-year-old Buick even in winter, when it 
 
i 9 6 MAIN STREET 
 
 was stored in the stable-garage behind the house. He filled 
 the grease-cups, varnished a fender, removed from beneath the 
 back seat the debris of gloves, copper washers, crumpled maps, 
 dust, and greasy rags. Winter noons he wandered out and 
 stared owlishly at the car. He became excited over a fabulous 
 " trip we might take next summer." He galloped to the sta- 
 tion, brought home railway maps, and traced motor-routes from 
 Gopher Prairie to Winnipeg or Des Moines or Grand Marais, 
 thinking aloud and expecting her to be effusive about such 
 academic questions as "Now I wonder if we could stop at 
 Baraboo and break the jump from La Crosse to Chicago? " 
 
 To him motoring was a faith not to be questioned, a high- 
 church cult, with electric sparks for candles, and piston-rings 
 possessing the sanctity of altar-vessels. His liturgy was com- 
 posed of intoned and metrical road-comments: "They say 
 there's a pretty good hike from Duluth to International Falls." 
 
 Hunting was equally a devotion, full of metaphysical con- 
 cepts veiled from Carol. All winter he read sporting-cata- 
 logues, and thought about remarkable past shots : " 'Member 
 that time when I got two ducks on a long chance, just at 
 sunset? " At least once a month he drew his favorite repeat- 
 ing shotgun, his "pump gun," from its wrapper of greased 
 canton flannel; he oiled the trigger, and spent silent ecstatic 
 moments aiming at the ceiling. Sunday mornings Carol heard 
 him trudging up to the attic and there, an hour later, she 
 found him turning over boots, wooden duck-decoys, lunch- 
 boxes, or reflectively squinting at old shells, rubbing their 
 brass caps with his sleeve and shaking his head as he thought 
 about their uselessness. 
 
 He kept the loading- tools he had used as a boy: a capper 
 for shot-gun shells, a mold for lead bullets. When once, in a 
 housewifely frenzy for getting rid of things, she raged, " Why 
 don't you give these away? " he solemnly defended them, 
 "Well, you can't tell; they might come in handy some day." 
 
 She flushed. She wondered if he was thinking of the child 
 they would have when, as he put it, they were "sure they 
 could afford one." 
 
 Mysteriously aching, nebulously sad, she slipped away, half- 
 convinced but only half-convinced that it was horrible and un- 
 natural, this postponement of release of mother-affection, this 
 sacrifice to her opinionation and to his cautious desire for 
 prosperity. 
 
MAIN STREET 197 
 
 "But it would be worse if he were like Sam Clark in- 
 sisted on having children," she considered; then, "If Will 
 were the Prince, wouldn't I demand his child? " 
 
 Kennicott's land-deals were both financial advancement and 
 favorite game. Driving through the country, he noticed which 
 farms had good crops; he heard the news about the restless 
 farmer who was " thinking about selling out here and pulling 
 his freight for Alberta." He asked the veterinarian about the 
 value of different breeds of stock; he inquired of Lyman Cass 
 whether or not Einar Gyseldson really had had a yield of forty 
 bushels of wheat to the acre. He was always consulting Julius 
 Flickerbaugh, who handled more real estate than law, and more 
 law than justice. He studied township maps, and read notices 
 of auctions. 
 
 Thus he was able to buy a quarter-section of land for one 
 hundred and fifty dollars an acre, and to sell it in a year or 
 two, after installing a cement floor in the barn and running 
 water in the house, for one hundred and eighty or even two 
 hundred. 
 
 He spoke of these details to Sam Clark. . . . rather 
 often. 
 
 In all his games, cars and guns and land, he expected Carol 
 to take an interest. But he did not give her the facts which 
 might have created interest. He talked only of the obvious and 
 tedious aspects; never of his aspirations in finance, nor of the 
 mechanical principles of motors. 
 
 This month of romance she was eager to understand his 
 hobbies. She shivered in the garage while he spent half an hour 
 in deciding whether to put alcohol or patent non-freezing liquid 
 into the radiator, or to drain out the water entirely. " Or no, 
 then I wouldn't want to take her out if it turned warm 
 still, of course, I could fill the radiator again wouldn't take 
 so awful long just take a few pails of water still, if it turned 
 
 cold on me again before I drained it Course there's some 
 
 people that put in kerosene, but they say it rots the hose-con- 
 nections and Where did I put that lug-wrench? " 
 
 It was at this point that she gave up being a motorist and 
 retired to the house. 
 
 In their new intimacy he was more communicative about his 
 practise; he informed her, with the invariable warning not to 
 tell, that Mrs. Sunderquist had another baby coming, that the 
 " hired girl at Rowland's was in trouble." But when she asked 
 
198 MAIN STREET 
 
 technical questions he did not know how to answer; when she 
 inquired, " Exactly what is the method of taking out the ton- 
 sils? " he yawned, " Tonsilectomy? Why you just If 
 
 there's pus, you operate. Just take 'em out. Seen the news- 
 paper? What the devil did Bea do with it? " 
 She did not try again. 
 
 m 
 
 They had gone to the " movies." The movies were almost 
 as vital to Kennicott and the other solid citizens of Gopher 
 Prairie as land-speculation and guns and automobiles. 
 
 The feature film portrayed a brave young Yankee who con- 
 quered a South American republic. He turned the natives from 
 their barbarous habits of singing and laughing to the vigorous 
 sanity, the Pep and Punch and Go, of the North; he taught 
 them to work in factories, to wear Klassy Kollege Klothes, and 
 to shout, " Oh, you baby doll, watch me gather in the mazuma." 
 He changed nature itself. A mountain which had borne noth- 
 ing but lilies and cedars and loafing clouds was by his Hustle 
 so inspirited that it broke out in long wooden sheds, and piles 
 of iron ore to be converted into steamers to carry iron ore 
 to be converted into steamers to carry iron ore. 
 
 The intellectual tension induced by the master film was re- 
 lieved by a livelier, more lyric and less philosophical drama: 
 Mack Schnarken and the Bathing Suit Babes in a comedy of 
 manners entitled " Right on the Coco." Mr. Schnarken was at 
 various high moments a cook, a life-guard, a burlesque actor, 
 and a sculptor. There was a hotel hallway up which policemen 
 charged, only to be stunned by plaster busts hurled upon them 
 from the innumerous doors. If the plot lacked lucidity, the 
 dual motif of legs and pie was clear and sure. Bathing and 
 modeling were equally sound occasions for legs; the wedding- 
 scene was but an approach to the thunderous climax when Mr. 
 Schnarken slipped a piece of custard pie into the clergyman's 
 rear pocket. 
 
 The audience in the Rosebud Movie Palace squealed and 
 wiped their eyes; they scrambled under the seats for over- 
 shoes, mittens, and mufflers, while the screen announced that 
 next week Mr. Schnarken might be seen in a new, riproaring, 
 extra-special superfeature of the Clean Comedy Corporation 
 entitled, " Under Mollie's Bed." 
 
MAIN STREET 199 
 
 " I'm glad," said Carol to Kennicott as they stooped before 
 the northwest gale which was torturing the barren street, " that 
 this is a moral country. We don't allow any of these beastly 
 frank novels." 
 
 " Yump. Vice Society and Postal Department won't stand 
 for them. The American people don't like filth." 
 
 " Yes. It's fine. I'm glad we have such dainty romances as 
 ' Right on the Coco ' instead." 
 
 " Say what in heck do you think you're trying to do? Kid 
 me?" 
 
 He was silent. She awaited his anger. She meditated upon 
 his gutter patois, the Boeotian dialect characteristic of Gopher 
 Prairie. He laughed puzzlingly. When they came into the 
 glow of the house he laughed again. He condescended: 
 
 " I've got to hand it to you. You're consistent, all right. 
 I'd of thought that after getting this look-in at a lot of good 
 decent farmers, you'd get over this high-art stuff, but you 
 hang right on." 
 
 " Well ", To herself: " He takes advantage of my try- 
 ing to be good." 
 
 "Tell you, Carrie: There's just three classes of people: 
 folks that haven't got any ideas at all; and cranks that kick 
 about everything; and Regular Guys, the fellows with stick- 
 tuitiveness, that boost and get the world's work done." 
 
 :< Then I'm probably a crank." She smiled negligently. 
 
 " No. I won't admit it. You do like to talk, but at a 
 show-down you'd prefer Sam Clark to any damn long-haired 
 artist." 
 
 Oh well " 
 
 " Oh well! " mockingly. " My, we're just going to change 
 everything, aren't we! Going to tell fellows that have been 
 making movies for ten years how to direct 'em; and tell archi- 
 tect^ how to build towns; and make the magazines publish 
 nothing but a lot of highbrow stories about old maids, and 
 about wives that don't know what they want. Oh, we're 
 a terror! . . . Come on now, Carrie; come out of it; 
 wake up! You've got a fine nerve, kicking about a movie be- 
 cause it shows a few legs! Why, you're always touting these 
 Greek dancers, or whatever they are, that don't even wear a 
 shimmy! " 
 
 " But, dear, the trouble with that film it wasn't that it 
 got in so many legs, but that it giggled coyly and promised 
 
200 MAIN STREET 
 
 to show more of them, and then didn't keep the promise. It 
 was Peeping Tom's idea of humor." 
 
 " I don't get you. Look here now " 
 
 She lay awake, while he rumbled with sleep. 
 
 " I must go on. My * crank ideas,' he calls them. I thought 
 that adoring him, watching him operate, would be enough. It 
 isn't. Not after the first thrill. 
 
 " I don't want to hurt him. But I must go on. 
 
 " It isn't enough, to stand by while he fills an automobile 
 radiator and chucks me bits of information. 
 
 "If I stood by and admired him long enough, I would be 
 content. I would become a ' nice little woman.' The Village 
 
 Virus. Already I'm not reading anything. I haven't 
 
 touched the piano for a week. I'm letting the days drown in 
 worship of l a good deal, ten plunks more per acre/ I won't! 
 I won't succumb! 
 
 "How? I've failed at everything: the Thanatopsis, par- 
 ties, pioneers, city hall, Guy and Vida. But It doesn't 
 
 matter I I'm not trying to ' reform the town ' now. I'm not 
 trying to organize Browning Clubs, and sit in clean white 
 kids yearning up at lecturers with ribbony eyeglasses. I am 
 trying to save my soul. 
 
 " Will Kennicott, asleep there, trusting me, thinking he holds 
 me. And I'm leaving him. All of me left him when he laughed 
 at me. It wasn't enough for him that I admired him; I must 
 change myself and grow like him. He takes advantage. No 
 more. It's finished. I will go on." 
 
 IV 
 
 Her violin lay on top of the upright piano. She picked it 
 up. Since she had last touched it the dried strings had snapped, 
 and upon it lay a gold and crimson cigar-band. 
 
 She longed to see Guy Pollock, for the confirming of the 
 brethren in the faith. But Kennicott's dominance was heavy 
 upon her. She could not determine whether she was checked 
 by fear or him, or by inertia by dislike of the emotional labor 
 of the " scenes " which would be involved in asserting inde- 
 pendence. She was like the revolutionist at fifty: not afraid 
 
MAIN STREET 201 
 
 of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad 
 breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades. 
 
 The second evening after the movies she impulsively sum- 
 moned Vida Sherwin and Guy to the house for pop-corn and 
 cider. In the living-room Vida and Kennicott debated " the 
 value of manual training in grades below the eighth," while 
 Carol sat beside Guy at the dining table, buttering pop-corn. 
 She was quickened by the speculation in his eyes. She 
 murmured: 
 
 " Guy, do you want to help me? " 
 
 " My dear! How? " 
 
 " I don't know! " 
 
 He waited. 
 
 " I think I want you to help me find out what has made the 
 darkness of the women. Gray darkness and shadowy trees. 
 We're all in it, ten million women, young married women with 
 good prosperous husbands, and business women in linen collars, 
 and grandmothers that gad out to teas, and wives of under- 
 paid miners, and farmwives who really like to make butter and 
 go to church. What is it we want and need? Will Kennicott 
 there would say that we need lots of children and hard work. 
 But it isn't that. There's the same discontent in women with 
 eight children and one more coming always one more coming! 
 And you find it in stenographers and wives who scrub, just 
 as much as in girl college-graduates who wonder how they can 
 escape their kind parents. What do we want? " 
 
 " Essentially, I think, you are like myself, Carol ; you want 
 to go back to an age of tranquillity and charming manners. 
 You want to enthrone good taste again." 
 
 "Just good taste? Fastidious people? Oh no! I be- 
 lieve all of us want the same things we're all together,' 
 the industrial workers and the women and the farmers and the 
 negro race and the Asiatic colonies, and even a few of the 
 Respectables. It's all the same revolt, in all the classes that 
 have waited and taken advice. I think perhaps we want a 
 more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and 
 dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be in- 
 dividualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next 
 generation. We're tired of hearing the politicians and priests 
 and cautious reformers (and the husbands!) coax us, ''Be 
 calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia 
 already made; just give us a bit more time and we'll produce 
 
202 MAIN STREET 
 
 it; trust us; we're wiser than you.' For ten thousand years 
 they've said that. We want our Utopia now and we're going 
 to try our hands at it. All we want is everything for all of 
 us! For every housewife and every longshoreman and every 
 Hindu nationalist and every teacher. We want everything. 
 We sha'n't get it. So we sha'n't ever be content " 
 
 She wondered why he was wincing. He broke in: 
 
 " See here, my dear, I certainly hope you don't class your- 
 self with a lot of trouble-making labor-leaders! Democracy 
 is all right theoretically, and I'll admit there are industrial in- 
 justices, but I'd rather have them than see the world reduced 
 to a dead level of mediocrity. I refuse to believe that you 
 have anything in common with a lot of laboring men rowing 
 for bigger wages so that they can buy wretched flivvers and 
 hideous player-pianos and " 
 
 At this second, in Buenos Ayres, a newspaper editor broke 
 his routine of being bored by exchanges to assert, " Any in- 
 justice is better than seeing the world reduced to a gray level 
 of scientific dullness." At this second a clerk standing at 
 the bar of a New York saloon stopped milling his secret fear 
 of his nagging office-manager long enough to growl at the 
 chauffeur beside him, " Aw, you socialists make me sick! I'm 
 an individualist. I ain't going to be nagged by no bureaus 
 and take orders off labor-leaders. And mean to say a hobo's 
 as good as you and me? " 
 
 At this second Carol realized that for all Guy's love of dead 
 elegances his timidity was as depressing to her as the bulkiness 
 of Sam Clark. She realized that he was not a mystery, as she 
 had excitedly believed; not a romantic messenger from the 
 World Outside on whom she could count for escape. He be- 
 longed to Gopher Prairie, absolutely. She was snatched back 
 from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main 
 Street. 
 
 He was completing his protest, "You don't want to be 
 mixed up in all this orgy of meaningless discontent? " 
 
 She soothed him. " No, I don't. I'm not heroic. I'm 
 scared by all the fighting that's going on in the world. I 
 want nobility and adventure, but perhaps I want still more to 
 curl on the hearth with some one I love." 
 
 "Would you " 
 
 He did not finish it. He picked up a handful of pop-corn, 
 let it run through lu*s fingers, looked at her wistfully. 
 
MAIN STREET 203 
 
 With the loneliness of one who has put away a possible love 
 Carol saw that he was a stranger. She saw. that he had never 
 been anything but a frame on which she had hung shining gar- 
 ments. If she had let him diffidently make love to her, it was 
 not because she cared, but because she did not care, because 
 it did not matter. 
 
 She smiled at him with the exasperating tactfulness of a 
 woman checking a flirtation; a smile like an airy pat on the 
 arm. She sighed, " You're a dear to let me tell you my imagi- 
 nary troubles." She bounced up, and trilled, " Shall we take 
 the pop-corn in to them now? " 
 
 Guy looked after her desolately. 
 
 While she teased Vida and Kennicott she was repeating, " I 
 must go on." 
 
 VI 
 
 Miles Bjornstam, the pariah " Red Swede," had brought 
 his circular saw and portable gasoline engine to the house, to 
 cut the cords of poplar for the kitchen range. Kennicott had 
 given the order; Carol knew nothing of it till she heard the 
 ringing of the saw, and glanced out to see Bjornstam, in 
 black leather jacket and enormous ragged purple mittens, press- 
 ing sticks against the whirling blade, and flinging the stove- 
 lengths to one side. The red irritable motor kept up a red 
 irritable " tip- tip- tip- tip- tip- tip." The whine of the saw rose 
 till it simulated the shriek of a fire-alarm whistle at night, 
 but always at the end it gave a lively metallic clang, and in 
 the stillness she heard the flump of the cut stick falling on the 
 pile. 
 
 She threw a motor robe over her, ran out. Bjornstam wel- 
 comed her, " Well, well, well! Here's old Miles, fresh as ever. 
 Well say, that's all right; he ain't even begun to be cheeky yet; 
 next summer he's going to take you out on his horse-trading 
 trip, clear into Idaho." 
 "Yes, and I may go! " 
 " How's tricks? Crazy about the town yet? " 
 "No, but I probably shall be, some day." 
 " Don't let 'em get you. Kick 'em in the face! " 
 He shouted at her while he worked. The pile of stove- 
 wood grew astonishingly. The pale bark of the poplar sticks 
 was mottled with lichens of sage-green and dusty gray; the 
 newly sawed ends were fresh-colored, with the agreeable 
 
204 MAIN STREET 
 
 roughness of a woolen muffler. To the sterile winter air the 
 wood gave a scent of March sap. 
 
 Kennicott telephoned that he was going into the country. 
 Bjornstam had not finished his work at noon, and she invited 
 him to have dinner with Bea in the kitchen. She wished that 
 she were independent enough to dine with these her guests. 
 She considered their friendliness, she sneered at " social dis- 
 tinctions," she raged at her own taboos and she continued to 
 regard them as retainers and herself as a lady. She sat in 
 the dining-room and listened through the door to Bjornstam's 
 booming and Bea's giggles. She was the more absurd to her- 
 self in that, after the rite of dining alone, she could go out to 
 the kitchen, lean against the sink, and talk to them. 
 
 They were attracted to each other; a Swedish Othello and 
 Desdemona, more useful and amiable than their prototypes. 
 Bjornstam told his scapes: selling horses in a Montana min- 
 ing-camp, breaking a log-jam, being impertinent to a " two- 
 fisted " millionaire lumberman. Bea gurgled " Oh my! " and 
 kept his coffee cup filled. 
 
 He took a long time to finish the wood. He had frequently 
 to go into the kitchen to get warm. Carol heard him con- 
 fiding to Bea, "You're a darn nice Swede girl. I guess if 
 I had a woman like you I wouldn't be such a sorehead. Gosh, 
 your kitchen is clean; makes an old bach feel sloppy. Say, 
 that's nice hair you got. Huh? Me fresh? Saaaay, girl, if 
 I ever do get fresh, you'll know it. Why, I could pick you up 
 with one finger, and hold you in the air long enough to read 
 Robert J. Ingersoll clean through. Ingersoll? Oh, he's a 
 religious writer. Sure. You'd like him fine." 
 
 When he drove off he waved to Bea; and Carol, lonely at the 
 window above, was envious of their pastoral. 
 
 "And I But I will go on." 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 THEY were driving down the lake to the cottages that moonlit 
 January night, twenty of them in the bob-sled. They sang 
 " Toy Land " and " Seeing Nelly Home "; they leaped from the 
 low back of the sled to race over the slippery snow ruts; and 
 when they were tired they climbed on the runners for a lift. 
 The moon-tipped flakes kicked up by the horses settled over the 
 revelers and dripped down their necks, but they laughed, yelped, 
 beat their leather mittens against their chests. The harness 
 rattled, the sleigh-bells were frantic, Jack Elder's setter sprang 
 beside the horses, barking. 
 
 For a time Carol raced with them. The cold air gave 
 fictive power. She felt that she could run on all night, leap 
 twenty feet at a stride. But the excess of energy tired her, and 
 she was glad to snuggle under the comforters which covered the 
 hay in the sled-box. 
 
 In the midst of the babel she found enchanted quietude. 
 
 Along the road the shadows from oak-branches were inked 
 on the snow like bars of music. Then the sled came out on the 
 surface of Lake Minniemashie. Across the thick ice was a 
 veritable road, a short-cut for farmers. On the glaring ex- 
 panse of the lake levels of hard crust, flashes of green ice 
 blown clear, chains of drifts ribbed like the sea-beach the 
 moonlight was overwhelming. It stormed on the snow, it 
 turned the woods ashore into crystals of fire. The night was 
 tropical and voluptuous. In that drugged magic there was no 
 difference between heavy heat and insinuating cold. 
 
 Carol was dream-strayed. The turbulent voices, even Guy 
 Pollock being connotative beside her, were nothing. She re- 
 peated: 
 
 Deep on the convent-roof the snows 
 Are sparkling to the moon. 
 
 The words and the light blurred into one vast indefinite 
 happiness, and she believed that some great thing was coming 
 
 205 
 
206 MAIN STREET 
 
 to her. She withdrew from the clamor into a worship of in- 
 comprehensible gods. The night expanded, she was conscious 
 of the universe, and all mysteries stooped down to her. 
 
 She was jarred out of her ecstasy as the bob-sled bumped up 
 the steep road to the bluff where stood the cottages. 
 
 They dismounted at Jack Elder's shack. The interior walls 
 of unpainted boards, which had been grateful in August, were 
 forbidding in the chill. In fur coats and mufflers tied over 
 caps they were a strange company, bears and walruses talk- 
 ing. Jack Elder lighted the shavings waiting in the belly of a 
 cast-iron stove which was like an enlarged bean-pot. They 
 piled their wraps high on a rocker, and cheered the rocker as 
 it solemnly tipped over backward. 
 
 Mrs. Elder and Mrs. Sam Clark made coffee in an enormous 
 blackened tin pot; Vida Sherwin and Mrs. McGanum unpacked 
 doughnuts and gingerbread; Mrs. Dave Dyer warmed up " hot 
 dogs " frankfurters in rolls ; Dr. Terry Gould, after announc- 
 ing, "Ladies and gents, prepare to be shocked; shock line 
 forms on the right," produced a bottle of bourbon whisky. 
 
 The others danced, muttering " Ouch! " as their frosted feet 
 struck the pine planks. Carol had lost her dream. Harry 
 Haydock lifted her by the waist and swung her. She laughed. 
 The gravity of the people who stood apart and talked made 
 her the more impatient for frolic. 
 
 Kennicott, Sam Clark, Jackson Elder, young Dr. McGanum, 
 and James Madison Rowland, teetering on their toes near the 
 stove, conversed with the sedate pomposity of the commercialist. 
 In details the men were unlike, yet they said the same things 
 in the same hearty monotonous voices. You had to look at 
 them to see which was speaking. 
 
 " Well, we made pretty good time coming up," from one 
 any one. 
 
 " Yurrtp, we hit it up after we struck the good going on the 
 lake." 
 
 " Seems kind of slow though, after driving an auto." 
 
 " Yump, it does, at that. Say, how'd you make out with 
 that Sphinx tire you got? " 
 
 " Seems to hold out fine. Still, I don't know's I like it any 
 better than the Roadeater Cord." 
 
 "Yump, nothing better than a Roadeater. Especially the 
 cord. The cord's lots better than the fabric." 
 
 " Yump, you said something Roadeater's a good tire." 
 
MAIN STREET 207 
 
 " Say, how'd you come out with Pete Garsheim on his pay- 
 ments? " 
 
 " He's paying up pretty good. That's a nice piece of land 
 he's got." 
 
 " Yump, that's a dandy farm." 
 
 " Yump, Pete's got a good place there." 
 
 They glided from these serious topics into the jocose insults 
 which are the wit of Main Street. Sam Clark was particularly 
 apt at them. " What's this wild-eyed sale of summer caps 
 you think you're trying to pull off? " he clamored at Harry 
 Haydock. " Did you steal 'em, or are you just overcharging us, 
 as usual? ... Oh say, speaking about caps, d'l ever tell 
 you the good one I've got on Will? The doc thinks he's a 
 pretty good driver, fact, he thinks he's almost got human in- 
 telligence, but one time he had his machine out in the rain, 
 and the poor fish, he hadn't put on chains, and thinks I " 
 
 Carol had heard the story rather often. She fled back 
 to the dancers, and at Dave Dyer's masterstroke of dropping an 
 icicle down Mrs. McGanum's back she applauded hysterically. 
 
 They sat on the floor, devouring the food. The men giggled 
 amiably as they passed the whisky bottle, and laughed, 
 " There's a real sport! " when Juanita Haydock took a sip. 
 Carol tried to follow; she believed that she desired to be drunk 
 and riotous ; but the whisky choked her and as she saw Kenni- 
 cott frown she handed the bottle on repentantly. Somewhat 
 too late she remembered that she had given up domesticity and 
 repentance. 
 
 " Let's play charades! " said Raymie Wutherspoon. 
 
 " Oh yes, do let us," said Ella Stowbody. 
 
 "That's the caper," sanctioned Harry Haydock. 
 
 They interpreted the word " making " as May and King. 
 The crown was a red flannel mitten cocked on Sam Clark's 
 broad pink bald head. They forgot they were respectable. 
 They made-believe. Carol was stimulated to cry: 
 
 " Let's form a dramatic club and give a play! Shall we? 
 It's been so much fun tonight! " 
 
 They looked affable. 
 
 " Sure," observed Sam Clark loyally. 
 
 " Oh, do let us! I think it would be lovely to present 
 ' Romeo and Juliet '! " yearned Ella Stowbody. 
 
 " Be a whale of a lot of fun," Dr. Terry Gould granted. 
 
 " But if we did," Carol cautioned. " it would be awfully 
 
208 MAIN STREET 
 
 silly to have amateur theatricals. We ought to paint our own 
 scenery and everything, and really do something fine. There'd 
 be a lot of hard work. Would you would we all be punctual 
 at rehearsals, do you suppose? " 
 
 "You bet!" "Sure." " That's the idea." " Fellow ought 
 to be prompt at rehearsals," they all agreed. 
 
 " Then let's meet next week and form the Gopher Prairie 
 Dramatic Association! " Carol sang. 
 
 She drove home loving these friends who raced through moon- 
 lit snow, had Bohemian parties, and were about to create- beauty 
 in the theater. Everything was solved. She would be an au- 
 thentic part of the town, yet escape the coma of the Village 
 Virus. . . . She would be free of Kennicott again, without 
 hurting him, without his knowing. 
 
 She had triumphed. 
 
 The moon was small and high now, and unheeding. 
 
 n 
 
 Though they had all been certain that they longed for the 
 privilege of attending committee meetings and rehearsals, the 
 dramatic association as definitely formed consisted only of 
 Kennicott, Carol, Guy Pollock, Vida Sherwin, Ella Stowbody, 
 the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, Raymie Wutherspoon, 
 Dr. Terry Gould, and four new candidates: flirtatious Rita Sim- 
 ons, Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon and Myrtle Cass, an uncomely 
 but intense girl of nineteen. Of these fifteen only seven came 
 to the first meeting. The rest telephoned their unparalleled 
 regrets and engagements and illnesses, and announced that 
 they would be present at all other meetings through eternity. 
 
 Carol was made president and director. 
 
 She had added the Dillons. Despite Kennicott's apprehen- 
 sion the dentist and his wife had not been taken up by the 
 Westlakes but had remained as definitely outside really smart 
 society as Willis Woodford, who was teller, bookkeeper, and 
 janitor in Stowbody's bank. Carol had noted Mrs. Dillon 
 dragging past the house during a bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, 
 looking in with pathetic lips at the splendor of the accepted. 
 She impulsively invited the Dillons to the dramatic associa- 
 tion meeting, and when Kennicott was brusque to them she was 
 unusually cordial, and felt virtuous. 
 
 That self-approval balanced her disappointment at the small- 
 
MAIN STREET 209 
 
 ness of the meeting, and her embarrassment during Raymie 
 Wutherspoon's repetitions of " The stage needs uplifting," and 
 " I believe that there are great lessons in some plays." 
 
 Ella Stowbody, who was a professional, having studied elo- 
 cution in Milwaukee, disapproved of Carol's enthusiasm for 
 recent plays. Miss Stowbody expressed the fundamental princi- 
 ple of the American drama: the only way to be artistic is to 
 present Shakespeare. As no one listened to her she sat back 
 and looked like Lady Macbeth. 
 
 m 
 
 The Little Theaters, which were to give piquancy to Ameri- 
 can drama three or four years later, were only in embryo. But 
 of this fast coming revolt Carol had premonitions. She knew 
 from some lost magazine article that in Dublin were innovators 
 called The Irish Players. She knew confusedly that a man 
 named Gordon Craig had painted scenery or had he written 
 plays? She felt that in the turbulence of the drama she was 
 discovering a history more important than the commonplace 
 chronicles which dealt with senators and their pompous puerili- 
 ties. She had a sensation of familiarity; a dream of sitting 
 in a Brussels cafe and going afterward to a tiny gay theater 
 under a cathedral wall. 
 
 The advertisement in the Minneapolis paper leaped from 
 the page to her eyes: 
 
 The Cosmos School of Music, Oratory, and 
 Dramatic Art announces a program of four 
 one-act plays by Schnitzler, Shaw, Yeats, and 
 Lord Dunsany. 
 
 She had to be there! She begged Kennicott to " run down 
 to the Cities " with her. 
 
 " Well, I don't know. Be fun to take in a show, but why 
 the deuce do you want to see those darn foreign plays, given 
 by a lot of amateurs? Why don't you wait for a regular play, 
 later on? There's going to be some corkers coming: ' Lottie 
 of Two-Gun Rancho,' and ' Cops and Crooks ' real Broad- 
 way stuff, with the New York casts. What's this junk you 
 want to see? Hm. < How He Lied to Her Husband. 7 That 
 doesn't listen so bad. Sounds racy. And, uh, well, I could 
 
210 MAIN STREET 
 
 go to the motor show, I suppose. I'd like to see this new 
 Hup roadster. Well " 
 
 She never knew which attraction made him decide. 
 
 She had four days of delightful worry over the hole in 
 her one good silk petticoat, the loss of a string of beads from 
 her chiffon and brown velvet frock, the catsup stain on her best 
 georgette crepe blouse. She wailed, " I haven't a single solitary 
 thing that's fit to be seen in," and enjoyed herself very much 
 indeed. 
 
 Kennicott went about casually letting people know that he 
 was " going to run down to the Cities and see some shows." 
 
 As the train plodded through the gray prairie, on a windless 
 day with the smoke from the engine clinging to the fields in 
 giant cotton-rolls, in a low and writhing wall which shut off 
 the snowy fields, she did not look out of the window. She 
 closed her eyes and hummed, and did not know that she was 
 humming. 
 
 She was the young poet attacking fame and Paris. 
 
 In the Minneapolis station the crowd of lumberjacks, 
 farmers, and Swedish families with innumerous children and 
 grandparents and paper parcels, their foggy crowding and their 
 clamor confused her. She felt rustic in this once familiar city, 
 after a year and a half of Gopher Prairie. She was certain 
 that Kennicott was taking the wrong trolley-car. By dusk, the 
 liquor warehouses, Hebraic clothing-shops, and lodging- 
 houses on lower Hennepin Avenue were smoky, hideous, ill- 
 tempered. She was battered by the noise and shuttling of the 
 rush-hour traffic. When a clerk in an overcoat too closely 
 fitted at the waist stared at her, she moved nearer to Kennicott's 
 arm. The clerk was flippant and urban. He was a superior 
 person, used to this tumult. Was he laughing at her? 
 
 For a moment she wanted the secure quiet of Gopher 
 Prairie. 
 
 In the hotel-lobby she was self-conscious. She was not 
 used to hotels; she remembered with jealousy how often 
 Juanita Haydock talked of the famous hotels in Chicago. She 
 could not face the traveling salesmen, baronial in large leather 
 chairs. She wanted people to believe that her husband and 
 she were accustomed to luxury and chill elegance; she was 
 faintly angry at him for the vulgar way in which, after sign- 
 ing the register " Dr. W. P. Kennicott & wife," he bellowed at 
 the clerk, " Got a nice room with bath for us, old man? " 
 
MAIN STREET 211 
 
 She gazed about haughtily, but as she discovered that no one 
 was interested in her she felt foolish, and ashamed of her 
 irritation. 
 
 She asserted, " This silly lobby is too florid," and simultan- 
 eously she admired it: the onyx columns with gilt capitals, the 
 crown-embroidered velvet curtains at the restaurant door, the 
 silk-roped alcove where pretty girls perpetually waited for 
 mysterious men, the two-pound boxes of candy and the variety 
 of magazines at the news-stand. The hidden orchestra was 
 lively. She saw a man who looked like a European diplomat, 
 in a loose top-coat and a Homburg hat. A woman with a 
 broadtail coat, a heavy lace veil, pearl earrings, and a close 
 black hat entered the restaurant. "Heavens! That's the 
 first really smart woman I've seen in a year! " Carol exulted. 
 She felt metropolitan. 
 
 But as she followed Kennicott to the elevator the coat- 
 check girl, a confident young woman, with cheeks powdered 
 like lime, and a blouse low and thin and furiously crimson, 
 inspected her, and under that supercilious glance Carol was 
 shy again. She unconsciously waited for the bellboy to precede 
 her into the elevator. When he snorted " Go ahead! " she was 
 mortified. He thought she was a hayseed, she worried. 
 
 The moment she was in their room, with the bellboy safely 
 out of the way, she looked critically at Kennicott. For the 
 first time in months she really saw him. 
 
 His clothes were too heavy and provincial. His decent 
 gray suit, made by Nat Hicks of Gopher Prairie, might have 
 been of sheet iron; it had no distinction of cut, no easy grace 
 like the diplomat's Burberry. His black shoes were blunt and 
 not well polished. His scarf was a stupid brown. He needed 
 a shave. 
 
 But she forgot her doubt as she realized the ingenuities of 
 the room. She ran about, turning on the taps of the bath- 
 tub, which gushed instead of dribbling like the taps at home, 
 snatching the new wash-rag out of its envelope of oiled 
 paper, trying the rose-shaded light between the twin beds, 
 pulling out the drawers of the kidney-shaped walnut desk to 
 examine the engraved stationery, planning to write on it to 
 every one she knew, admiring the claret-colored velvet arm- 
 chair and the blue rug, testing the ice-water tap, and squealing 
 happily when the water really did come out cold. She flung 
 her arms about Kennicott, kissed him. 
 
212 MAIN STREET 
 
 " Like it, old lady? " 
 
 " It's adorable. It's so amusing. I love you for bringing 
 me. You really are a dear! " 
 
 He looked blankly indulgent, and yawned, and condescended, 
 " That's a pretty slick arrangement on the radiator, so you can 
 adjust it at any temperature you want. Must take a big 
 furnace to run this place. Gosh, I hope Bea remembers to 
 turn off the drafts tonight." 
 
 Under the glass cover of the dressing-table was a menu with 
 the most enchanting dishes: breast of guinea hen De Vitresse, 
 pommes de terre a la Russe, meringue Chantilly, gateaux 
 Bruxelles. 
 
 " Oh, let's I'm going to have a hot bath, and put on my 
 
 new hat with the wool flowers, and let's go down and eat for 
 hours, and we'll have a cocktail! " she chanted. 
 
 While Kennicott labored over ordering it was annoying to 
 see him permit the waiter to be impertinent, but as the cock- 
 tail elevated her to a bridge among colored stars, as the 
 oysters came in not canned oysters in the Gopher Prairie 
 fashion, but on the half-shell she cried, " If you only knew 
 how wonderful it is not to have had to plan this dinner, and 
 order it at the butcher's and fuss and think about it, and then 
 watch Bea cook it! I feel so free. And to have new kinds of 
 food, and different patterns of dishes and linen, and not worry 
 about whether the pudding is being spoiled! Oh, this is a 
 great moment for me! " 
 
 IV 
 
 They had all the experiences of provincials in a metropolis. 
 After breakfast Carol bustled to a hair-dresser's, bought gloves 
 and a blouse, and importantly met Kennicott in front of an 
 optician's, in accordance with plans laid down, revised, and 
 verified. They admired the diamonds and furs and frosty 
 silverware and mahogany chairs and polished morocco sewing- 
 boxes in shop-windows, and were abashed by the throngs in the 
 department-stores, and were bullied by a clerk into buying too 
 many shirts for Kennicott, and gaped at the " clever novelty 
 perfumes just in from New York." Carol got three books 
 on the theater, and spent an exultant hour in warning herself 
 that she could not afford this rajah-silk frock, in thinking how 
 envious it would make Juanita Haydock, in closing her eyes, 
 
MAIN STREET 213 
 
 and buying it. Kennicott went from shop to shop, earnestly 
 hunting down a felt-covered device to keep the windshield of 
 his car clear of rain. 
 
 They dined extravagantly at their hotel at night, and next 
 morning sneaked round the corner to economize at a Childs' 
 Restaurant. They were tired by three in the afternoon, and 
 dozed at the motion-pictures and said they wished they were 
 back in Gopher Prairie and by eleven in the evening they were 
 again so lively that they went to a Chinese restaurant that was 
 frequented by clerks and their sweethearts on pay-days. They 
 sat at a teak and marble table eating Eggs Fooyung, and 
 listened to a brassy automatic piano, and were altogether cosmo- 
 politan. 
 
 On the street they met people from home the McGanums. 
 They laughed, shook hands repeatedly, and exclaimed, " Well, 
 this is quite a coincidence! " They asked when the McGanums 
 had come down, and begged for news of the town they had 
 left two days before. Whatever the McGanums were at home, 
 here they stood out as so superior to all the undistinguishable 
 strangers absurdly hurrying past that the Kennicotts held 
 them as long as they could. The McGanums said good-by 
 as though they were going to Tibet instead of to the station 
 to catch No. 7 north. 
 
 They explored Minneapolis. Kennicott was conversational 
 and technical regarding gluten and cockle-cylinders and No. 
 i Hard, when they were shown through the gray stone hulks 
 and new cement elevators of the largest flour-mills in the world. 
 They looked across Loring Park and the Parade to the towers 
 of St. Mark's and the Procathedral, and the red roofs of 
 houses climbing Kenwood Hill. They drove about the chain 
 of garden-circled lakes, and viewed the houses of the millers 
 and lumbermen and real estate peers the potentates of the 
 expanding city. They surveyed the small eccentric bungalows 
 with pergolas, the houses of pebbledash and tapestry brick 
 with sleeping-porches above sun-parlors, and one vast incredible 
 chateau fronting the Lake of the Isles. They tramped through 
 a shining-new section of apartment-houses; not the tall bleak 
 apartments of Eastern cities but low structures of cheerful 
 yellow brick, in which each flat had its glass-enclosed porch 
 with swinging couch and scarlet cushions and Russian brass 
 bowls. Between a waste of tracks and a raw gouged hill they 
 found poverty in staggering shanties. 
 
214 MAIN STREET 
 
 They saw miles of the city which they had never known in 
 their days of absorption in college. They were distinguished 
 explorers, and they remarked, in great mutual esteem, " I bet 
 Harry Haydock's never seen the City like this! Why, he'd 
 never have sense enough to study the machinery in the mills, 
 or go through all these outlying districts. Wonder folks in 
 Gopher Prairie wouldn't use their legs and explore, the way we 
 do!" 
 
 They had two meals with Carol's sister, and were bored, and 
 felt that intimacy which beatifies married people wrien they 
 suddenly admit that they equally dislike a relative of either 
 of them. 
 
 So it was with affection but also with weariness that they 
 approached the evening on which Carol was to see the plays at 
 the dramatic school. Kennicott suggested not going. " So darn 
 tired from all this walking; don't know but what we better 
 turn in early and get rested up." It was only from duty that 
 Carol dragged him and herself out of the warm hotel, into a 
 stinking trolley, up the brownstone steps of the converted 
 residence which lugubriously housed the dramatic school. 
 
 They were in a long whitewashed hall with a clumsy draw- 
 curtain across the front. The folding chairs were filled with 
 people who looked washed and ironed: parents of the pupils, 
 girl students, dutiful teachers. 
 
 " Strikes me it's going to be punk. If the first play isn't 
 good, let's beat it," said Kennicott hopefully. 
 
 " All right," she yawned. With hazy eyes she tried to read 
 the lists of characters, which were hidden among lifeless ad- 
 vertisements of pianos, music-dealers, restaurants, candy. 
 
 She regarded the Schnitzler play with no vast interest. The 
 actors moved and spoke stiffly. Just as its cynicism was be- 
 ginning to rouse her village-dulled frivolity, it was over. 
 
 " Don't think a whale of a lot of that. How about taking 
 a sneak? " petitioned Kennicott. 
 
 "Oh, let's try the next one, 'How He Lied to Her 
 Husband.' " 
 
 The Shaw conceit amused her, and perplexed Kennicott: 
 
 " Strikes me it's darn fresh. Thought it would be racy. 
 Don't know as I think much of a play where a husband 
 
MAIN STREET 215 
 
 actually claims he wants a fellow to make love to his wife. 
 No husband ever did that! Shall we shake a leg? " 
 
 " I want to see this Yeats thing, ' Land of Heart's Desire.' 
 I used to love it in college." She was awake now, and urgent. 
 " I know you didn't care so much for Yeats when I read him 
 aloud to you, but you just see if you don't adore him on 
 the stage." 
 
 Most of the cast were as unwieldy as oak chairs marching, 
 and the setting was an arty arrangement of batik scarfs and 
 heavy tables, but Maire Bruin was slim as Carol, and larger- 
 eyed, and her voice was a morning bell. In her, Carol lived, 
 and on her lifting voice was transported from this sleepy small- 
 town husband and all the rows of polite parents to the stilly 
 loft of a thatched cottage where in a green dimness, beside a 
 window caressed by linden branches, she bent over a chronicle 
 of twilight women and the ancient gods. 
 
 \Vell gosh nice kid played that girl good-looker," said 
 Kennicott. " Want to stay for the last piece? Heh? " 
 
 She shivered. She did not answer. 
 
 The curtain was again drawn aside. On the stage they 
 saw nothing but long green curtains and a leather chair. Two 
 young men in brown robes like furniture-covers were gesturing 
 vacuously and droning cryptic sentences full of repetitions. 
 
 It was Carol's first hearing of Dunsany. She sympathized 
 with the restless Kennicott as he felt in his pocket for a cigar 
 and unhappily put it back. 
 
 Without understanding when or how, without a tangible 
 change in the stilted intoning of the stage-puppets, she was 
 conscious of another time and place. 
 
 Stately and aloof among vainglorious tiring-maids, a queen 
 in robes that murmured on the marble floor, she trod the 
 gallery of a crumbling palace. In the courtyard, elephants 
 trumpeted, and swart men with beards dyed crimson stood with 
 blood-stained hands folded upon their hilts, guarding the 
 caravan from El Sharnak, the camels with Tyrian stuffs of 
 topaz and cinnabar. Beyond the turrets of the outer wall the 
 jungle glared and shrieked, and the sun was furious above 
 drenched orchids. A youth came striding through the steel- 
 bossed doors, the sword-bitten doors that were higher than ten 
 tall men. He was in flexible mail, and under the rim of his 
 planished morion were amorous curls. His hand was out to 
 her; before she touched it she could feel its warmth 
 
2i6 MAIN STREET 
 
 " Gosh all hemlock! What the dickens is all this stuff about, 
 Carrie? " 
 
 She was no Syrian queen. She was Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. 
 She fell with a jolt into a whitewashed hall and sat looking 
 at two scared girls and a young man in wrinkled tights. 
 
 Kennicott fondly rambled as they left the hall: 
 
 " What the deuce did that last spiel mean? Couldn't make 
 head or tail of it. If that's highbrow drama, give me a cow- 
 puncher movie, every time! Thank God, that's over, and we 
 can get to bed. Wonder if we wouldn't make time by walking 
 over to Nicollet to take a car? One thing; I will say for that 
 dump: they had it warm enough. Must have a big hot-air 
 furnace, I guess. Wonder how much coal it takes to run 'em 
 through the winter? " 
 
 In the car he affectionately patted her knee, and he was for 
 a second the striding youth in armor; then he was Doc 
 Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, and she was recaptured by Main 
 Street. Never, not all her life, would she behold jungles and 
 the tombs of kings. There were strange things in the world, 
 they really existed; but she would never see them. 
 
 She would recreate them in plays! 
 
 She would make the dramatic association understand her 
 aspiration. They would, surely they would 
 
 She looked doubtfully at the impenetrable reality of yawning 
 trolley conductor and sleepy passengers and placards adver- 
 tising soap and underwear. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 SHE hurried to the first meeting of the play-reading committee. 
 Her jungle romance had faded, but she retained a religious 
 fervor, a surge of half-formed thought about the creation of 
 beauty by suggestion. 
 
 A Dunsany play would be too difficult for the Gopher Prairie 
 association. She would let them compromise on Shaw on 
 " Androcles and the Lion," which had just been published. 
 
 The committee was composed of Carol, Vida Sherwin, Guy 
 Pollock, Raymie Wutherspoon, and Juanita Haydock. They 
 were exalted by the picture of themselves as being simul- 
 taneously business-like and artistic. They were entertained 
 by Vida in the parlor of Mrs. Elisha Gurrey's boarding-house, 
 with its steel engraving of Grant at Appomattox, its basket of 
 stereoscopic views, and its mysterious stains on the gritty 
 carpet. 
 
 Vida was an advocate of culture-buying and efficiency- 
 systems. She hinted that they ought to have (as at the 
 committee-meetings of the Thanatopsis) a " regular order of 
 business," and " the reading of the minutes," but as there 
 were no minutes to read, and as no one knew exactly what was 
 the regular order of the business of being literary, they had 
 to give up efficiency. 
 
 Carol, as chairman, said politely, " Have you any ideas about 
 what play we'd better give first? " She waited for them to 
 look abashed and vacant, so that she might suggest 
 " Androcles." 
 
 Guy Pollock answered with disconcerting readiness, " I'll 
 tell you: since we're going to try to do something artistic, 
 and not simply fool around, I believe we ought to give some- 
 thing classic. How about ' The School for Scandal ' ? " 
 
 "Why Don't you think that has been done a good 
 
 deal? " 
 
 " Yes, perhaps it has." 
 
 Carol was ready to say, " How about Bernard Shaw? " when 
 
 217 
 
218 MAIN STREET 
 
 he treacherously went on, " How would it be then to give a 
 Greek drama say ' (Edipus Tyrannus ' ? " 
 
 " Why, I don't believe " 
 
 Vida Sherwin intruded, " I'm sure that would be too hard 
 for us. Now I've brought something that I think would be 
 awfully jolly." 
 
 She held out, and Carol incredulously took, a thin gray 
 pamphlet entitled " McGinerty's Mother-in-law." It was the 
 sort of farce which is advertised in " school entertainment " 
 catalogues as: 
 
 Riproaring knock-out, 5 m. 3 f., time 2 hrs., interior set, popular 
 with churches and all high-class occasions. 
 
 Carol glanced from the scabrous object to Vida, and realized 
 that she was not joking. 
 
 " But this is this is why, it's just a Why, Vida, I 
 
 thought you appreciated well appreciated art." 
 
 Vida snorted, "Oh. Art. Oh yes. I do like art. It's 
 very nice. But after all, what does it matter what kind of 
 play we give as long as we get the association started? The 
 thing that matters is something that none of you have spoken 
 of, that is: what are we going to do with the money, if we 
 make any? I think it would be awfully nice if we presented 
 the high school with a full set of Stoddard's travel-lectures! " 
 
 Carol moaned, " Oh, but Vida dear, do forgive me but this 
 farce Now what I'd like us to give is something dis- 
 tinguished. Say Shaw's ' Androcles.' Have any of you read 
 it?" 
 
 " Yes. Good play," said Guy Pollock. 
 
 Then Raymie Wutherspoon astoundingly spoke up: 
 
 " So have I. I read through all the plays in the public 
 
 library, so's to be ready for this meeting. And But I 
 
 don't believe you grasp the irreligious ideas in this f Androcles,' 
 Mrs. Kennicott. I guess the feminine mind is too innocent to 
 understand all these immoral writers. I'm sure I don't want 
 to criticize Bernard Shaw; I understand he is very popular 
 
 with the highbrows in Minneapolis; but just the same As 
 
 far as I can make out, he's downright improper! The things 
 
 he says Well, it would be a very risky thing for our 
 
 young folks to see. It seems to me that a play that doesn't 
 leave a nice taste in the mouth and that hasn't any message 
 is nothing but nothing but Well, whatever it may be, 
 
MAIN STREET 219 
 
 it isn't art. So Now I've found a play that is clean, and 
 
 there's some awfully funny scenes in it, too. I laughed out 
 loud, reading it. It's called ' His Mother's Heart,' and it's 
 about a young man in college who gets in with a lot of free- 
 thinkers and boozers and everything, but in the end his mother's 
 influence " 
 
 Juanita Haydock broke in with a derisive, " Oh rats, Raymie! 
 Can the mother's influence! I say let's give something with 
 some class to it. I bet we could get the rights to l The Girl 
 from Kankakee,' and that's a real show. It ran for eleven 
 months in New York! " 
 
 " That would be lots of fun, if it wouldn't cost too much," 
 reflected Vida. 
 
 Carol's was the only vote cast against "The Girl from 
 Kankakee." 
 
 n 
 
 She disliked "The Girl from Kankakee" even more than 
 she had expected. It narrated the success of a farm-lassie in 
 clearing her brother of a charge of forgery. She became secre- 
 tary to a New York millionaire and social counselor to his 
 wife; and after a well-conceived speech on the discomfort of 
 having money, she married his son. 
 
 There was also a humorous office-boy. 
 
 Carol discerned that both Juanita Haydock and Ella Stow- 
 body wanted the lead. She let Juanita have it. Juanita kissed 
 her and in the exuberant manner of a new star presented to 
 the executive committee her theory, " What we want in a play 
 is humor and pep. There's where American playwrights put it 
 all over these darn old European glooms." 
 
 As selected by Carol and confirmed by the committee, the 
 persons of the play were: 
 
 John Grimm, a millionaire . . . Guy Pollock 
 
 His wife Miss Vida Sherwin 
 
 His son Dr. Harvey Dillon 
 
 His business rival Raymond T. Wutherspoon 
 
 Friend of Mrs. Grimm .... Miss Ella Stowbody 
 
 The girl from Kankakee . . . Mrs. Harold C. Haydock 
 
 Her brother Dr. Terence Gould 
 
 Her mother Mrs. David Dyer 
 
 Stenographer ......;. Miss Rita Simons 
 
 Office-boy Miss Myrtle Cass 
 
 Maid in the Grimms' home . . . Mrs. W. P. Kennicott 
 Direction of Mrs. Kennicott 
 
220 MAIN STREET 
 
 Among the minor lamentations was Maud Dyer's " Well of 
 course I suppose I look old enough to be Juanita's mother, 
 even if Juanita is eight months older than I am, but I don't 
 know as I care to have everybody noticing it and " 
 
 Carol pleaded, "Oh, my dear! You two look exactly the 
 same age. I chose you because you have such a darling com- 
 plexion, and you know with powder and a white wig, anybody 
 looks twice her age, and I want the mother to be sweet, no 
 matter who else is." 
 
 Eila Stowbody, the professional, perceiving that it was be- 
 cause of a conspiracy of jealousy that she had been given a 
 small part, alternated between lofty amusement and Christian 
 patience. 
 
 Carol hinted that the play would be improved by cutting, 
 but as every actor except Vida and Guy and herself wailed 
 at the loss of a single line, she was defeated. She told herself 
 that, after all, a great deal could be done with direction and 
 settings. 
 
 Sam Clark had boastfully written about the dramatic as- 
 sociation to his schoolmate, Percy Bresnahan, president of the 
 Velvet Motor Company of Boston. Bresnahan sent a check 
 for a hundred dollars; Sam added twenty-five and brought the 
 fund to Carol, fondly crying, " There! That'll give you a 
 start for putting the thing across swell! " 
 
 She rented the second floor of the city hall for two months. 
 All through the spring the association thrilled to its own talent 
 in that dismal room. They cleared out the bunting, ballot- 
 boxes, handbills, legless chairs. They attacked the stage. 
 It was a simple-minded stage. It was raised above the floor, 
 and it did have a movable curtain, painted with the adver- 
 tisement of a druggist dead these ten years, but otherwise it 
 might not have been recognized as a stage. There were two 
 dressing-rooms, one for men, one for women, on either side. 
 The dressing-room doors were also the stage-entrances, opening 
 from the house, and many a citizen of Gopher Prairie had for 
 his first glimpse of romance the bare shoulders of the leading 
 woman. 
 
 There were three sets of scenery: a woodland, a Poor In- 
 terior, and a Rich Interior, the last also useful for railway 
 stations, offices, and as a background for the Swedish Quartette 
 from Chicago. There were three gradations of lighting: full 
 on, half on, and entirely off. 
 
MAIN STREET 221 
 
 This was the only theater in Gopher Prairie. It was known 
 as the " op'ra house." Once, strolling companies had used 
 it for performances of " The Two Orphans," and " Nellie the 
 Beautiful Cloak Model," and " Othello " with specialties be- 
 tween acts, but now the motion-pictures had ousted the gipsy 
 drama. 
 
 Carol intended to be furiously modern in constructing the 
 office-set, the drawing-room for Mr. Grimm, and the Humble 
 Home near Kankakee. It was the first time that any one in 
 Gopher Prairie had been so revolutionary as to use enclosed 
 scenes with continuous side-walls. The rooms in the op'ra house 
 sets had separate wing-pieces for sides, which simplified drama- 
 turgy, as the villain could always get out of the hero's way by 
 walking out through the wall. 
 
 The inhabitants of the Humble Home were supposed to be 
 amiable and intelligent. Carol planned for them a simple set 
 with warm color. She could see the beginning of the play: 
 all dark save the high settles and the solid wooden table be- 
 tween them, which were to be illuminated by a ray from off- 
 stage. The high light was a polished copper pot filled with 
 primroses. Less clearly she sketched the Grimm drawing-room 
 as a series of cool high white arches. 
 
 As to how she was to produce these effects she had no 
 notion. 
 
 She discovered that, despite the enthusiastic young writers, 
 the drama was not half so native and close to the soil as motor 
 cars and telephones. She discovered that simple arts require 
 sophisticated training. She discovered that to produce one 
 perfect stage-picture would be as difficult as to turn all of 
 Gopher Prairie into a Georgian garden. 
 
 She read all she could find regarding staging; she bought 
 paint and light wood; she borrowed furniture and drapes un- 
 scrupulously; she made Kennicott turn carpenter. She col- 
 lided with the problem of lighting. Against the protest of 
 Kennicott and Vida she mortgaged the association by sending 
 to Minneapolis for a baby spotlight, a strip light, a dimming 
 device, and blue and amber bulbs; and with the gloating rap- 
 ture of a born painter first turned loose among colors, she 
 spent absorbed evenings in grouping, dimming painting with 
 lights. 
 
 Only Kennicott, Guy, and Vida helped her. They speculated 
 as to how flats could be lashed together to form a wall; they 
 
222 MAIN STREET 
 
 hung crocus-yellow curtains at the windows; they blacked the 
 sheet-iron stove; they put on aprons and swept. The rest 
 of the association dropped into the theater every evening, and 
 were literary and superior. They had borrowed Carol's 
 manuals of play-production and had become extremely stagey 
 in vocabulary. 
 
 Juanita Haydock, Rita Simons, and Raymie Wutherspoon 
 sat on a sawhorse, watching Carol try to get the right position 
 for a picture on the wall in the first scene. 
 
 " I don't want to hand myself anything but I believe I'll 
 give a swell performance in this first act," confided Juanita. 
 "I wish Carol wasn't so bossy though. She doesn't under- 
 stand clothes. I want to wear, oh, a dandy dress I have 
 all scarlet and I said to her, 'When I enter wouldn't it 
 knock their eyes out if I just stood there at the door in this 
 straight scarlet thing? ' But she wouldn't let me." 
 
 Young Rita agreed, " She's so much taken up with her old 
 details and carpentering and everything that she can't see the 
 picture as a whole. Now I thought it would be lovely if we 
 had an office-scene like the one in ' Little, But Oh My ! ' 
 Because I saw that, in Duluth. But she simply wouldn't listen 
 at all." 
 
 Juanita sighed, "I wanted to give one speech like Ethel 
 Barrymore would, if she was in a play like this. (Harry 
 and I heard her one time in Minneapolis we had dandy seats, 
 in the orchestra I just know I could imitate her.) Carol 
 didn't pay any attention to my suggestion. I don't want to 
 criticize but I guess Ethel knows more about acting than 
 Carol does! " 
 
 " Say, do you think Carol has the right dope about using a 
 strip light behind the fireplace in the second act? I told 
 her I thought we ought to use a bunch," offered Raymie. 
 " And I suggested it would be lovely if we used a cyclorama 
 outside the window in the first act, and what do you think 
 she said? l Yes, and it would be lovely to have Eleanora 
 Duse play the lead/ she said, ' and aside from the fact that 
 it's evening in the first act, you're a great technician/ she 
 said. I must say I think she was pretty sarcastic. I've been 
 reading up, and I know I could build a cyclorama, if she didn't 
 want to run everything." 
 
 "Yes, and another thing, I think the entrance in the first 
 act ought to be L. U. E., not L. 3 E.," from Juanita. 
 
MAIN STREET 223 
 
 " And why does she just use plain white tormenters? " 
 " What's a tormenter? " blurted Rita Simons. 
 The savants stared at her ignorance. 
 
 m 
 
 Carol did not resent their criticisms, she didn't very much 
 resent their sudden knowledge, so long as they let her make 
 pictures. It was at rehearsals that the quarrrels broke. No 
 one understood that rehearsals were as real engagements as 
 bridge-games or sociables at the Episcopal Church. They gaily 
 came in half an hour late, or they vociferously came in ten 
 minutes early, and they were so hurt that they whispered 
 about resigning when Carol protested. They telephoned, " I 
 don't think I'd better come out; afraid the dampness might 
 start my toothache," or " Guess can't make it tonight; Dave 
 wants me to sit in on a poker gameX" 
 
 When, after a month of labor, as many as nine-elevenths 
 of the cast were often present at a rehearsal; when most of 
 them had learned their parts and some of them spoke like 
 human beings, Carol had a new shock in the realization that 
 Guy Pollock and herself were very bad actors, and that 
 Raymie Wutherspoon was a surprisingly good one. For all her 
 visions she could not control her voice, and she was bored by 
 the fiftieth repetition of her few lines as maid. Guy pulled 
 his soft mustache, looked self-conscious, and turned Mr. Grimm 
 into a limp dummy. But Raymie, as the villain, had no repres- 
 sions. The tilt of his head was full of character; his drawl 
 was admirably vicious. 
 
 There was an evening when Carol hoped she was going to 
 make a play; a rehearsal during which Guy stopped looking 
 abashed. 
 
 From that evening the play declined. 
 
 They were weary. " We know our parts well enough now; 
 what's the use of getting sick of them? " they complained. 
 They began to skylark; to play with the sacred lights; to 
 giggle when Carol was trying to make the sentimental Myrtle 
 Cass into a humorous office-boy; to act everything but "The 
 Girl from Kankakee." After loafing through his proper part 
 Dr. Terry Gould had great applause for his burlesque of 
 " Hamlet." Even Raymie lost his simple faith, and tried to 
 show that he could do a vaudeville shuffle. 
 
224 MAIN STREET 
 
 Carol turned on the company. " See here, I want this non- 
 sense to stop. We've simply got to get down to work." 
 
 Juanita Haydock led the mutiny: " Look here, Carol, don't 
 be so bossy. After all, we're doing this play principally 
 for the fun of it, and if we have fun out of a lot of monkey- 
 shines, why then " 
 
 Ye-es," feebly. 
 
 "You said one time that folks in G. P. didn't get enough 
 fun out of life. And now we are having a circus, you want 
 us to stop! " 
 
 Carol answered slowly: "I wonder if I can explain what 
 I mean? It's the difference between looking at the comic 
 page and looking at Manet. I want fun out of this, of course. 
 Only I don't think it would be less fun, but more, to pro- 
 duce as perfect a play as we can." She was curiously exalted; 
 her voice was strained ; she stared not at the company but at the 
 grotesques scrawled on the backs of wing-pieces by forgotten 
 stage-hands. " I wonder if you can understand the c fun ' of 
 making a beautiful thing, the pride and satisfaction of it, and 
 the holiness! " 
 
 The company glanced doubtfully at one another. In Gopher 
 Prairie it is not good form to be holy except at a church, be- 
 tween ten-thirty and twelve on Sunday. 
 
 " But if we want to do it, we've got to work; we must 
 have self-discipline." 
 
 They were at once amused and embarrassed. They did not 
 want to affront this mad woman. They backed off and tried to 
 rehearse. Carol did not hear Juanita, in front, protesting to 
 Maud Dyer, " If she calls it fun and holiness to sweat over 
 her darned old play well, I don't! " 
 
 IV 
 
 Carol attended the only professional play which came to 
 Gopher Prairie that spring. It was a " tent show, presenting 
 snappy new dramas under canvas." The hard-working actors 
 doubled in brass, and took tickets; and between acts sang 
 about the moon in June, and sold Dr. Wintergreen's Surefire 
 Tonic for Ills of the Heart, Lungs, Kidneys, and Bowels. They 
 presented " Sunbonnet Nell: A Dramatic Comedy of the 
 Ozarks," with J. Witherbee Boothby wringing the soul by 
 his resonant "Yuh ain't done right by man little gal, Mr. 
 
MAIN STREET 225 
 
 City Man, but yer a-goin' to find that back in these-yere hills 
 there's honest folks and good shots! " 
 
 The audience, on planks beneath the patched tent, admired 
 Mr. Boothby's beard and long rifle; stamped their feet in 
 the dust at the spectacle of his heroism; shouted when the 
 comedian aped the City Lady's use of a lorgnon by looking 
 through a doughnut stuck on a fork; wept visibly over Mr. 
 Boothby's Little Gal Nell, who was also Mr. Boothby's legal 
 wife Pearl, and when the curtain went down, listened respect- 
 fully to Mr. Boothby's lecture on Dr. Wintergreen's Tonic as 
 a cure for tape-worms, which he illustrated by horrible pallid 
 objects curled in bottles of yellowing alcohol. 
 
 Carol shook her head. "Juanita is right. I'm a fool. 
 Holiness of the drama! Bernard Shaw! The only trouble 
 with 'The Girl from Kankakee' is that it's too subtle for 
 Gopher Prairie! " 
 
 She sought faith in spacious banal phrases, taken from books: 
 " the instinctive nobility of simple souls," " need only the 
 opportunity, to appreciate fine things," and " sturdy exponents 
 of democracy." But these optimisms did not sound so loud 
 as the laughter of the audience at the funny-man's line, " Yes, 
 by heckelum, I'm a smart fella." She wanted to give up the 
 play, the dramatic association, the town. As she came out of 
 the tent and walked with Kennicott down the dusty spring 
 street, she peered at this straggling wooden village and felt 
 that she could not possibly stay here through all of tomorrow. 
 
 It was Miles Bjornstam who gave her strength he and the 
 fact that every seat for " The Girl from Kankakee " had been 
 sold. 
 
 Bjornstam was " keeping company " with Bea. Every night 
 he was sitting on the back steps. Once when Carol appeared 
 he grumbled, " Hope you're going to give this burg one good 
 show. If you don't, reckon nobody ever will." 
 
 It was the great night; it was the night of the play. The 
 two dressing-rooms were swirling with actors, panting, twitchy, 
 pale. Del Snafflin the barber, who was as much a professional 
 as Ella, having once gone on in a mob scene at a stock- 
 company performance in Minneapolis, was making them up, 
 and showing his scorn for amateurs with, " Stand still! For 
 
226 MAIN STREET 
 
 the love o> Mike, how do you expect me to get your eyelids 
 dark if you keep a-wigglin'? " The actors were beseeching, 
 "Hey, Del, put some red in my nostrils you put some in 
 Rita's gee, you didn't hardly do anything to my face." 
 
 They were enormously theatric. They examined Del's make- 
 up box, they sniffed the scent of grease-paint, every minute 
 they ran out to peep through the hole in the curtain, they 
 came back to inspect their wigs and costumes, they read on 
 the whitewashed walls of the dressing-rooms the pencil in- 
 scriptions: "The Flora Flanders Comedy Company," and 
 " This is a bum theater," and felt that they were companions 
 of these vanished troupers. 
 
 Carol, smart in maid's uniform, coaxed the temporary stage- 
 hands to finish setting the first act, wailed at Kennicott, the 
 electrician, " Now for heaven's sake remember the change in 
 cue for the ambers in Act Two," slipped out to ask Dave Dyer, 
 the ticket-taker, if he could get some more chairs, warned the 
 frightened Myrtle Cass to be sure to upset the waste-basket 
 when John Grimm called, " Here you, Reddy." 
 
 Del Snaffiin's orchestra of piano, violin, and cornet began to 
 tune up and every one behind the magic line of the proscenic 
 arch was frightened into paralysis. Carol wavered to the 
 hole in the curtain. There were so many people out there, 
 staring so hard 
 
 In the second row she saw Miles Bjornstam, not with Bea 
 but alone. He really wanted to see the play! It was a good 
 omen. Who could tell? Perhaps this evening would convert 
 Gopher Prairie to conscious beauty. 
 
 She darted into the women's dressing-room, roused Maud 
 Dyer from her fainting panic, pushed her to the wings, and 
 ordered the curtain up. 
 
 It rose doubtfully, it staggered and trembled, but it did get 
 up without catching this time. Then she realized that 
 Kennicott had forgotten to turn off the houselights. Some 
 one out front was giggling. 
 
 She galloped round to the left wing, herself pulled the 
 switch, looked so ferociously at Kennicott that he quaked, 
 and fled back. 
 
 Mrs. Dyer was creeping out on the half-darkened stage. 
 The play was begun. 
 
 And with that instant Carol realized that it was a bad play 
 abominably acted. 
 
MAIN STREET 227 
 
 Encouraging them with lying smiles, she watched her work 
 go to pieces. The settings seemed flimsy, the lighting com- 
 monplace. She watched Guy Pollock stammer and twist his 
 mustache when he should have been a bullying magnate; Vida 
 Sherwin, as Grimm's timid wife, chatter at the audience as 
 though they were her class in high-school English; Juanita, 
 in the leading role, defy Mr. Grimm as though she were re- 
 peating a list of things she had to buy at the grocery this 
 morning; Ella Stowbody remark " I'd like a cup of tea " as 
 though she were reciting " Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight "; 
 and Dr. Gould, making love to Rita Simons, squeak, " My 
 my you are a won'erful girl." 
 
 Myrtle Cass, as the office-boy, was so much pleased by the 
 applause of her relatives, then so much agitated by the re- 
 marks of Cy Bogart, in the back row, in reference to her 
 wearing trousers, that she could hardly be got off the stage. 
 Only Raymie was so unsociable as to devote himself entirely 
 to acting. 
 
 That she was right in her opinion of the play Carol was 
 certain when Miles Bjornstam went out after the first act, 
 and did not come back. 
 
 VI 
 
 Between the second and third acts she called the company 
 together, and supplicated, " I want to know something, before 
 we have a chance to separate. Whether we're doing well or 
 badly tonight, it is a beginning. But will we take it as merely 
 a beginning? How many of you will pledge yourselves to 
 start in with me, right away, tomorrow, and plan for another 
 play, to be given in September? " 
 
 They stared at her; they nodded at Juanita's protest: "I 
 think one's enough for a while. It's going elegant tonight, but 
 
 another play Seems to me it'll be time enough to talk 
 
 about that next fall. Carol! I hope you don't mean to hint 
 and suggest we're not doing fine tonight? I'm sure the ap- 
 plause shows the audience think it's just dandy! " 
 
 Then Carol knew how completely she had failed. 
 
 As the audience seeped out she heard B. J. Gougerling the 
 banker say to Rowland the grocer, " Well, I think the folks 
 'did splendid; just as good as professionals. But I don't care 
 much for these plays. What I like is a good movie, with 
 
228 MAIN STREET 
 
 auto accidents and hold-ups, and some git to it, and not all 
 this talky-talk." 
 
 Then Carol knew how certain she was to fail again. 
 
 She wearily did not blame them, company nor audience. 
 Herself she blamed for trying to carve intaglios in good whole- 
 some jack-pine. 
 
 " It's the worst defeat of all. I'm beaten. By Main Street. 
 1 1 must go on.' But I can't! " 
 
 She was not vastly encouraged by the Gopher Prairie 
 Dauntless'. 
 
 . . . would be impossible to distinguish among the actors when 
 all gave such fine account of themselves in difficult roles of this 
 well-known New York stage play. Guy Pollock as the old mil- 
 lionaire could not have been bettered for his fine impersonation of 
 the gruff old millionaire; Mrs. Harry Haydock as the young lady 
 from the West who so easily showed the New York four-flushers 
 where they got off was a vision of loveliness and with fine stage 
 presence. Miss Vida Sherwin the ever popular teacher in our 
 high school pleased as Mrs. Grimm, Dr. Gould was well suited in 
 the role of young lover girls you better look out, remember the 
 doc is a bachelor. The local Four Hundred also report that he 
 is a great hand at shaking the light fantastic tootsies in the 
 dance. ^ As the stenographer Rita Simons was pretty as a picture, 
 and Miss Ella Stowbody's long and intensive study of the drama 
 and kindred arts in Eastern schools was seen in the fine finish 
 of her part. 
 
 ... to no one is greater credit to be given than to Mrs. Will 
 Kennicott on whose capable shoulders fell the burden of directing. 
 
 " So kindly," Carol mused, " so well meant, so neighborly 
 and so confoundedly untrue. Is it really my failure, or 
 theirs? " 
 
 She sought to be sensible; she elaborately explained to her- 
 self that it was hysterical to condemn Gopher Prairie because 
 it did not foam over the drama. Its justification was in its 
 service as a market-town for farmers. How bravely and gener- 
 ously it did its work, forwarding the bread of the world, feeding 
 and healing the farmers! 
 
 Then, on the corner below her husband's office, she heard 
 a farmer holding forth: 
 
 " Sure. Course I was beaten. The shipper and the grocers 
 here wouldn't pay us a decent price for our potatoes, even 
 though folks in the cities were howling for 'em. So we says, 
 well, we'll get a truck and ship 'em right down to Minneapolis. 
 But the commission merchants there were in cahoots with the 
 
MAIN STREET 229 
 
 local shipper here; they said they wouldn't pay us a cent 
 more than he would, not even if they was nearer to the 
 market. Well, we found we could get higher prices in Chicago, 
 but when we tried to get freight cars to ship there, the rail- 
 roads wouldn't let us have 7 em even though they had cars 
 standing empty right here in the yards. There you got it 
 good market, and these towns keeping us from it. Gus, that's 
 the way these towns work all the time. They pay what they 
 want to for our wheat, but we pay what they want us to 
 for their clothes. Stowbody and Dawson foreclose every mort- 
 gage they can, and put in tenant farmers. The Dauntless lies 
 to us about the Nonpartisan League, the lawyers sting us, 
 the machinery-dealers hate to carry us over bad years, and 
 then their daughters put on swell dresses and look at us as 
 if we were a bunch of hoboes. Man, I'd like to burn this 
 town! " 
 
 Kennicott observed, " There's that old crank Wes Brannigan 
 shooting off his mouth again. Gosh, but he loves to hear him- 
 self talk! They ought to run that fellow out of town! " 
 
 vn 
 
 She felt old and detached through high-school commence- 
 ment week, which is the fete of youth in Gopher Prairie; 
 through baccalaureate sermon, senior parade, junior entertain- 
 ment, commencement address by an Iowa clergyman who 
 asserted that he believed in the virtue of virtuousness, and 
 the procession of Decoration Day, when the few Civil War 
 veterans followed Champ Perry, in his rusty forage-cap, along 
 the spring-powdered road to the cemetery. She met Guy; she 
 found that she had nothing to say to him. Her head ached 
 in an aimless way. When Kennicott rejoiced, " We'll have a 
 great time this summer; move down to the lake early and 
 wear old clothes and act natural," she smiled, but her smile 
 creaked. 
 
 In the prairie heat she trudged along unchanging ways, 
 talked about nothing to tepid people, and reflected that she 
 might never escape from them. 
 
 She was startled to find that she was using the word 
 " escape." 
 
 Then, for three years which passed like one curt paragraph, 
 she ceased to find anything interesting save the Bjornstams 
 and her baby. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 IN three years of exile from herself Carol had certain ex- 
 periences chronicled as important by the Dauntless, or discussed 
 by the Jolly Seventeen, but the event unchronicled, undiscussed, 
 and supremely controlling, was her slow admission of longing 
 to find her own people. 
 
 ii 
 
 Bea and Miles Bjornstam were married in June, a month 
 after " The Girl from Kankakee." Miles had turned respect- 
 able. He had renounced his criticisms of state and society; 
 he had given up roving as horse-trader, and wearing red 
 mackinaws in lumber-camps; he had gone to work as engineer 
 in Jackson Elder's planing-mill ; he was to be seen upon the 
 streets endeavoring to be neighborly with suspicious men whom 
 he had taunted for years. 
 
 Carol was the patroness and manager of the wedding. Jua- 
 nita Haydock mocked, " You're a chump to let a good hired 
 girl like Bea go. Besides! How do you know it's a good 
 thing, her marrying a sassy bum like this awful Red Swede 
 person? Get wise! Chase the man off with a mop, and hold 
 onto your Svenska while the holding's good. Huh? Me go to 
 their Scandahoofian wedding? Not a chance! " 
 
 The other matrons echoed Juanita. Carol was dismayed by 
 the casualness of their cruelty, but she persisted. Miles had 
 exclaimed to her, " Jack Elder says maybe he'll come to the 
 wedding! Gee, it would be nice to have Bea meet the Boss 
 as a reg'lar married lady. Some day 111 be so well off that 
 Bea can play with Mrs. Elder and you! Watch us! " 
 
 There was an uneasy knot of only nine guests at the service 
 in the unpainted Lutheran Church Carol, Kennicott, Guy 
 Pollock, and the Champ Perrys, all brought by Carol; Bea's 
 frightened rustic parents, her cousin Tina, and Pete, Miles's 
 ex-partner in horse-trading, a surly, hairy man who had bought 
 
 230 
 
MAIN STREET 231 
 
 a black suit and come twelve hundred miles from Spokane for 
 the event. 
 
 Miles continuously glanced back at the church door. Jack- 
 son Elder did not appear. The door did not once open after 
 the awkward entrance of the first guests. Miles's hand closed 
 on Bea's arm. 
 
 He had, with Carol's help, made his shanty over into a 
 cottage with white curtains and a canary and a chintz chair. 
 
 Carol coaxed the powerful matrons to call on Bea. They 
 half scoffed, half promised to go. 
 
 Bea's successor was the oldish, broad, silent Oscarina, who 
 was suspicious of her frivolous mistress for a month, so that 
 Juanita Hay dock was able to crow, " There, smarty, I told you 
 you'd run into the Domestic Problem! " But Oscarina adopted 
 Carol as a daughter, and with her as faithful to the kitchen as 
 Bea had been, there was nothing changed in Carol's life. 
 
 m 
 
 She was unexpectedly appointed to the town library-board 
 by Ole Jenson, the new mayor. The other members were 
 Dr. Westlake, Lyman Cass, Julius Flickerbaugh the attorney, 
 Guy Pollock, and Martin Mahoney, former livery-stable keeper 
 and now owner of a garage. She was delighted. She went to 
 the first meeting rather condescendingly, regarding herself as 
 the only one besides Guy who knew anything about books 
 or library methods. She was planning to revolutionize the 
 whole system. 
 
 Her condescension was ruined and her humility wholesomely 
 increased when she found the board, in the shabby room on the 
 second floor of the house which had been converted into the 
 library, not discussing the weather and longing to play check- 
 ers, but talking about books. She discovered that amiable old 
 Dr. Westlake read everything in verse and " light fiction "; 
 that Lyman Cass, the veal-faced, bristly-bearded owner of the 
 mill, had tramped through Gibbon, Hume, Grote, Prescott, 
 and the other thick historians; that he could repeat pages 
 from them and did. When Dr. Westlake whispered to her, 
 " Yes, Lym is a very well-informed man, but he's modest about 
 it," she felt uninformed and immodest, and scolded at her- 
 self that she had missed the human potentialities in this vast 
 Gopher Prairie. When Dr. Westlake quoted the " Paradiso," 
 
232 MAIN STREET 
 
 "Don Quixote," "Wilhelm Meister," and the Koran, she 
 reflected that no one she knew, not even her father, had read 
 all four. 
 
 She came diffidently to the second meeting of the board. She 
 'did not plan to revolutionize anything. She hoped that the 
 wise elders might be so tolerant as to listen to her suggestions 
 about changing the shelving of the juveniles. 
 
 Yet after four sessions of the library-board she was where 
 she had been before the first session. She had found that for 
 all their pride in being reading men, Westlake and Cass and 
 even Guy had no conception of making the library familiar 
 to the whole town. They used it, they passed resolutions 
 about it, and they left it as dead as Moses. Only the Henty 
 books and the Elsie books and the latest optimisms by moral 
 female novelists and virile clergymen were in general demand, 
 and the board themselves were interested only in old, stilted 
 volumes. They had no tenderness for the noisiness of youth 
 discovering great literature. 
 
 If she was egotistic about her tiny learning, they were at 
 least as much so regarding theirs. And for all their talk of 
 the need of additional library-tax none of them was willing 
 to risk censure by battling for it, though they now had so 
 small a fund that, after paying for rent, heat, light, and Miss 
 Villets's salary, they had only a hundred dollars a year for the 
 purchase of books. 
 
 The Incident of the Seventeen Cents killed her none too en- 
 during interest. 
 
 She had come to the board-meeting singing with a plan. 
 She had made a list of thirty European novels of the past ten 
 years, with twenty important books on psychology, education, 
 and economics which the library lacked. She had made 
 Kennicott promise to give fifteen dollars. If each of the 
 board would contribute the same, they could have the books. 
 
 Lym Cass looked alarmed, scratched himself, and protested, 
 " I think it would be a bad precedent for the board-members 
 to contribute money uh not that I mind, but it wouldn't be 
 fair establish precedent. Gracious! They don't pay us a 
 cent for our services! Certainly can't expect us to pay for the 
 privilege of serving! " 
 
 Only Guy looked sympathetic, and he stroked the pine table 
 and said nothing. 
 
 The rest of the meeting they gave to a bellicose investigation 
 
MAIN STREET 233 
 
 of the fact that there was seventeen cents less than there should 
 be in the Fund. Miss Villets was summoned; she spent half 
 an hour in explosively defending herself; the seventeen cents 
 were gnawed over, penny by penny; and Carol, glancing at 
 the carefully inscribed list which had been so lovely and excit- 
 ing an hour before, was silent, and sorry for Miss Villets, and 
 sorrier for herself. 
 
 She was reasonably regular in attendance till her two years 
 were up and Vida Sherwin was appointed to the board in her 
 place, but she did not try to be revolutionary. In the plod- 
 ding course of her life there was nothing changed, and nothing 
 new. 
 
 IV 
 
 Kennicott made an excellent land-deal, but as he told her 
 none of the details, she was not greatly exalted or agitated. 
 What did agitate her was his announcement, half whispered and 
 half blurted, half tender and half coldly medical, that they 
 " ought to have a baby, now they could afford it." They had 
 so long agreed that " perhaps it would be just as well not to 
 have any children for a while yet," that childlessness had come 
 to be natural. Now, she feared and longed and did not know; 
 she hesitatingly assented, and wished that she had not assented. 
 
 As there appeared no change in their drowsy relations, she 
 forgot all about it, and life was planless. 
 
 Idling on the porch of their summer cottage at the lake, 
 on afternoons when Kennicott was in town, when the water 
 was glazed and the whole air languid, she pictured a hundred 
 escapes: Fifth Avenue in a snow-storm, with limousines, 
 golden shops, a cathedral spire. A reed hut on fantastic piles 
 above the mud of a jungle river. A suite in Paris, immense 
 high grave rooms, with lambrequins and a balcony. The En- 
 chanted Mesa. An ancient stone mill in Maryland, at the turn 
 of the road, between rocky brook and abrupt hills. An upland 
 moor of sheep and flitting cool sunlight. A clanging dock where 
 steel cranes unloaded steamers from Buenos Ayres and Tsing- 
 tao. A Munich concert-hall, and a famous 'cellist playing 
 playing to her. 
 
 One scene had a persistent witchery: 
 
234 MAIN STREET 
 
 She stood on a terrace overlooking a boulevard by the warm 
 sea. She was certain, though she had no reason for it, that the 
 place was Mentone. Along the drive below her swept barouches, 
 with a mechanical tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, and great cars 
 with polished black hoods and engines quiet as the sigh of an 
 old man. In them were women erect, slender, enameled, and 
 expressionless as marionettes, their small hands upon parasols, 
 their unchanging eyes always forward, ignoring the men beside 
 them, tall men with gray hair and distinguished faces. Be- 
 yond the drive were painted sea and painted sands, and blue 
 and yellow pavilions. Nothing moved except the gliding car- 
 riages, and the people were small and wooden, spots in a 
 picture drenched with gold and hard bright blues. There was 
 no sound of sea or winds; no softness of whispers nor of fall- 
 ing petals; nothing but yellow and cobalt and staring light, 
 and the never-changing tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot 
 
 She startled. She whimpered. It was the rapid ticking of 
 the clock which had hypnotized her into hearing the steady 
 hoofs. No aching color of the sea and pride of supercilious 
 people, but the reality of a round-bellied nickel alarm-clock on 
 a shelf against a fuzzy unplaned pine wall, with a stiff 
 gray wash-rag hanging above it and a kerosene-stove standing 
 below. 
 
 A thousand dreams governed by the fiction she had read, 
 drawn from the pictures she had envied, absorbed her drowsy 
 lake afternoons, but always in the midst of them Kennicott 
 came out from town, drew on khaki trousers which were 
 plastered with dry fish-scales, asked, " Enjoying yourself? " 
 and did not listen to her answer. 
 
 And nothing was changed, and there was no reason to believe 
 that there ever would be change. 
 
 VI 
 
 Trains! 
 
 At the lake cottage she missed the passing of the trains. She 
 realized that in town she had depended upon them for as- 
 surance that there remained a world beyond. 
 
 The railroad was more than a means of transportation to 
 Gopher Prairie. It was a new god; a monster of steel limbs, 
 oak ribs, flesh of gravel, and a stupendous hunger for freight; 
 a deity created by man that he might keep himself respectful to 
 
MAIN STREET 235 
 
 Property, as elsewhere he had elevated and served as tribal 
 gods the mines, cotton-mills, motor-factories, colleges, army. 
 
 The East remembered generations when there had been no 
 railroad, and had no awe of it; but here the railroads had 
 been before time was. The towns had been staked out on barren 
 prairie as convenient points for future train-halts; and back 
 in 1860 and 1870 there had been much profit, much opportunity 
 to found aristocratic families, in the possession of advance 
 knowledge as to where the towns would arise. 
 
 If a town was in disfavor, the railroad could ignore it, cut 
 it off from commerce, slay it. To Gopher Prairie the 
 tracks were eternal verities, and boards of railroad directors 
 an omnipotence. The smallest boy or the most secluded 
 grandam could tell you whether No. 32 had a hot-box last 
 Tuesday, whether No. 7 was going to put on an extra day- 
 coach; and the name of the president of the road was familiar 
 to every breakfast table. 
 
 Even in this new era of motors the citizens went down to 
 the station to see the trains go through. It was their ro- 
 mance; their only mystery besides mass at the Catholic 
 Church; and from the trains came lords of the outer world 
 traveling salesmen with piping on their waistcoats, and visit- 
 ing cousins from Milwaukee. 
 
 Gopher Prairie had once been a " division-point." The 
 roundhouse and repair-shops were gone, but two conductors 
 still retained residence, and they were persons of distinction, 
 men who traveled and talked to strangers, who wore uniforms 
 with brass buttons, and knew all about these crooked games 
 of con-men. They were a special caste, neither above nor below 
 the Haydocks, but apart, artists and adventurers. 
 
 The night telegraph-operator at the railroad station was the 
 most melodramatic figure in town: awake at three in the 
 morning, alone in a room hectic with clatter of the telegraph 
 key. All night he " talked " to operators twenty, fifty, a hun- 
 dred miles away. It was always to be expected that he would 
 be held up by robbers. He never was, but round him was a 
 suggestion of masked faces at the window, revolvers, cords 
 bindkig him to a chair, his struggle to crawl to the key before 
 he fainted. 
 
 During blizzards everything about the railroad was melo- 
 dramatic. There were days when the town was completely 
 shut off, when they had no mail, no express, no fresh meat, 
 
236 MAIN STREET 
 
 no newspapers. At last the rotary snow-plow came through, 
 bucking the drifts, sending up a geyser, and the way to the 
 Outside was open again. The brakemen, in mufflers and fur 
 caps, running along the tops of ice-coated freight-cars; the 
 engineers scratching frost from the cab windows and looking 
 out, inscrutable, self-contained, pilots of the prairie sea they 
 were heroism, they were to Carol the daring of the quest in a 
 world of groceries and sermons. 
 
 To the small boys the railroad was a familiar playground. 
 They climbed the iron ladders on the sides of the box-cars; 
 built fires behind piles of old ties; waved to favorite brake- 
 men. But to Carol it was magic. 
 
 She was motoring with Kennicott, the car lumping through 
 darkness, the lights showing mud-puddles and ragged weeds 
 by the road. A train coming! A rapid chuck-a-chuck, chuck- 
 a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck. It was hurling past the Pacific 
 Flyer, an arrow of golden flame. Light from the fire-box 
 splashed the under side of the trailing smoke. Instantly the 
 vision was gone; Carol was back in the long darkness; and 
 Kennicott was giving his version of that fire and wonder: 
 " No. 19. Must be 'bout ten minutes late." 
 
 In town, she listened from bed to the express whistling in 
 the cut a mile north. Uuuuuuu! faint, nervous, distrait, 
 horn of the free night riders journeying to the tall towns where 
 were laughter and banners and the sound of bells Uuuuu! 
 Uuuuu! the world going by Uuuuuuu! fainter, more wist- 
 ful, gone. 
 
 Down here there were no trains. The stillness was very 
 great. The prairie encircled the lake, lay round her, raw, 
 dusty, thick. Only the train could cut it. Some day she would 
 take a train; and that would be a great taking. 
 
 vn 
 
 She turned to the Chautauqua as she had turned to the 
 dramatic association, to the library-board. 
 
 Besides the permanent Mother Chautauqua, in New York, 
 there are, all over these States, commercial Chautauqua com- 
 panies which send out to every smallest town troupes of 
 lecturers and " entertainers " to give a week of culture under 
 canvas. Living in Minneapolis, Carol had never encountered 
 the ambulant Chautauqua, and the announcement of its com- 
 
MAIN STREET 237 
 
 ing to Gopher Prairie gave her hope that others might be 
 doing the vague things which she had attempted. She pic- 
 tured a condensed university course brought to the people. 
 Mornings when she came in from the lake with Kennicott she 
 saw placards in every shop-window, and strung on a cord 
 across Main Street, a line of pennants alternately worded 
 "The Boland Chautauqua COMING! " and "A solid week 
 of inspiration and enjoyment! " But she was disappointed 
 when she saw the program. It did not seem to be a tabloid 
 university; it did not seem to be any kind of a university; it 
 seemed to be a combination of vaudeville performance, Y. M. 
 C. A. lecture, and the graduation exercises of an elocution 
 class. 
 
 She took her doubt to Kennicott. He insisted, " Well, maybe 
 it won't be so awful darn intellectual, the way you and I 
 might like it, but it's a whole lot better than nothing." Vida 
 Sherwin added, " They have some splendid speakers. If the 
 people don't carry off so much actual information, they do get 
 a lot of new ideas, and that's what counts." 
 
 During the Chautauqua Carol attended three evening meet* 
 ings, two afternoon meetings, and one in the morning. She was 
 impressed by the audience: the sallow women in skirts and 
 blouses, eager to be made to think, the men in vests and shirt- 
 sleeves, eager to be allowed to laugh, and the wriggling children, 
 eager to sneak away. She liked the plain benches, the portable 
 stage under its red marquee, the great tent over all, shadowy 
 above strings of incandescent bulbs at night and by day casting 
 an amber radiance on the patient crowd. The scent of dust 
 and trampled grass and sun-baked wood gave her an illusion 
 of Syrian caravans; she forgot the speakers while she listened 
 to noises outside the tent: two farmers talking hoarsely, a 
 wagon creaking down Main Street, the crow of a rooster. She 
 was content. But it was the contentment of the lost hunter 
 stopping to rest. 
 
 For from the Chautauqua itself she got nothing but wind 
 and chaff and heavy laughter, the laughter of yokels at old 
 jokes, a mirthless and primitive sound like the cries of beasts 
 on a farm. 
 
 These were the several instructors in the condensed uni- 
 versity's seven-day course: 
 
 Nine lecturers, four of them ex-ministers, and one an ex- 
 congressman, all of them delivering " inspirational addresses." 
 
238 MAIN STREET 
 
 The only facts or opinions which Carol derived from them 
 were: Lincoln was a celebrated president of the United States, 
 but in his youth extremely poor. James J. Hill was the best- 
 known railroad-man of the West, and in his youth extremely 
 poor. Honesty and courtesy in business are preferable to 
 boorishness and exposed trickery, but this is not to be taken 
 personally, since all persons in Gopher Prairie are known to 
 be honest and courteous. London is a large city. A dis- 
 tinguished statesman once taught Sunday School. 
 
 Four " entertainers " who told Jewish stories, Irish stories, 
 German stories, Chinese stories, and Tennessee mountaineer 
 stories, most of which Carol had heard. 
 
 A "lady elocutionist" who recited Kipling and imitated 
 children. 
 
 A lecturer with motion-pictures of an Andean exploration; 
 excellent pictures and a halting narrative. 
 
 Three brass-bands, a company of six opera-singers, a Hawai- 
 ian sextette, and four youths who played saxophones and 
 guitars disguised as wash-boards. The most applauded pieces 
 were those, such as the " Lucia " inevitability, which the 
 audience had heard most often. 
 
 The local superintendent, who remained through the week 
 while the other enlighteners went to other Chautauquas for 
 their daily performances. The superintendent was a bookish, 
 underfed man who worked hard at rousing artificial enthusiasm, 
 at trying to make the audience cheer by dividing them into 
 competitive squads and telling them that they were intelligent 
 and made splendid communal noises. He gave most of the 
 morning lectures, droning with equal unhappy facility about 
 poetry, the Holy Land, and the injustice to employers in any 
 system of profit-sharing. 
 
 The final item was a man who neither lectured, inspired, nor 
 entertained; a plain little man with his hands in his pockets. 
 All the other speakers had confessed, "I cannot keep from 
 telling the citizens of your beautiful city that none of the 
 talent on this circuit have found a more charming spot or 
 more enterprising and hospitable people." But the little man 
 suggested that the architecture of Gopher Prairie was hap- 
 hazard, and that it was sottish to let the lake-front be monopo- 
 lized by the cinder-heaped wall of the railroad embankment. 
 Afterward the audience grumbled, " Maybe that guy's got the 
 right dope, but what's the use of looking on the dark side of 
 
MAIN STREET 
 
 things all the time? New ideas are first-rate, but not all this 
 criticism. Enough trouble in life without looking for it! " 
 
 Thus the Chautauqua, as Carol saw it. After it, the town 
 felt proud and educated. 
 
 vra 
 
 Two weeks later the Great War smote Europe. 
 
 For a month Gopher Prairie had the delight of shuddering, 
 then, as the war settled down to a business of trench-fighting, 
 they forgot. 
 
 When Carol talked about the Balkans, and the possibility 
 of a German revolution, Kennicott yawned, " Oh yes, it's a 
 great old scrap, but it's none of our business. Folks out here 
 are too busy growing corn to monkey with any fool war that 
 those foreigners want to get themselves into." 
 
 It was Miles Bjornstam who said, " I can't figure it out. I'm 
 opposed to wars, but still, seems like Germany has got to be 
 licked because them Junkers stands in the way of progress." 
 
 She was calling on Miles and Bea, early in autumn. They 
 had received her with cries, with dusting of chairs, and a 
 running to fetch water for coffee. Miles stood and beamed at 
 her. He fell often and joyously into his old irreverence about 
 the lords of Gopher Prairie, but always with a certain diffi- 
 culty he added something decorous and appreciative. 
 
 " Lots of people have come to see you, haven't they? " 
 Carol hinted. 
 
 "Why, Be's cousin Tina comes in right along, and the 
 
 foreman at the miH, and Oh, we have good times. Say, 
 
 take a look at that Bea I Wouldn't you think she was a 
 canary-bird, to listen to her, and to see that Scandahoofian tow- 
 head of hers? But say, know what she is? She's a mother 
 hen! Way she fusses over me way she makes old Miles wear 
 a necktie! Hate to spoil her by letting her hear it, but she's 
 
 one pretty darn nice nice Hell! What do we care if 
 
 none of the dirty snobs come and call? We've got each 
 other." 
 
 Carol worried about their struggle, but she forgot it in the 
 stress of sickness and fear. For that autumn she knew that 
 a baby was coming, that at last life promised to be interesting 
 in the peril of the great change. 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 THE baby was coming. Each morning she was nauseated, 
 chilly, bedraggled, and certain that she would never again be 
 attractive; each twilight she was afraid. She did not feel 
 exalted, but unkempt and furious. The period of daily sick- 
 ness crawled into an endless time of boredom. It became 
 difficult for her to move about, and she raged that she, who 
 had been slim and light-footed, should have to lean on a 
 stick, and be heartily commented upon by street gossips. She 
 was encircled by greasy eyes. Every matron hinted, " Now 
 that you're going to be a mother, dearie, you'll get over all 
 these ideas of yours and settle down." She felt that willy-nilly 
 she was being initiated into the assembly of housekeepers ; with 
 the baby for hostage, she would never escape; presently she 
 would be drinking coffee and rocking and talking about 
 diapers. 
 
 " I could stand fighting them. I'm used to that. But this 
 being taken in, being taken as a matter of course, I can't 
 stand it and I must stand it! " 
 
 She alternately detested herself for not appreciating the 
 kindly women, and detested them for their advice: lugubrious 
 hints as to how much she would suffer in labor, details of 
 baby-hygiene based on long experience and total misunder- 
 standing, superstitious cautions about the things she must eat 
 and read and look at in prenatal care for the baby's soul, and 
 always a pest of simpering baby- talk. Mrs. Champ Perry 
 bustled in to lend " Ben Hur," as a preventive of future infant 
 immorality. The Widow Bogart appeared trailing pinkish ex- 
 clamations, " And how is our lovely 'ittle muzzy today! My, 
 ain't it just like they always say: being in a Family Way does 
 make the girlie so lovely, just like a Madonna. Tell me " 
 Her whisper was tinged with salaciousness " does oo feel the 
 dear itsy one stirring, the pledge of love? I remember with 
 Cy, of course he was so big " 
 
 "I do not look lovely, Mrs. Bogart. My complexion is 
 
 240 
 
MAIN STREET 241 
 
 rotten, and my hair is coming out, and I look like a potato-bag, 
 and I think my arches are falling, and he isn't a pledge of 
 love, and I'm afraid he will look like us, and I don't believe 
 in mother-devotion, and the whole business is a confounded 
 nuisance of a biological process," remarked Carol. 
 
 Then the baby was born, without unusual difficulty: a boy 
 with straight back and strong legs. The first day she hated 
 him for the tides of pain and hopeless fear he had caused; 
 she resented his raw ugliness. After that she loved him with 
 all the devotion and instinct at which she had scoffed. She 
 marveled at the perfection of the miniature hands as noisily as 
 did Kennicott; she was overwhelmed by the trust with which 
 the baby turned to her; passion for him grew with each un- 
 poetic irritating thing she had to do for him. 
 
 He was named Hugh, for her father. 
 
 Hugh developed into a thin healthy child with a large head 
 and straight delicate hair of a faint brown. He was thoughtful 
 and casual a Kennicott. 
 
 For two years nothing else existed. She did not, as the 
 cynical matrons had prophesied, " give up worrying about the 
 world and other folks' babies soon as she got one of her own 
 to fight for." The barbarity of that willingness to sacrifice other 
 children so that one child might have too much was impossible 
 to her. But she would sacrifice herself. She understood con- 
 secration she who answered Kennicott's hints about having 
 Hugh christened: " I refuse to insult my baby and myself by 
 asking an ignorant young man in a frock coat to sanction him, 
 to permit me to have him! I refuse to subject him to any 
 devil-chasing rites! If I didn't give my baby my baby 
 enough sanctification in those nine hours of hell, then he 
 can't get any more out of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel! " 
 
 " Well, Baptists hardly ever christen kids. I was kind of 
 thinking more about Reverend Warren," said Kennicott. 
 
 Hugh was her reason for living, promise of accomplishment 
 in the future, shrine of adoration and a diverting toy. " I 
 thought I'd be a dilettante mother, but I'm as dismayingly 
 natural as Mrs. Bogart," she boasted. 
 
 For two years Carol was a part of the town; as much one 
 of Our Young Mothers as Mrs. McGanum. Her opinionation 
 seemed dead ; she had no apparent desire for escape ; her brood- 
 ing centered on Hugh. While she wondered at the pearl texture 
 of his ear she exulted, " I feel like an old woman, with a skin 
 
242 MAIN STREET 
 
 like sandpaper, beside him, and I'm glad of it! He is perfect. 
 He shall have everything. He sha'n't always stay here in 
 Gopher Prairie. ... I wonder which is really the best, 
 Harvard or Yale or Oxford? " 
 
 ii 
 
 The people who hemmed her in had been brilliantly rein- 
 forced by Mr. and Mrs. Whittier N. Smail Kennicott 's Uncle 
 Whittier and Aunt Bessie. 
 
 The true Main Streetite defines a relative as a person to 
 whose house you go uninvited, to stay as long as you like. If 
 you hear that Lym Cass on his journey East has spent all 
 his time " visiting " in Oyster Center, it does not mean that he 
 prefers that village to the rest of New England, but that he 
 has relatives there. It does not mean that he has written to 
 the relatives these many years, nor that they have ever given 
 signs of a desire to look upon him. But " you wouldn't expect 
 a man to go and spend good money at a hotel in Boston, 
 when his own third cousins live right in the same state, would 
 you? " 
 
 When the Smails sold their creamery in North Dakota they 
 visited Mr. SmaiFs sister, Kennicott's mother, at Lac-qui- 
 Meurt, then plodded on to Gopher Prairie to stay with their 
 nephew. They appeared unannounced, before the baby was 
 born, took their welcome for granted, and immediately began 
 to complain of the fact that their room faced north. 
 
 Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie assumed that it was their 
 privilege as relatives to laugh at Carol, and their duty as 
 Christians to let her know how absurd her " notions " were. 
 They objected to the food, to Oscarina's lack of friendliness, 
 to the wind, the rain, and the immodesty of Carol's maternity 
 gowns. They were strong and enduring; for an hour at a 
 time they could go on heaving questions about her father's 
 income, about her theology, and about the reason why she had 
 not put on her rubbers when she had gone across the street. 
 For fussy discussion they had a rich, full genius, and their 
 example developed in Kennicott a tendency to the same form 
 of affectionate flaying. 
 
 If Carol was so indiscreet as to murmur that she had a 
 small headache, instantly the two Smails and Kennicott were 
 at it. Every five minutes, every time she sat down or rose or 
 
MAIN STREET 243 
 
 spoke to Oscarina, they twanged, " Is your head better now? 
 Where does it hurt? Don't you keep hartshorn in the house? 
 Didn't you walk too far today? Have you tried hartshorn? 
 Don't you keep some in the house so it will be handy? Does 
 it feel better now? How does it feel? Do your eyes hurt, 
 too? What time do you usually get to bed? As late as that? 
 Well! How does it feel now?" 
 
 In her presence Uncle Whittier snorted at Kennicott, " Carol 
 get these headaches often? Huh? Be better for her if she 
 didn't go gadding around to all these bridge-whist parties, and 
 took some care of herself once in a while! " 
 
 They kept it up, commenting, questioning, commenting, ques- 
 tioning, till her determination broke and she bleated, " For 
 heaven's sake, don't dis-cuss it! My head 's all right! " 
 
 She listened to the Smails and Kennicott trying to deter- 
 mine by dialectics whether the copy of the Dauntless, which 
 Aunt Bessie wanted to send to her sister in Alberta, ought to 
 have two or four cents postage on it. Carol would have taken 
 it to the drug store and weighed it, but then she was a 
 dreamer, while they were practical people (as they frequently 
 admitted). So they sought to evolve the postal rate from their 
 inner consciousnesses, which, combined with entire frankness 
 in thinking aloud, was their method of settling all problems. 
 
 The Smails did not " believe in all this nonsense " about 
 privacy and reticence. When Carol left a letter from her 
 sister on the table, she was astounded to hear from Uncle 
 Whittier, "I see your sister says her husband is doing fine. 
 You ought to go see her oftener. I asked Will and he says 
 you don't go see her very often. My! You ought to go see 
 her oftener! " 
 
 If Carol was writing a letter to a classmate, or planning the 
 week's menus, she could be certain that Aunt Bessie would 
 pop in and titter, "Now don't let me disturb you, I just 
 wanted to see where you were, don't stop, I'm not going to stay 
 only a second. I just wondered if you could possibly have 
 thought that I didn't eat the onions this noon because I didn't 
 think they were properly cooked, but that wasn't the reason 
 at all, it wasn't because I didn't think they were well cooked, 
 I'm sure that everything in your house is always very dainty 
 and nice, though I do think that Oscarina is careless about 
 some things, she doesn't appreciate the big wages you pay her, 
 and she is so cranky, all these Swedes are so cranky, I don't 
 
244 MAIN STREET 
 
 really see why you have a Swede, but But that wasn't 
 
 it, I didn't eat them not because I didn't think they weren't 
 cooked proper, it was just I find that onions don't agree with 
 me, it's very strange, ever since I had an attack of biliousness 
 one time, I have found that onions, either fried onions or 
 raw ones, and Whittier does love raw onions with vinegar 
 and sugar on them " 
 
 It was pure affection. 
 
 Carol was discovering that the one thing that can be more 
 disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love. 
 
 She supposed that she was being gracefully dull and stand- 
 ardized in the Smails' presence, but they scented the heretic, 
 and with forward-stooping delight they sat and tried to drag 
 out her ludicrous concepts for their amusement. They were 
 like the Sunday-afternoon mob starting at monkeys in the 
 Zoo, poking fingers and making faces and giggling at the 
 resentment of the more dignified race. 
 
 With a loose-lipped, superior, village smile Uncle Whittier 
 hinted, " What's this I hear about your thinking Gopher 
 Prairie ought to be all tore down and rebuilt, Carrie? I don't 
 know where folks get these new-fangled ideas. Lots of farmers 
 in Dakota getting 'em these days. About co-operation. Think 
 they can run stores better 7 n storekeepers! Huh! " 
 
 " Whit and I didn't need no co-operation as long as we was 
 farming! " triumphed Aunt Bessie. " Carrie, tell your old 
 auntie now: don't you ever go to church on Sunday? You 
 do go sometimes? But you ought to go every Sunday! When 
 you're as old as I am, you'll learn that no matter how smart 
 folks think they are, God knows a whole lot more than they 
 do, and then you'll realize and be glad to go and listen to your 
 pastor! " 
 
 In the manner of one who has just beheld a two-headed 
 calf they repeated that they had "never heard such funny 
 ideas! " They were staggered to learn that a real tangible 
 person, living in Minnesota, and married to their own flesh- 
 and-blood relation, could apparently believe that divorce may 
 not always be immoral; that illegitimate children do not 
 bear any special and guaranteed form of curse; that there 
 are ethical authorities outside of the Hebrew Bible; that men 
 have drunk wine yet not died in the gutter; that the capital- 
 istic system of distribution and the Baptist wedding-ceremony 
 were not known in tke Garden of Eden; that mushrooms are 
 
MAIN STREET 245 
 
 as edible as corn-beef hash; that the word "dude" is no 
 longer frequently used; that there are Ministers of the Gospel 
 who accept evolution; that some persons of apparent intelligence 
 and business ability do not always vote the Republican ticket 
 straight; that it is not a universal custom to wear scratchy 
 flannels next the skin in winter; that a violin is not inherently 
 more immoral than a chapel organ; that some poets do not have 
 long hair; and that Jews are not always pedlers or pants- 
 makers. 
 
 " Where does she get all them the'ries? " marveled Uncle 
 Whittier Smail ; while Aunt Bessie inquired, " Do you suppose 
 there's many folks got notions like hers? My! If there are," 
 and her tone settled the fact that there were not, " I just don't 
 know what the world's coming to! " 
 
 Patiently more or less Carol awaited the exquisite day 
 when they would announce departure. After three weeks Uncle 
 Whittier remarked, " We kinda like Gopher Prairie. Guess 
 maybe we'll stay here. We'd been wondering what we'd do, 
 now we've sold the creamery and my farms. So I had a talk 
 with Ole Jenson about his grocery, and I guess I'll buy him out 
 and storekeep for a while." 
 
 He did. 
 
 Carol rebelled. Kennicott soothed her: " Oh, we won't see 
 much of them. They'll have their own house." 
 
 She resolved to be so chilly that they would stay away. But 
 she had no talent for conscious insolence. They found a house, 
 but Carol was never safe from their appearance with a hearty, 
 " Thought we'd drop in this evening and keep you from being 
 lonely. Why, you ain't had them curtains washed yet! " 
 Invariably, whenever she was touched by the realization that 
 it was they who were lonely, they wrecked her pitying affec- 
 tion by comments questions comments advice. 
 
 They immediately became friendly with all of their own 
 race, with the Luke Dawsons, the Deacon Piersons, and Mrs. 
 Bogart; and brought them along in the evening. Aunt Bessie 
 was a bridge over whom the older women, bearing gifts of 
 counsel and the ignorance of experience, poured into Carol's 
 island of reserve. Aunt Bessie urged the good Widow Bogart, 
 " Drop in and see Carrie real often. Young folks today don't 
 understand housekeeping like we do." 
 
 Mrs. Bogart showed herself perfectly willing to be an as- 
 sociate relative. 
 
246 MAIN STREET 
 
 Carol was thinking up protective insults when Kennicott's 
 mother came down to stay with Brother Whittier for two 
 months. Carol was fond of Mrs. Kennicott. She could not 
 carry out her insults. 
 
 She felt trapped. 
 
 She had been kidnaped by the town. She was Aunt Bessie's 
 niece, and she was to be a mother. She was expected, she 
 almost expected herself, to sit forever talking of babies, cooks, 
 embroidery stitches, the price of potatoes, and the tastes of 
 husbands hi the matter of spinach. 
 
 She found a refuge in the Jolly Seventeen. She suddenly 
 understood that they could be depended upon to laugh with 
 her at Mrs. Bogart, and she now saw Juanita Haydock's gossip 
 not as vulgarity but as gaiety and remarkable analysis. 
 
 Her life had changed, even before Hugh appeared. She 
 looked forward te the next bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, and 
 the security of whispering with her dear friends Maud Dyer 
 and Juanita and Mrs. McGanum. 
 
 She was part of the town. Its philosophy and its feuds 
 dominated her. 
 
 m 
 
 She was no longer irritated by the cooing of the matrons, 
 nor by their opinion that diet didn't matter so long as the 
 Little Ones had plenty of lace and moist kisses, but she 
 concluded that in the care of babies as in politics, intelligence 
 was superior to quotations about pansies. She liked best to 
 talk about Hugh to Kennicott, Vida, and the Bjornstams. She 
 was happily domestic when Kennicott sat by her on the floor, 
 to watch baby make faces. She was delighted when Miles, 
 speaking as one man to another, admonished Hugh, " I wouldn't 
 stand them skirts if I was you. Come on. Join the union 
 and strike. Make 'em give you pants." 
 
 As a parent, Kennicott was moved to establish the first 
 child-welfare week held in Gopher Prairie. Carol helped him 
 weigh babies and examine their throats, and she wrote out 
 the diets for mute German and Scandinavian mothers. 
 
 The aristocracy of Gopher Prairie, even the wives of the 
 rival doctors, took part, and for several days there was com- 
 munity spirit and much uplift. But this reign of love was 
 overthrown when the prize for Best Baby was awarded not to 
 
MAIN STREET 247 
 
 decent parents but to Bea and Miles Bjornstam! The good 
 matrons glared at Olaf Bjornstam, with his blue eyes, his 
 honey-colored hair, and magnificent back, and they remarked, 
 " Well, Mrs. Kennicott, maybe that Swede brat is as healthy as 
 your husband says he is, but let me tell you I hate to think 
 of the future that awaits any boy with a hired girl for a 
 mother and an awful irreligious socialist for a pa! " 
 
 She raged, but so violent was the current of their respect- 
 ability, so persistent was Aunt Bessie in running to her with 
 their blabber, that she was embarrassed when she took Hugh 
 to play with Olaf. She hated herself for it, but she hoped 
 that no one saw her go into the Bjornstam shanty. She hated 
 herself and the town's indifferent cruelty when she saw Bea's 
 radiant devotion to both babies alike; when she saw Miles 
 staring" at them wistfully. 
 
 He had saved money, had quit Elder's planing-mill and 
 started a dairy on a vacant lot near his shack. He was 
 proud of his three cows and sixty chickens, and got up nights 
 to nurse them. 
 
 " I'll be a big farmer before you can bat an eye! I tell 
 you that young fellow Olaf is going to go East to college along 
 
 with the Haydock kids. Uh Lots of folks dropping in to 
 
 chin with Bea and me now. Say! Ma Bogart come in one 
 
 day! She was I liked the old lady fine. And the mill 
 
 foreman comes in right along. Oh, we got lots of friends. 
 You bet! " 
 
 IV 
 
 Though the town seemed to Carol to change no more than the 
 surrounding fields, there was a constant shifting, these three 
 years. The citizen of the prairie drifts always westward. It 
 may be because he is the heir of ancient migrations and it 
 may be because he finds within his own spirit so little ad- 
 venture that he is driven to seek it by changing his horizon. 
 The towns remain unvaried, yet the individual faces alter 
 like classes in college. The Gopher Prairie jeweler sells out, 
 for no discernible reason, and moves on to Alberta or the 
 state of Washington, to open a shop precisely like his former 
 one, in a town precisely like the one he has left. There is, 
 except among professional men and the wealthy, small per- 
 manence either of residence or occupation. A man becomes 
 
MAIN STREET 
 
 farmer, grocer, town policeman, garageman, restaurant-owner, 
 postmaster, insurance-agent, and farmer all over again, and the 
 community more or less patiently suffers from his lack of 
 knowledge in each of his experiments. 
 
 Ole Jenson the grocer and Dahl the butcher moved on to 
 South Dakota and Idaho. Luke and Mrs. Dawson picked up 
 ten thousand acres of prairie soil, in the magic portable form 
 of a small check book, and went to Pasadena, to a bungalow 
 and sunshine and cafeterias. Chet Dashaway sold his furniture 
 and undertaking business and wandered to Los Angeles, where, 
 the Dauntless reported, " Our good friend Chester has accepted 
 a fine position with a real-estate firm, and his wife has in the 
 charming social circles of the Queen City of the Southwest- 
 land that same popularity which she enjoyed in our own society 
 sets." 
 
 Rita Simons was married to Terry Gould, and rivaled Juanita 
 Haydock as the gayest of the Young Married Set. But Juanita 
 also acquired merit. Harry's father died, Harry became senior 
 partner in the Bon Ton Store, and Juanita was more acidulous 
 and shrewd and cackling than ever. She bought an evening 
 frock, and exposed her collar-bone to the wonder of the Jolly 
 Seventeen, and talked of moving to Minneapolis. 
 
 To defend her position against the new Mrs. Terry Gould 
 she sought to attach Carol to her faction by giggling that 
 "some folks might call Rita innocent, but I've got a hunch 
 that she isn't half as ignorant of things as brides are supposed 
 to be and of course Terry isn't one-two-three as a doctor 
 alongside of your husband." 
 
 Carol herself would gladly have followed Mr. Ole Jenson, 
 and migrated even to another Main Street; flight from familiar 
 tedium to new tedium would have for a time the outer look 
 and promise of adventure. She hinted to Kennicott of the 
 probable medical advantages of Montana and Oregon. She 
 knew that he was satisfied with Gopher Prairie, but it gave 
 her vicarious hope to think of going, to ask for railroad folders 
 at the station, to trace the maps with a restless forefinger. 
 
 Yet to the casual eye she was not discontented, she was 
 not an abnormal and distressing traitor to the faith of Main 
 Street. 
 
 The settled citizen believes that the rebel is constantly in a 
 stew of complaining and, hearing of a Carol Kennicott, he 
 gasps, " What an awful person! She must be a Holy Terror 
 
MAIN STREET 249 
 
 to live with! Glad my folks are satisfied with things way 
 they are! " Actually, it was not so much as five minutes a 
 day that Carol devoted to lonely desires. It is probable that 
 the agitated citizen has within his circle at least one inarticulate 
 rebel with aspirations as wayward as Carol's. 
 
 The presence of the baby had made her take Gopher Prairie 
 and the brown house seriously, as natural places of residence. 
 She pleased Kennkott by being friendly with the complacent 
 maturity of Mrs. Clark and Mrs. Elder, and when she had 
 often enough been in conference upon the Elders' new Cadillac 
 car, or the job which the oldest Clark boy had taken in the 
 office of the flour-mill, these topics became important, things 
 to follow up day by day. 
 
 With nine-tenths of her emotion concentrated upon Hugh, 
 she did not criticize shops, streets, acquaintances . . . this 
 year or two. She hurried to Uncle Whittier's store for a 
 package of corn-flakes, she abstractedly listened to Uncle 
 Whittier's denunciation of Martin Mahoney for asserting that 
 the wind last Tuesday had been south and not southwest, she 
 came back along streets that held no surprises nor the star- 
 tling faces of strangers. Thinking of Hugh's teething all the 
 way, she did not reflect that this store, these drab blocks, made 
 up all her background. She did her work, and she triumphed 
 over winning from the Clarks at five hundred. 
 
 The most considerable event of the two years after the 
 birth of Hugh occurred when Vida Sherwin resigned from the 
 high school and was married. Carol was her attendant, and 
 as the wedding was at the Episcopal Church, all the women 
 wore new kid slippers and .long white kid gloves, and looked 
 refined. 
 
 For years Carol had been little sister to Vida, and had never 
 in the least known to what degree Vida loved her and hated 
 her and in curious strained ways was bound to her. 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 GRAY steel that seems unmoving because it spins so fast in the 
 balanced fly-wheel, gray snow in an avenue of elms, gray dawn 
 with the sun behind it this was the gray of Vida Sherwin's 
 life at thirty-six. 
 
 She was small and active and sallow; her yellow hair was 
 faded, and looked dry; her blue silk blouses and modest 
 lace collars and high black shoes and sailor hats were as literal 
 and uncharming as a schoolroom desk; but her eyes determined 
 her appearance, revealed her as a personage and a force, in- 
 dicated her faith in the goodness and purpose of everything. 
 They were blue, and they were never still; they expressed 
 amusement, pity, enthusiasm. If she had been seen in sleep, 
 with the wrinkles beside her eyes stilled and the creased lids 
 hiding the radiant irises, she would have lost her potency. 
 
 She was born in a hill-smothered Wisconsin village where 
 her father was a prosy minister; she labored through a sanc- 
 timonious college; she taught for two years in an iron-range 
 town of blurry-faced Tatars and Montenegrins, and wastes of 
 ore, and when she came to Gopher Prairie, its trees and the 
 shining spaciousness of the wheat prairie made her certain 
 that she was in paradise. 
 
 She admitted to her fellow-teachers that the schoolbuilding 
 was slightly damp, but she insisted that the rooms were 
 " arranged so conveniently and then that bust of President 
 McKinley at the head of the stairs, it's a lovely art-work, and 
 isn't it an inspiration to have the brave, honest, martyr 
 president to think about! " She taught French, English, and 
 history, and the Sophomore Latin class, which dealt in matters 
 of a metaphysical nature called Indirect Discourse and the 
 Ablative Absolute. Each year she was reconvinced that the 
 pupils were beginning to learn more quickly. She spent four 
 winters in building up the Debating Society, and when the 
 debate really was lively one Friday afternoon, and the speakers 
 of pieces did not forget their lines, she felt rewarded. 
 
 250 
 
MAIN STREET 251 
 
 She lived an engrossed useful life, and seemed as cool and 
 simple as an apple. But secretly she was creeping among fears, 
 longing, and guilt. She knew what it was, but she dared not 
 name it. She hated even the sound of the word " sex." When 
 she dreamed of being a woman of the harem, with great white 
 warm limbs, she awoke to shudder, defenseless in the dusk of 
 her room. She prayed to Jesus, always to the Son of God, 
 offering him the terrible power of her adoration, addressing him 
 as the eternal lover, growing passionate, exalted, large, as she 
 contemplated his splendor. Thus she mounted to endurance 
 and surcease. 
 
 By day, rattling about in many activities, she was able to 
 ridicule her blazing nights of darkness. With spurious cheer- 
 fulness she announced everywhere, " I guess I'm a born spin- 
 ster," and " No one will ever marry a plain schoolma'am like 
 me," and " You men, great big noisy bothersome creatures, 
 we women wouldn't have you round the place, dirtying up nice 
 clean rooms, if it wasn't that you have to be petted and 
 guided. We just ought to say ' Scat! ' to all of you! " 
 
 But when a man held her close at a dance, even when 
 " Professor " George Edwin Mott patted her hand paternally 
 as they considered the naughtinesses of Cy Bogart, she quiv- 
 ered, and reflected how superior she was to have kept her 
 virginity. 
 
 In the autumn of 1911, a year before Dr. Will Kennicott 
 was married, Vida was his partner at a five-hundred tourna- 
 ment. She was thirty-four then; Kennicott about thirty-six. 
 To her he was a superb, boyish, diverting creature; all the 
 heroic qualities in a manly magnificent body. They had 
 been helping the hostess to serve the Waldorf salad and coffee 
 and gingerbread. They were in the kitchen, side by side on 
 a bench, while the others ponderously supped in the room 
 beyond. 
 
 Kennicott was masculine and experimental. He stroked 
 Vida's hand, he put his arm carelessly about her shoulder. 
 
 " Don't! " she said sharply. 
 
 "You're a cunning thing," he offered, patting the back of 
 her shoulder in an exploratory manner. 
 
 While she strained away, she longed to move nearer to him. 
 He bent over, looked at her knowingly. She glanced down at 
 his left hand as it touched her knee. She sprang up, started 
 noisily and needlessly to wash the dishes. He helped her. He 
 
252 MAIN STREET 
 
 was too lazy to adventure further and too used to women in 
 his profession. She was grateful for the impersonality of his 
 talk. It enabled her to gain control. She knew that she had 
 skirted wild thoughts. 
 
 A month after, on a sleighing-party, under the buffalo robes 
 in the bob-sled, he whispered, " You pretend to be a grown-up 
 schoolteacher, but you're nothing but a kiddie." His arm 
 was about her. She resisted. 
 
 " Don't you like the poor lonely bachelor? " he yammered in 
 a fatuous way. 
 
 " No, I don't! You don't care for me in the least. You're 
 just practising on me." 
 
 " You're so mean! I'm terribly fond of you." 
 
 " I'm not of you. And I'm not going to let myself be fond 
 of you, either." 
 
 He persistently drew her toward him. She clutched his arm. 
 Then she threw off the robe, climbed out of the sled, raced after 
 it with Harry Haydock. At the dance which followed the 
 sleigh-ride Kennicott was devoted to the jratery prettiness of 
 Maud Dyer, and Vida was noisily interested in getting up a 
 Virginia Reel. Without seeming to watch Kennicott, she knew 
 that he did not once look at her. 
 
 That was all of her first love-affair. 
 
 He gave no sign of remembering that he was " terribly fond." 
 She waited for him; she reveled in longing, and in a sense of 
 guilt because she longed. She told herself that she did not 
 want part of him ; unless he gave her all his devotion she would 
 never let him touch her; and when she found that she was 
 probably lying, she burned with scorn. She fought it out in 
 prayer. She knelt in a pink flannel nightgown, her thin 
 hair down her back, her forehead as full of horror as a mask 
 of tragedy, while she identified her love for the Son of God 
 with her love for a mortal, and wondered if any other woman 
 had ever been so sacrilegious. She wanted to be a nun 
 and observe perpetual adoration. She bought a rosary, but 
 she had been so bitterly reared as a Protestant that she could 
 not bring herself to use it. 
 
 Yet none of her intimates in the school and in the boarding- 
 house knew of her abyss of passion. They said she was " so 
 optimistic." 
 
 When she heard that Kennicott was to marry a girl, pretty, 
 young, and imposingly from the Cities, Vida despaired. She 
 
MAIN STREET 253 
 
 congratulated Kennicott; carelessly ascertained from him the 
 hour of marriage. At that hour, sitting in her room, Vida pic- 
 tured the wedding in St. Paul. Full of an ecstasy which horri- 
 fied her, she followed Kennicott and the girl who had stolen 
 her place, followed them to the train, through the evening, 
 the night. 
 
 She was relieved when she had worked out a belief that she 
 wasn't really shameful, that there was a mystical relation be- 
 tween herself and Carol, so that she was vicariously yet veri- 
 tably with Kennicott, and had the right to be. 
 
 She saw Carol during the first five minutes in Gopher Prairie. 
 She stared at the passing motor, at Kennicott and the girl 
 beside him. In that fog world of transference of emotion Vida 
 had no normal jealousy but a conviction that, since through 
 Carol she had received Kennicott's love, then Carol was a part 
 of her, an astral self, a heightened and more beloved self. 
 She was glad of the girl's charm, of the smooth black hair, 
 the airy head and young shoulders. But she was suddenly 
 angry. Carol glanced at her for a quarter-second, but looked 
 past her, at an old roadside barn. If she had made the great 
 sacrifice, at least she expected gratitude and recognition, Vida 
 raged, while her conscious schoolroom mind fussily begged 
 her to control this insanity. 
 
 During her first call half of her wanted to welcome a fellow 
 reader of books; the other half itched to find out whether 
 Carol knew anything about Kennicott's former interest in 
 herself. She discovered that Carol was not aware that he had 
 ever touched another woman's hand. Carol was an amusing, 
 naive, curiously learned child. While Vida was most actively 
 describing the glories of the Thanatopsis, and complimenting 
 this librarian on her training as a worker, she was fancying 
 that this girl was the child born of herself and Kennicott; and 
 out of that symbolizing she had a comfort she had not known 
 for months. 
 
 When she came home, after supper with the Kennicotts and 
 Guy Pollock, she had a sudden and rather pleasant backsliding 
 from devotion. She bustled into her room, she slantmed her 
 hat on the bed, and chattered, " I don't care! I'm a lot like 
 her except a few years older. I'm light and quick, too, and 
 
 I can talk just as well as she can, and I'm sure Men are 
 
 such fools. I'd be ten times as sweet to make love to as that 
 dreamy baby. And I am as good-looking! " 
 
254 MAIN STREET 
 
 But as she sat on the bed and stared at her thin thighs, 
 defiance oozed away. She mourned: 
 
 " No. I'm not. Dear God, how we fool ourselves! I pre- 
 tend I'm 'spiritual.' I pretend my legs are graceful. They 
 aren't. They're skinny. Old-maidish. I hate it! I hate that 
 impertinent young woman! A selfish cat, taking his love 
 for granted. . . . No, she's adorable. ... I don't 
 think she ought to be so friendly with Guy Pollock." 
 
 For a year Vida loved Carol, longed to and did not pry into 
 the details of her relations with Kennicott, enjoyed her spirit 
 of play as expressed in childish tea-parties, and, with the 
 mystic bond between them forgotten, was healthily vexed by 
 Carol's assumption that she was a sociological messiah come 
 to save Gopher Prairie. This last facet of Vida's thought was 
 the one which, after a year, was most often turned to the 
 light. In a testy way she brooded, " These people that want 
 to change everything all of a sudden without doing any work, 
 make me tired! Here I have to go and work for four years, 
 picking out the pupils for debates, and drilling them, and 
 nagging at them to get them to look up references, and begging 
 them to choose their own subjects four years, to get up a 
 couple of good debates! And she comes rushing in, and expects 
 in one year to change the whole town into a lollypop paradise 
 with everybody stopping everything else to grow tulips and 
 drink tea. And it's a comfy homey old town, too! " 
 
 She had such an outburst after each of Carol's campaigns 
 for better Thanatopsis programs, for Shavian plays, for more 
 Jauman schools but she never betrayed herself, and always she 
 was penitent. 
 
 yida was, and always would be, a reformer, a liberal. She 
 believed that details could excitingly be altered, but that 
 things-in-general were comely and kind and immutable. Carol 
 was, without understanding or accepting it, a revolutionist, a 
 radical, and therefore possessed of " constructive ideas," which 
 only the destroyer can have, since the reformer believes that 
 all the essential constructing has already been done. After 
 years of intimacy it was this unexpressed opposition more than 
 the fancied loss of Kennicott's love which held Vida irritably 
 fascinated. 
 
 But the birth of Hugh revived the transcendental emotion. 
 She was indignant that Carol should not be utterly fulfilled in 
 having borne Kennicott's child. She admitted that Carol 
 
MAIN STREET 255 
 
 seemed to have affection and immaculate care for the baby, 
 but she began to identify herself now with Kennicott, and in 
 this phase to feel that she had endured quite too much from 
 Carol's instability. 
 
 She recalled certain other women who had come from 
 the Outside and had not appreciated Gopher Prairie. She 
 remembered the rector's wife who had been chilly to callers 
 and who was rumored throughout the town to have said, 
 " Re-ah-ly I cawn't endure this bucolic heartiness in the re- 
 sponses." The woman was positively known to have worn 
 handkerchiefs in her bodice as padding oh, the town had 
 simply roared at her. Of course the rector and she were 
 got rid of in a few months. 
 
 Then there was the mysterious woman witK the dyed hair 
 and penciled eyebrows, who wore tight English dresses, like 
 basques, who smelled of stale musk, who flirted with the men 
 and got them to advance money for her expenses in a law- 
 suit, who laughed at Vida's reading at a school-entertainment, 
 and went off owing a hotel-bill and the three hundred dollars 
 she had borrowed. 
 
 Vida insisted that she loved Carol, but with some satisfaction 
 she compared her to these traducers of the town. 
 
 Vida had enjoyed Raymie Wutherspoon's singing in the 
 Episcopal choir ; she had thoroughly reviewed the weather with 
 him at Methodist sociables and in the Bon Ton. But she did 
 not really know him till she moved to Mrs. Gurrey's boarding- 
 house. It was five years after her affair with Kennicott. She 
 was thirty-nine, Raymie perhaps a year younger. 
 
 She said to him, and sincerely, " My! You can do anything, 
 with your brains and tact and that heavenly voice. You were 
 so good in * The Girl from Kankakee.' You made me feel 
 terribly stupid. If you'd gone on the stage, I believe you'd 
 be just as good as anybody in Minneapolis. But still, I'm not 
 sorry you stuck to business. It's such a constructive career." 
 
 " Do you really think so? " yearned Raymie, across the 
 apple-sauce. 
 
 It was the first time that either of them had found a de- 
 pendable intellectual companionship. They looked down on 
 Willis Woodford the bank-clerk, and his anxious babycentric 
 
256 MAIN STREET 
 
 wife, the silent Lyman Casses, the slangy traveling man, and 
 the rest of Mrs. Gurrey's unenlightened guests. They sat 
 opposite, and they sat late. They were exhilarated to find that 
 they agreed in confession of faith: 
 
 " People like Sam Clark and Harry Haydock aren't earnest 
 about music and pictures and eloquent sermons and really 
 refined movies, but then, on the other hand, people like Carol 
 Kennicott put too much stress on all this art. Folks ought 
 to appreciate lovely things, but just the same, they got to be 
 practical and they got to look at things in a practical way." 
 
 Smiling, passing each other the pressed-glass pickle-dish, 
 seeing Mrs. Gurrey's linty supper-cloth irradiated by the light 
 of intimacy, Vida and Raymie talked about Carol's rose-colored 
 turban, Carol's sweetness, Carol's new low shoes, Carol's erron- 
 eous theory that there was no need of strict discipline in school, 
 Carol's amiability in the Bon Ton, Carol's flow of wild ideas, 
 which, honestly, just simply made you nervous trying to keep 
 track of them; 
 
 About the lovely display of gents' shirts in the Bon Ton 
 window as dressed by Raymie, about Raymie's offertory last 
 Sunday, the fact that there weren't any of these new solos as 
 nice as " Jerusalem the Golden," and the way Raymie stood 
 up to Juanita Haydock when she came into the store and 
 tried to run things and he as much as told her that she was 
 so anxious to have folks think she was smart and bright that 
 she said things she didn't mean, and anyway, Raymie was 
 running the shoe-department, and if Juanita, or Harry either, 
 didn't like the way he ran things, they could go get another 
 man; 
 
 About Vida's new jabot which made her look thirty-two 
 (Vida's estimate) or twenty-two (Raymie's estimate), Vida's 
 plan to have the high-school Debating Society give a playlet, 
 and the difficulty of keeping the younger boys well behaved 
 on the playground when a big lubber like Cy Bogart acted 
 up so; 
 
 About the picture post-card which Mrs. Dawson had sent to 
 Mrs. Cass from Pasadena, showing roses growing right out- 
 doors in February, the change in time on No. 4, the reckless 
 way Dr. Gould always drove his auto, the reckless way almost 
 all these people drove their autos, the fallacy of supposing 
 that these socialists could carry on a government for as much 
 as six months if they ever did have a chance to try out their 
 
MAIN STREET 257 
 
 theories, and the crazy way in which Carol jumped from 
 subject to subject. 
 
 Vida had once beheld Raymie as a thin man with spectacles, 
 mournful drawn-out face, and colorless stiff hair. Now she 
 noted that his jaw was square, that his long hands moved 
 quickly and were bleached in a refined manner, and that his 
 trusting eyes indicated that he had " led a clean life." She 
 began to call him " Ray," and to bounce in defense of his 
 unselfishness and thoughtfulness every time Juanita Haydock 
 or Rita Gould giggled about him at the Jolly Seventeen. 
 
 On a Sunday afternoon of late autumn they walked down 
 to Lake Minniemashie. Ray said that he would like to see 
 the ocean; it must be a grand sight; it must be much grander 
 than a lake, even a great big lake. Vida had seen it, she 
 stated modestly; she had seen it on a summer trip to Cape 
 Cod. 
 
 " Have you been clear to Cape Cod? Massachusetts? I 
 knew you'd traveled, but I never realized you'd been that 
 far! " 
 
 Made taller and younger by his interest she poured out, " Oh 
 my yes. It was a wonderful trip. So many points of interest 
 through Massachusetts historical. There's Lexington where 
 we turned back the redcoats, and Longfellow's home at Cam- 
 bridge, and Cape Cod just everything fishermen and whale- 
 ships and sand-dunes and everything." 
 
 She wished that she had a little cane to carry. He broke 
 off a willow branch. 
 
 " My, you're strong! " she said. 
 
 " No, not very. I wish there was a Y. M. C. A. here, so I 
 could take up regular exercise. I used to think I could do 
 pretty good acrobatics, if I had a chance." 
 
 " I'm sure you could. You're unusually lithe, for a large 
 man." 
 
 " Oh no, not so very. But I wish we had a Y. M. It would 
 be dandy to have lectures and everything, and I'd like to take 
 a class in improving the memory I believe a fellow ought 
 to go on educating himself and improving his mind even if he is 
 in business, don't you, Vida I guess I'm kind of fresh to call 
 you Vida ' ! " 
 
 " I've been calling you ' Ray ' for weeks! " 
 
 He wondered why she sounded tart. 
 
 He helped her down the bank to the edge of the lake but 
 
258 MAIN STREET 
 
 dropped her hand abruptly, and as they sat on a willow log 
 and he brushed her sleeve, he delicately moved over and 
 murmured, " Oh, excuse me accident." 
 
 She stared at the mud-browned chilly water, the floating 
 gray reeds. 
 
 " You look so thoughtful," he said. 
 
 She threw out her hands. "I am! Will you kindly tell 
 me what's the use of anything! Oh, don't mind me. I'm 
 a moody old hen. Tell me about your plan for getting a 
 partnership in the Bon Ton. I do think you're right: Harry 
 Haydock and that mean old Simons ought to give you one." 
 
 He hymned the old unhappy wars in which he had been 
 Achilles and the mellifluous Nestor, yet gone his righteous ways 
 unheeded by the cruel kings. . . . "Why, if I've told 
 'em once, I've told 'em a dozen times to get in a side-line of 
 light-weight pants for gents' summer wear, and of course here 
 they go and let a cheap kike like Rifkin beat them to it 
 and grab the trade right off 'em, and then Harry said 
 you know how Harry is, maybe he don't mean to be grouchy, 
 but he's such a sore-head " 
 
 He gave her a hand to rise. " If you don't mind. I think 
 a fellow is awful if a lady goes on a walk with him and she 
 can't trust him and he tries to flirt with her and all." 
 
 " I'm sure you're highly trustworthy! " she snapped, and 
 she sprang up without his aid. Then, smiling excessively, 
 " Uh don't you think Carol sometimes fails to appreciate Dr. 
 Will's ability? " 
 
 in 
 
 Ray habitually asked her about his window-trimming, the 
 display of the new shoes, the best music for the entertainment 
 at the Eastern Star, and (though he was recognized as a pro- 
 fessional authority on what the town called " gents' furnish- 
 ings ") about his own clothes. She persuaded him not to wear 
 the small bow ties which made him look like an elongated 
 Sunday School scholar. Once she burst out: 
 
 " Ray, I could shake you! Do you know you're too apolo- 
 getic? You always appreciate other people too much. You 
 fuss over Carol Kennicott when she has some crazy theory that 
 we all ought to turn anarchists or live on figs and nuts or 
 something. And you listen when Harry Haydock tries to show 
 
MAIN STREET 259 
 
 off and talk about turnovers and credits _and things you know 
 lots better than he does. Look folks in the eye! Glare at 
 'em! Talk deep! You're the smartest man in town, if you 
 only knew it. You are! " 
 
 He could not believe it. He kept coming back to her for 
 confirmation. He practised glaring and talking deep, but he 
 circuitously hinted to Vida that when he had tried to look 
 Harry Haydock in the eye, Harry had inquired, " What's the 
 matter with you, Raymie? Got a pain? " But afterward 
 Harry had asked about Kantbeatum socks in a manner which, 
 Ray felt, was somehow different from his former condescension. 
 
 They were sitting on the squat yellow satin settee in the 
 boarding-house parlor. As Ray reannounced that he simply 
 wouldn't stand it many more years if Harry didn't give him a 
 partnership, his gesticulating hand touched Vida's shoulders. 
 
 " Oh, excuse me! " he pleaded. 
 
 " It's all right. Well, I think I must be running up to my 
 room. Headache," she said briefly. 
 
 IV 
 
 Ray and she had stopped in at Dyer's for a hot chocolate 
 on their way home from tie movies, that March evening. Vida 
 speculated, " Do you know that I may not be here next year? " 
 
 " What do you mean? " 
 
 With her fragile narrow nails she smoothed the glass slab 
 which formed the top of the round table at which they sat. 
 She peeped through the glass at the perfume-boxes of black and 
 gold and citron in the hollow table. She looked about at 
 shelves of red rubber water-bottles, pale yellow sponges, wash- 
 rags with blue borders, hair-brushes of polished cherry backs. 
 She shook her head like a nervous medium coming out of a 
 trance, stared at him unhappily, demanded: 
 
 " Why should I stay here? And I must make up my mind. 
 Now. Time to renew our teaching-contracts for next year. 
 I think I'll go teach in some other town. Everybody here is 
 tired of me. I might as well go. Before folks come out and 
 say they're tired of me. I have to decide tonight. I might as 
 well Oh, no matter. Come. Let's skip. It's late." 
 
 She sprang up, ignoring his wail of "Vida! Wait! Sit 
 down! Gosh! I'm flabbergasted! Gee! Vida! " She 
 inarched out. While he was paying his check she got ahead. 
 
260 MAIN STREET 
 
 He ran after her, blubbering, " Vida! Wait! " In the shade 
 of the lilacs in front of the Gougerling house he came up with 
 her, stayed her flight by a hand on her shoulder. 
 
 " Oh, don't! Don't! What does it matter? " she begged. 
 She was sobbing, her soft wrinkly lids soaked with tears. 
 " Who cares for my affection or help? I might as well drift 
 on, forgotten. O Ray, please don't hold me. Let me go. 
 I'll just decide not to renew my contract here, and and 
 drift way off " 
 
 His hand was steady on her shoulder. She dropped her 
 head, rubbed the back of his hand with her cheek. 
 
 They were married in June. 
 
 They took the Ole Jenson house. " It's small," said Vida, 
 " but it's got the dearest vegetable garden, and I love having 
 time to get near to Nature for once." 
 
 Though she became Vida Wutherspoon technically, and 
 though she certainly had no ideals about the independence of 
 keeping her name, she continued to be known as Vida Sher- 
 win. 
 
 She had resigned from the school, but she kept up one class 
 in English. She bustled about on every committee of the 
 Thanatopsis; she was always popping into the rest-room to 
 make Mrs. Nodelquist sweep the floor; she was appointed to 
 the library-board to succeed Carol; she taught the Senior 
 Girls' Class in the Episcopal Sunday School, and tried to revive 
 the King's Daughters. She exploded into self-confidence and 
 happiness; her draining thoughts were by marriage turned 
 into energy. She became daily and visibly more plump, and 
 though she chattered as eagerly, she was less obviously admir- 
 ing of marital bliss, less sentimental about babies, sharper in 
 demanding that the entire town share her reforms the pur- 
 chase of a park, the compulsory cleaning of back-yards. 
 
 She penned Harry Haydock at his desk in the Bon Ton; 
 she interrupted his joking; she told him that it was Ray who 
 had built up the shoe-department and men's department; she 
 demanded that he be made a partner. Before Harry could 
 answer she threatened that Ray and she would start a rival 
 shop. "I'll clerk behind the counter myself, and a Certain 
 Party is all ready to put up the money." 
 
MAIN STREET 261 
 
 She rather wondered who the Certain Party was. 
 
 Ray was made a one-sixth partner. 
 
 He became a glorified floor-walker, greeting the men witK 
 new poise, no longer coyly subservient to pretty women. 
 When he was not affectionately coercing people into buying 
 things they did not need, he stood at the back of the store, 
 glowing, abstracted, feeling masculine as he recalled the 
 tempestuous surprises of love revealed by Vida. 
 
 The only remnant of Vida's identification of herself with 
 Carol was a jealousy when she saw Kennicott and Ray to- 
 gether, and reflected that some people might suppose that 
 Kennicott was his superior. She was sure that Carol thought 
 so, and she wanted to shriek, " You needn't try to gloat! I 
 wouldn't have your pokey old husband. He hasn't one single 
 bit of Ray's spiritual nobility." 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 
 THE greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction 
 to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put 
 in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the long- 
 shoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman. 
 It was this which puzzled Carol in regard to the married Vida. 
 Carol herself had the baby, a larger house to care for, all the 
 telephone calls for Kennicott when he was away; and she 
 read everything, while Vida was satisfied with newspaper head- 
 lines. 
 
 But after detached brown years in boarding-houses, Vida 
 was hungry for housework, for the most pottering detail of it. 
 She had no maid, nor wanted one. She cooked, baked, swept, 
 washed supper-cloths, with the triumph of a chemist in a new 
 laboratory. To her the hearth was veritably the altar. When 
 she went shopping she hugged the cans of soup, and she 
 bought a mop or a side of bacon as though she were preparing 
 for a reception. She knelt beside a bean sprout and crooned, 
 " I raised this with my own hands I brought this new life 
 into the world." 
 
 " I love her for being so happy," Carol brooded. " I ought 
 
 to be that way. I worship the baby, but the housework 
 
 Oh, I suppose I'm fortunate; so much better off than farm- 
 women on a new clearing, or people in a slum." 
 
 It has not yet been recorded that any human being has 
 gained a very large or permanent contentment from medita- 
 tion upon the fact that he is better off than others. 
 
 In Carol's own twenty-four hours a day she got up, dressed 
 the baby, had breakfast, talked to Oscarina about the day's 
 shopping, put the baby on the porch to play, went to the 
 butcher's to choose between steak and pork chops, bathed the 
 baby, nailed up a shelf, had dinner, put the baby to bed for a 
 nap, paid the iceman, read for an hour, took the baby 
 out for a walk, called on Vida, had supper, put the baby to 
 bed, darned socks, listened to Kennicott's yawning comment 
 
 262 
 
MAIN STREET 263 
 
 on what a fool Dr. McGanum was to try to use that cheap 
 X-ray outfit of his on an epithelioma, repaired a frock, drowsily 
 heard Kennicott stoke the furnace, tried to read a page of 
 Thorstein Veblen and the day was gone. 
 
 Except when Hugh was vigorously naughty, or whiney, or 
 laughing, or saying " I like my chair " with thrilling ma- 
 turity, she was always enfeebled by loneliness. She no longer 
 felt superior about that misfortune. She would gladly have 
 been converted to Vida's satisfaction in Gopher Prairie and 
 mopping the floor. 
 
 n 
 
 Carol drove through an astonishing number of books from 
 the public library and from city shops. Kennicott was at 
 first uncomfortable over her disconcerting habit of buying 
 them. A book was a book, and if you had several thousand 
 of them right here in the library, free, why the dickens should 
 you spend your good money? After worrying about it for 
 two or three years, he decided that this was one of the Funny 
 Ideas which she had caught as a librarian and from which 
 she would never entirely recover. 
 
 The authors whom she read were most of them frightfully 
 annoyed by the Vida Sherwins. They were young American 
 sociologists, young English realists, Russian horrorists ; Anatole 
 France, Rolland, Nexo, Wells, Shaw, Key, Edgar Lee Masters, 
 Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Henry Mencken, and 
 all the other subversive philosophers and artists whom women 
 were consulting everywhere, in batik-curtained studios in 
 New York, in Kansas farmhouses, San Francisco drawing- 
 rooms, Alabama schools for negroes. From them she got 
 the same confused desire which the million other women 
 felt; the same determination to be class-conscious without 
 discovering the class of which she was to be conscious. 
 
 Certainly her reading precipitated her observations of Main 
 Street, of Gopher Prairie and of the several adjacent Gopher 
 Prairies which she had seen on drives with Kennicott. In 
 her fluid thought certain convictions appeared, jaggedly, a 
 fragment of an impression at a time, while she was going to 
 sleep, or manicuring her nails, or waiting for Kennicott. 
 
 These convictions she presented to Vida Sherwin Vida 
 Wutherspoon beside a radiator, over a bowl of not very good 
 
264 MAIN STREET 
 
 walnuts and pecans from Uncle Whittier's grocery, on an 
 evening when both Kennicott and Raymie had gone out of 
 town with the other officers of the Ancient and Affiliated Order 
 of Spartans, to inaugurate a new chapter at Wakamin. Vida 
 had come to the house for the night. She helped in putting 
 Hugh to bed, sputtering the while about his soft skin. Then 
 they talked till midnight. 
 
 What Carol said that evening, what she was passionately 
 thinking, was also emerging in the minds of women in ten 
 thousand Gopher Prairies. Her formulations were not pat 
 solutions but visions of a tragic futility. She did not utter 
 them so compactly that they can be given in her words; they 
 were roughened with " Well, you see " and " if you get what 
 I mean " and " I don't know that I'm making myself clear." 
 But they were definite enough, and indignant enough. 
 
 in 
 
 In reading popular stories and seeing plays, asserted Carol, 
 she had found only two traditions of the American small town. 
 The first tradition, repeated in scores of magazines every month, 
 is that the American village remains the one sure abode of 
 friendship, honesty, and clean sweet marriageable girls. There- 
 fore all men who succeed in painting in Paris or in finance in 
 New York at last become weary of smart women, return 
 to their native towns, assert that cities are vicious, marry 
 their childhood sweethearts and, presumably, joyously abide 
 in those towns until death. 
 
 The other tradition is that the significant features of all 
 villages are whiskers, iron dogs upon lawns, gold bricks, 
 checkers, jars of gilded cat-tails, and shrewd comic old men 
 who are known as " hicks " and who ejaculate " Waal I swan." 
 This altogether admirable tradition rules the vaudeville stage, 
 facetious illustrators, and syndicated newspaper humor, but 
 out of actual life it passed forty years ago. Carol's small 
 town thinks not in hoss-swapping but in cheap motor cars, 
 telephones, ready-made clothes, silos, alfalfa, kodaks, phono- 
 graphs, leather-upholstered Morris chairs,, bridge-prizes, oil- 
 stocks, motion-pictures, land-deals, unread sets of Mark 
 Twain, and a chaste version of national politics. 
 
 With such a small-town life a Kennicott or a Champ Perry 
 is content, but there are also hundreds of thousands, par- 
 
MAIN STREET 265 
 
 ticularly women and young men, who are not at all content. 
 The more intelligent young people (and the fortunate widows! ) 
 flee to the cities with agility and, despite the fictional tra- 
 dition, resolutely stay there, seldom returning even for holi- 
 days. The most protesting patriots of the towns leave them 
 in old age, if they can afford it, and go to live in California 
 or in the cities. 
 
 The reason, Carol insisted, is not a whiskered rusticity. It 
 is nothing so amusing! 
 
 It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a slug- 
 gishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit 
 by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment . . . 
 the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the 
 living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized 
 as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. 
 It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness 
 made God. 
 
 A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting after- 
 ward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with 
 inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying me- 
 chanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and 
 viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world. 
 
 IV 
 
 She had inquired as to the effect of this dominating dull- 
 ness upon foreigners. She remembered the feeble exotic 
 quality to be found in the first-generation Scandinavians; she 
 recalled the Norwegian Fair at the Lutheran Church, to 
 which Bea had taken her. There, in the bondestue, the replica 
 of a Norse farm kitchen, pale women in scarlet jackets em- 
 broidered with gold thread and colored beads, in black skirts 
 with a line of blue, green-striped aprons, and ridged caps very 
 pretty to set off a fresh face, had served rommegrod og lefse 
 sweet cakes and sour milk pudding spiced with cinnamon. 
 For the first time in Gopher Prairie Carol had found novelty. 
 She had reveled in the mild foreignness of it. 
 
 But she saw these Scandinavian women zealously exchanging 
 their spiced puddings and red jackets for fried pork chops 
 and congealed white blouses, trading the ancient Christmas 
 hymns of the fjords for " She's My Jazzland Cutie," being 
 Americanized into uniformity, and in less than a generation 
 
266 MAIN STREET 
 
 losing in the grayness whatever pleasant new customs they 
 might have added to the life of the town. Their sons finished 
 the process. In ready-made clothes and ready-made high- 
 school phrases they sank into propriety, and the sound Amer- 
 ican customs had absorbed without one trace of pollution an- 
 other alien invasion. 
 
 And along with these foreigners, she felt herself being ironed 
 into glossy mediocrity, and she rebelled, in fear. 
 
 The respectability of the Gopher Prairies, said Carol, is 
 reinforced by vows of poverty and chastity in the matter of 
 knowledge. Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens 
 are proud of that achievement of ignorance which it is so easy 
 to come by. To be " intellectual " or " artistic " or, in their 
 own word, to be " highbrow," is to be priggish and of dubious 
 Virtue. 
 
 Large experiments in politics and in co-operative distribution, 
 ventures requiring knowledge, courage, and imagination, do 
 originate in the West and Middlewest, but they are not of 
 the towns, they are of the farmers. If these heresies are 
 supported by the townsmen it is only by occasional teachers, 
 doctors, lawyers, the labor unions, and workmen like Miles 
 Bjornstam, who are punished by being mocked as " cranks," 
 as " half-baked parlor socialists." The editor and the rector 
 preach at them. The cloud of serene ignorance submerges 
 them in unhappiness and futility. 
 
 Here Vida observed, "Yes well Do you know, I've 
 
 always thought that Ray would have made a wonderful rector. 
 He has what I call an essentially religious soul. My! He'd 
 have read the service beautifully! I suppose it's too late now, 
 but as I tell him, he can also serve the world by selling shoes 
 and i wonder if we oughtn't to have family-prayers? " 
 
 VI 
 
 Doubtless all small towns, in all countries, in all ages, 
 Carol admitted, have a tendency to be not only dull but 
 mean, bitter, infested with curiosity. In France or Tibet quite 
 as much as in Wyoming or Indiana these timidities are in- 
 herent in isolation. 
 
MAIN STREET 267 
 
 But a village in a country which is taking pains to become 
 altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed 
 Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no 
 longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its 
 leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to dominate 
 the earth, to drain the hills and sea of color, to set Dante at 
 boosting Gopher Prairie, and to dress the high gods in 
 Klassy Kollege Klothes. Sure of itself, it bullies other civiliza- 
 tions, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the 
 wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over 
 arches for centuries dedicate to the sayings of Confucius. 
 
 Such a society functions admirably in the large production 
 of cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But 
 it is not satisfied until the entire world also admits that the 
 end and joyous purpose of living is to ride in flivvers, to make 
 advertising-pictures of dollar watches, and in the twilight to 
 sit talking not of love and courage but of the convenience 
 of safety razors. 
 
 And such a society, such a nation, is determined by the 
 Gopher Prairies. The greatest manufacturer is but a busier 
 Sam Clark, and all the rotund senators and presidents are 
 village lawyers and bankers grown nine feet tall. 
 
 Though a Gopher Prairie regards itself as a part of the Great 
 World, compares itself to Rome and Vienna, it will not acquire 
 the scientific spirit, the international mind, which would make 
 it great. It picks at information which will visibly procure 
 money or social distinction. Its conception of a community 
 ideal is not the grand manner, the noble aspiration, the fine 
 aristocratic pride, but cheap labor for the kitchen and rapid 
 increase in the price of land. It plays at cards on greasy oil- 
 cloth in a shanty, and does not know that prophets are walking 
 and talking on the terrace. 
 
 If all the provincials were as kindly as Champ Perry and 
 Sam Clark there would be no reason for desiring the town 
 to seek great traditions. It is the Harry Hay docks, the Dave 
 Dyers, the Jackson Elders, small busy men crushingly powerful 
 in their common purpose, viewing themselves as men of the 
 world but keeping themselves men of the cash-register and 
 the comic film, who make the town a sterile oligarchy. 
 
268 MAIN STREET 
 
 VII 
 
 She had sought to be definite in analyzing the surface ugli- 
 ness of the Gopher Prairies. She asserted that it is a matter 
 of universal similarity; of flimsiness of construction, so that 
 the towns resemble frontier camps; of neglect of natural ad- 
 vantages, so that the hills are covered with brush, the lakes 
 shut off by railroads, and the creeks lined with dumping- 
 grounds; of depressing sobriety of color; rectangularity of 
 buildings ; and excessive breadth and straightness of the gashed 
 streets, so that there is no escape from gales and from sight 
 of the grim sweep of land, nor any windings to coax the 
 loiterer along, while the breadth which would be majestic in 
 an avenue of palaces makes the low shabby shops creeping 
 down the typical Main Street the more mean by comparison. 
 
 The universal similarity that is the physical expression of 
 the philosophy of dull safety. Nine-tenths of the American 
 towns are so alike that it is the completest boredom to wander 
 from one to another. Always, west of Pittsburg, and often, 
 east of it, there is the same lumber yard, the same railroad 
 station, the same Ford garage, the same creamery, the same 
 box-like houses and two-story shops. The new, more conscious 
 houses are alike in their very attempts at diversity: the same 
 bungalows, the same square houses of stucco or tapestry brick. 
 The shops show the same standardized, nationally advertised 
 wares; the newspapers of sections three thousand miles apart 
 have the same "syndicated features"; the boy in Arkansas 
 displays just such a flamboyant ready-made suit as is found 
 on just such a boy in Delaware, both of them iterate the same 
 slang phrases from the same sporting-pages, and if one of them 
 is in college and the other is a barber, no one may surmise which 
 is which. 
 
 If Kennicott were snatched from Gopher Prairie and in- 
 stantly conveyed to a town leagues away, he would not realize 
 it. He would go down apparently the same Main Street 
 (almost certainly it would be called Main Street) ; in the 
 same drug store he would see the same young man serving 
 the same ice-cream soda to the same young woman with the 
 same magazines and phonograph records under her arm. Not 
 till he had climbed to his office and found another sign on 
 the door, another Dr. Kennicott inside, would he understand 
 that something curious had presumably happened. 
 
MAIN STREET 269 
 
 Finally, behind all her comments, Carol saw the fact that the 
 prairie towns no more exist to serve the farmers who are 
 their reason of existence than do the great capitals; they 
 exist to fatten on the farmers, to provide for the townsmen 
 large motors and social preferment; and, unlike the capitals, 
 they do not give to the district in return for usury a stately 
 and permanent center, but only this ragged camp. It is a 
 " parasitic Greek civilization " minus the civilization. 
 
 "There we are then," said Carol. "The remedy? Is 
 there any? Criticism, perhaps, for the beginning of the 
 beginning. Oh, there's nothing that attacks the Tribal God 
 Mediocrity that doesn't help a little . . . and probably 
 there's nothing that helps very much. Perhaps some day the 
 farmers will build and own their market-towns. (Think of 
 the club they could have!) But I'm afraid I haven't any 
 1 reform program.' Not any more! The trouble is spiritual, 
 and no League or Party can enact a preference for gardens 
 rather than dumping-grounds. . . . There's my confes- 
 sion. Well?" 
 
 " In other words, all you want is perfection? " 
 
 "Yes! Why not?" 
 
 " How you hate this place! How can you expect to do 
 anything with it if you haven't any sympathy? " 
 
 " But I have! And affection. Or else I wouldn't fume 
 so. I've learned that Gopher Prairie isn't just an eruption 
 on the prairie, as I thought first, but as large as New York. 
 In New York I wouldn't know more than forty or fifty people, 
 and I know that many here. Go on! Say what you're 
 thinking." 
 
 " Well, my dear, if I did take all your notions seriously, 
 it would be pretty discouraging. Imagine how a person 
 would feel, after working hard for years and helping to build 
 up a nice town, to have you airily flit in and simply say 
 < Rotten! ' Think that's fair? " 
 
 " Why not? It must be just as discouraging for the Gopher 
 Prairieite to see Venice and make comparisons." 
 
 " It would not ! I imagine gondolas are kind of nice to 
 
 ride in, but we've got better bath-rooms! But My dear, 
 
 you're not the only person in this town who has done some 
 thinking for herself, although (pardon my rudeness) I'm 
 afraid you think so. I'll admit we lack some things. Maybe 
 our theater isn't as good as shows in Paris. All right! I don't 
 
270 MAIN STREET 
 
 want to see any foreign culture suddenly forced on us whether 
 it's street-planning or table-manners or crazy communistic 
 ideas." 
 
 Vida sketched what she termed " practical things that will 
 make a happier and prettier town, but that do belong to our 
 life, that actually are being done." Of the Thanatopsis Club 
 she spoke; of the rest-room, the fight against mosquitos, the 
 campaign for more gardens and shade-trees and sewers 
 matters not fantastic and nebulous and distant, but immediate 
 and sure. 
 
 Carol's answer was fantastic and nebulous enough: 
 
 "Yes. . . . Yes. ... I know. They're good. 
 But if I could put through all those reforms at once, I'd still 
 want startling, exotic things. Life is comfortable and clean 
 enough here already. And so secure. What it needs is to be 
 less secure, more eager. The civic improvements which I'd 
 like the Thanatopsis to advocate are Strindberg plays, and 
 classic dancers exquisite legs beneath tulle and (I can see 
 him so clearly!) a thick, black-bearded, cynical Frenchman 
 who would sit about and drink and sing opera and tell bawdy 
 stories and laugh at our proprieties and quote Rabelais and 
 not be ashamed to kiss my hand! " 
 
 "Huh! Not sure about the rest of it but I guess that's 
 what you and all the other discontented young women really 
 want: some stranger kissing your hand! " At Carol's gasp, the 
 old squirrrel-like Vida darted out and cried, "Oh, my dear, 
 don't take that too seriously. I just meant " 
 
 "I know. You just meant it. Go on. Be good for my 
 soul. Isn't it funny: here we all are me trying to be good 
 for Gopher Prairie's soul, and Gopher Prairie trying to be 
 good for my soul. What are my other sins? " 
 
 " Oh, there's plenty of them. Possibly some day we shall 
 have your fat cynical Frenchman (horrible, sneering, tobacco- 
 stained object, ruining his brains and his digestion with vile 
 liquor!) but, thank heaven, for a while we'll manage to keep 
 busy with our lawns and pavements! You see, these things 
 really are coming! The Thanatopsis is getting somewhere. 
 
 And y OU Her tone italicized the words " to my great 
 
 disappointment, are doing less, not more, than the people 
 you laugh at! Sam Clark, on the school-board, is working 
 for better school ventilation. Ella Stowbody (whose elocuting 
 you always think is so absurd) has persuaded the railroad 
 
MAIN STREET 271 
 
 to share the expense of a parked space at the station, to 
 do away with that vacant lot. 
 
 "You sneer so easily. I'm sorry, but I do think there's 
 something essentially cheap in your attitude. Especially about 
 religion. 
 
 " If you must know, you're not a sound reformer at all. 
 You're an impossibilist. And you give up too easily. You 
 gave up on the new city hall, the anti-fly campaign, club papers, 
 the library-board, the dramatic association just because we 
 didn't graduate into Ibsen the very first thing. You want per- 
 fection all at once. Do you know what the finest thing you've 
 done is aside from bringing Hugh into the world? It was 
 the help you gave Dr. Will during baby-welfare week. You 
 didn't demand that each baby be a philosopher and artist 
 before you weighed him, as you do with the rest of us. 
 
 " And now I'm afraid perhaps I'll hurt you. We're going 
 to have a new schoolbuilding in this town in just a few 
 years and we'll have it without one bit of help or interest 
 from you! 
 
 " Professor Mott and I and some others have been dinging 
 away at the moneyed men for years. We didn't call on 
 you because you would never stand the pound-pound-pounding 
 year after year without one bit of encouragement. And we've 
 won! I've got the promise of everybody who counts that 
 just as soon as war-conditions permit, they'll vote the bonds 
 for the schoolhouse. And we'll have a wonderful building 
 lovely brown brick, with big windows, and agricultural and 
 manual-training departments. When we get it, that'll be my 
 answer to all your theories! " 
 
 " I'm glad. And I'm ashamed I haven't had any part in 
 
 getting it. But Please don't think I'm unsympathetic 
 
 if I ask one question: Will the teachers in the hygienic new 
 building go on informing the children that Persia is a yellow 
 spot on the map, and * Csesar ' the title of a book of gram- 
 matical puzzles? " 
 
 vin 
 
 Vida was indignant; Carol was apologetic; they talked for 
 another hour, the eternal Mary and Martha an immoralist 
 Mary and a reformist Martha. It was Vida who conquered. 
 
 The fact that she had been left out of the campaign for the 
 
272 MAIN STREET 
 
 new schoolbuilding disconcerted Carol. She laid her dreams 
 of perfection aside. When Vida asked her to take charge of 
 a group of Camp Fire Girls, she obeyed, and had definite 
 pleasure out of the Indian dances and ritual and costumes. She 
 went more regularly to the Thanatopsis. With Vida as lieu- 
 tenant and unofficial commander she campaigned for a village 
 nurse to attend poor families, raised the fund herself, saw to 
 it that the nurse was young and strong and amiable and 
 intelligent. 
 
 Yet all the while she beheld the burly cynical Frenchman 
 and the diaphanous dancers as clearly as the child sees its 
 air-born playmates; she relished the Camp Fire Girls not 
 because, in Vida's words, " this Scout training will help so 
 much to make them Good Wives," but because she hoped 
 that the Sioux dances would bring subversive color into their 
 dinginess. 
 
 She helped Ella Stowbody to set out plants in the tiny 
 triangular park at the railroad station; she squatted in the 
 dirt, with a small curved trowel and the most decorous of 
 gardening gauntlets; she talked to Ella about the public- 
 spiritedness of fuchsias and cannas; and she felt that she was 
 scrubbing a temple deserted by the gods and empty even of 
 incense and the sound of chanting. Passengers looking from 
 trains saw her as a village woman of fading prettiness, in- 
 corruptible virtue, and no abnormalities; the baggageman 
 heard her say, " Oh yes, I do think it will be a good example 
 for the children "; and all the while she saw herself running 
 garlanded through the streets of Babylon. 
 
 Planting led her to botanizing. She never got much farther 
 than recognizing the tiger lily and the wild rose, but she re- 
 discovered Hugh. " What does the buttercup say, mummy? " 
 he cried, his hand full of straggly grasses, his cheek gilded with 
 pollen. She knelt to embrace him; she affirmed that he made 
 life more than full; she was altogether reconciled . . . 
 for an hour. 
 
 But she awoke at night to hovering death. She crept away 
 from the hump of bedding that was Kennicott; tiptoed into 
 the bathroom and, by the mirror in the door of the medicine- 
 cabinet, examined her pallid face. 
 
 Wasn't she growing visibly older in ratio as Vida grew 
 plumper and younger? Wasn't her nose sharper? Wasn't 
 her neck granulated? She stared and choked. She was only 
 
MAIN STREET 273 
 
 thirty. But the five years since her marriage had they not 
 gone by as hastily and stupidly as though she had been under 
 ether; would time not slink past till death? She pounded her 
 fist on the cool enameled rim of the bathtub and raged mutely 
 against the indifferent gods: 
 
 "I don't care! I won't endure it! They lie so Vida 
 and Will and Aunt Bessie they tell me I ought to be satisfied 
 with Hugh and a good home and planting seven nasturtiums 
 in a station garden! I am I! When I die the world will be 
 annihilated, as far as I'm concerned. I am I! I'm not 
 content to leave the sea and the ivory towers to others. I 
 want them for me! Damn Vida! Damn all of them! Do 
 they think they can make me believe that a display of potatoes 
 at Rowland & Gould's is enough beauty and strangeness? " 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 WHEN America entered the Great European War, Vida sent 
 Raymie off to an officers' training-camp less than a year after 
 her wedding. Raymie was diligent and rather strong. He 
 came out a first lieutenant of infantry, and was one of the 
 earliest sent abroad. 
 
 Carol grew definitely afraid of Vida as Vida transferred 
 the passion which had been released in marriage to the cause 
 of the war ; as she lost all tolerance. When Carol was touched 
 by the desire for heroism in Raymie and tried tactfully to 
 express it, Vida made her feel like an impertinent child. 
 
 By enlistment and draft, the sons of Lyman Cass, Nat 
 Hicks, Sam Clark joined the army. But most of the soldiers 
 were the sons of German and Swedish farmers unknown to 
 Carol. Dr. Terry Gould and Dr. McGanum became captains 
 in the medical corps, and were stationed at camps in Iowa and 
 Georgia. They were the only officers, besides Raymie, from 
 the Gopher Prairie district. Kennicott wanted to go with 
 them, but the several doctors of the town forgot medical 
 rivalry and, meeting in council, decided that he would do 
 better to wait and keep the town well till he should be needed. 
 Kennicott was forty- two now; the only youngish doctor left 
 in a radius of eighteen miles. Old Dr. Westlake, who loved 
 comfort like a cat, protestingly rolled out at night for country 
 calls, and hunted through his collar-box for his G. A. R. button. 
 
 Carol did not quite know what she thought about Kennicott's 
 going. Certainly she was no Spartan wife. She knew that 
 he wanted to go; she knew that this longing was always in 
 him, behind his unchanged trudging and remarks about the 
 weather. She felt for him an admiring affection and she 
 was sorry that she had nothing more than affection. 
 
 Cy Bogart was the spectacular warrior of the town. Cy 
 was no longer the weedy boy who had sat in the loft specu- 
 lating about Carol's egotism and the mysteries of generation. 
 He was nineteen now, tall, broad, busy, the " town sport," 
 
 274 
 
MAIN STREET 275 
 
 famous for his ability to drink beer, to shake dice, to tell 
 undesirable stories, and, from his post in front of Dyer's drug 
 store, to embarrass the girls by " jollying " them as they passed. 
 His face was at once peach-bloomed and pimply. 
 
 Cy was to be heard publishing it abroad that if he couldn't 
 get the Widow Bogart's permission to enlist, he'd run away 
 and enlist without it. He shouted that he " hated every dirty 
 Hun; by gosh, if he could just poke a bayonet into one big 
 fat Heinie and learn him some decency and democracy, he'd 
 die happy." Cy got much reputation by whipping a farmboy 
 named Adolph Pochbauer for being a " damn hyphenated Ger- 
 man." . . . This was the younger Pochbauer, who was 
 killed in the Argonne, while he was trying to bring the body 
 of his Yankee captain back to the lines. At this time Cy Bogart 
 was still dwelling in Gopher Prairie and planning to go to 
 war. 
 
 ii 
 
 Everywhere Carol heard that the war was going to bring 
 a basic change in psychology, to purify and uplift everything 
 from marital relations to national politics, and she tried to 
 exult in it. Only she did not find it. She saw the women who 
 made bandages for the Red Cross giving up bridge, and 
 laughing at having to do without sugar, but over the surgical- 
 dressings they did not speak of God and the souls of men, 
 but of Miles Bjornstam's impudence, of Terry Gould's scan- 
 dalous carryings-on with a farmer's daughter four years ago, 
 of cooking cabbage, and of altering blouses. Their refer- 
 ences to the war touched atrocities only. She herself was 
 punctual, and efficient at making dressings, but she could not, 
 like Mrs. Lyman Cass and Mrs. Bogart, fill the dressings 
 with hate for enemies. 
 
 When she protested to Vida, " The young do the work while 
 these old ones sit around and interrupt us and gag with hate 
 because they're too feeble to do anything but hate," then 
 Vida turned on her: \ 
 
 " If you can't be reverent, at least don't be so pert and 
 opinionated, now when men and women are dying. Some of 
 us we have given up so much, and we're glad to. At least 
 we expect that you others sha'n't try to be witty at our 
 expense." 
 
276 MAIN STREET 
 
 There was weeping. 
 
 Carol did desire to see the Prussian autocracy defeated; 
 she did persuade herself that there were no autocracies save 
 that of Prussia; she did thrill to motion-pictures of troops 
 embarking in New York ; and she was uncomfortable when she 
 met Miles Bjornstam on the street and he croaked: 
 
 "How's tricks? Things going fine with me; got two new 
 cows. Well, have you become a patriot? Eh? Sure, they'll 
 bring democracy the democracy of death. Yes, sure, in every 
 war since the Garden of Eden the workmen have gone out to 
 fight each other for perfectly good reasons handed to them 
 by their bosses. Now me, I'm wise. I'm so wise that I know 
 I don't know anything about the war." 
 
 It was not a thought of the war that remained with her 
 after Miles's declamation but a perception that she and Vida 
 and all of the good-intentioners who wanted to " do some- 
 thing for the common people " were insignificant, because the 
 "common people" were able to do things for themselves, 
 and highly likely to, as soon as they learned the fact. The 
 conception of millions of workmen like Miles taking control 
 frightened her, and she scuttled rapidly away from the thought 
 of a time when she might no longer retain the position of 
 Lady Bountiful to the Bjornstams and Beas and Oscarinas 
 whom she loved and patronized. 
 
 m 
 
 It was in June, two months after America's entrance into 
 the war, that the momentous event happened the visit of 
 the great Percy Bresnahan, the millionaire president of the 
 Velvet Motor Car Company of Boston, the one native son 
 who was always to be mentioned to strangers. 
 
 For two weeks there were rumors. Sam Clark cried to 
 Kennicott, " Say, I hear Perce Bresnahan is coming! By 
 golly it'll be great to see the old scout, eh? " Finally the 
 Dauntless printed, on the front page with a No. i head, a letter 
 from Bresnahan to Jackson Elder: 
 
 DEAR JACK: 
 
 Well, Jack, I find I can make it. I'm to go to Washington as a 
 dollar a year man for the government, in the aviation motor section, 
 and tell them how much I don't know about carburetors. But before 
 I start in being a hero I want to shoot out and catch me a big black 
 
MAIN STREET 277 
 
 bass and cuss out you and Sam Clark and Harry Haydock and Will 
 Kennicott and the rest of you pirates. I'll land in G.P. on Jirne 7, 
 on No. 7 from Mpls. Shake a day-day. Tell Bert Tybee to save 
 me a glass of beer. 
 
 Sincerely yours, 
 
 PERCE. 
 
 All members of the social, financial, scientific, literary, and 
 sporting sets were at No. 7 to meet Bresnahan; Mrs. Lyman 
 Cass was beside Del Snafflin the barber, and Juanita Haydock 
 almost cordial to Miss Villets the librarian. Carol saw Bres- 
 nahan laughing down at them from the train vestibule big, 
 immaculate, overjawed, with the eye of an executive. In the 
 voice of the professional Good Fellow he bellowed, " Howdy, 
 folks! " As she was introduced to him (not he to her) Bres- 
 nahan looked into her eyes, and his hand-shake was warm, un- 
 hurried. 
 
 He declined the offers of motors; he walked off, his arm 
 about the shoulder of Nat Hicks the sporting tailor, with the 
 elegant Harry Haydock carrying one of his enormous pale 
 leather bags, Del Snafflin the other, Jack Elder bearing an 
 overcoat, and Julius Flickerbaugh the fishing-tackle. Carol 
 noted that though Bresnahan wore spats and a stick, no small 
 boy jeered. She decided, " I must have Will get a double- 
 breasted blue coat and a wing collar and a dotted bow-tie 
 like his." 
 
 That evening, when Kennicott was trimming the grass along 
 the walk with sheep-shears, Bresnahan rolled up, alone. He 
 was now in corduroy trousers, khaki shirt open at the throat, 
 a white boating hat, and marvelous canvas-and-leather shoes. 
 " On the job there, old Will ! Say, my Lord, this is living, to 
 come back and get into a regular man-sized pair of pants. 
 They can talk all they want to about the city, but my idea 
 of a good time is to loaf around and see you boys and catch 
 a gamey bass! " 
 
 He hustled up the walk and blared at Carol, " Where's that 
 little fellow? I hear youVe got one fine big he-boy that you're 
 holding out on me! " 
 
 "He's gone to bed," rather briefly. 
 
 " I know. And rules are rules, these days. Kids get routed 
 through the shop like a motor. But look here, sister; I'm 
 one great hand at busting rules. Come on now, let Uncle 
 Perce have a look at him. Please now, sister? " 
 
278 MAIN STREET 
 
 He put his arm about her waist; it was a large, strong, 
 sophisticated arm, and very agreeable; he grinned at her with 
 a devastating knowingness, while Kennicott glowed inanely. 
 She flushed; she was alarmed by the ease with which the 
 big-city man invaded her guarded personality. She was glad, 
 in retreat, to scamper ahead of the two men up-stairs to the 
 hall-room hi which Hugh slept. All the way Kennicott mut- 
 tered, " Well, well, say, gee whittakers but it's good to have 
 you back, certainly is good to see you! " 
 
 Hugh lay on his stomach, making an earnest business of 
 sleeping. He burrowed his eyes in the dwarf blue pillow to 
 escape the electric light, then sat up abruptly, small and frail 
 in his woolly nightdrawers, his floss of brown hair wild, the 
 pillow clutched to his breast. He wailed. He stared at the 
 stranger, in a manner of patient dismissal. He explained 
 confidentially to Carol, "Daddy wouldn't let it be morning 
 yet. What does the pillow say? " 
 
 Bresnahan dropped his arm caressingly on Carol's shoulder; 
 he pronounced, " My Lord, you're a lucky girl to have a fine 
 young husk like that. I figure Will knew what he was doing 
 when he persuaded you to take a chance on an old bum like 
 him! They tell me you come from St. Paul. We're going to 
 get you to come to Boston some day." He leaned over the 
 bed. " Young man, you're the slickest sight I've seen this 
 side of Boston. With your permission, may we present you 
 with a slight token of our regard and appreciation of your 
 long service? " 
 
 He held out a red rubber Pierrot. Hugh remarked, " Gimme 
 it," hid it under the bedclothes, and stared at Bresnahan 
 as though he had never seen the man before. 
 
 For once Carol permitted herself the spiritual luxury of 
 not asking "Why, Hugh dear, what do you say when some 
 one gives you a present? " The great man was apparently 
 waiting. They stood in inane suspense till Bresnahan led 
 them out, rumbling, "How about planning a fishing-trip, 
 Will? " 
 
 He remained for half an hour. Always he told Carol what 
 a charming person she was ; always he looked at her knowingly. 
 
 " Yes. He probably would make a woman fall in love with 
 him. But it wouldn't last a week. I'd get tired of his con- 
 founded buoyancy. His hypocrisy. He's a spiritual bully. 
 He makes me rude to him in self-defense. Oh yes, he is glad 
 
MAIN STREET 279 
 
 to be here. He does like us. He's so good an actor that he 
 convinces his own self. ... I'd hate him in Boston. 
 He'd have all the obvious big-city things. Limousines. Dis- 
 creet evening-clothes. Order a clever dinner at a smart res- 
 taurant. Drawing-room decorated by the best firm but the 
 pictures giving him away. I'd rather talk to Guy Pollock in 
 his dusty office. . . . How I lie! His arm coaxed my 
 shoulder and his eyes dared me not to admire him. I'd be 
 afraid of him. I hate him! . . . Oh, the inconceivable 
 egotistic imagination of women! All this stew of analysis 
 about a man, a good, decent, friendly, efficient man, because he 
 was kind to me, as Will's wife! " 
 
 IV 
 
 The Kennicotts, the Elders, the Clarks, and Bresnahan went 
 fishing at Red Squaw Lake. They drove forty miles to the lake 
 in Elder's new Cadillac. There was much laughter and bustle 
 at the start, much storing of lunch-baskets and jointed poles, 
 much inquiry as to whether it would really bother Carol to 
 sit with her feet up on a roll of shawls. When they were 
 ready to go Mrs. Clark lamented, "Oh, Sam, I forgot my 
 magazine," and Bresnahan bullied, " Come on now, if you 
 women think you're going to be literary, you can't go with 
 us tough guys! " Every one laughed a great deal, and as 
 they drove on Mrs. Clark explained that though probably she 
 would not have read it, still, she might have wanted to, while 
 the other girls had a nap in the afternoon, and she was right 
 in the middle of a serial it was an awfully exciting story 
 it seems that this girl was a Turkish dancer (only she was 
 really the daughter of an American lady and a Russian prince) 
 and men kept running after her, just disgustingly, but she 
 remained pure, and there was a scene 
 
 While the men floated on the lake, casting for black bass, 
 the women prepared lunch and yawned. Carol was a little 
 resentful of the manner in which the men assumed that they 
 did not care to fish. "I don't want to go with them, but 
 I would like the privilege of refusing." 
 
 The lunch was long and pleasant. It was a background 
 for the talk of the great man come home, hints of cities and 
 large imperative affairs and famous people, jocosely modest 
 admissions that, yes, their friend Perce was doing about as 
 
28o MAIN STREET 
 
 well as most of these " Boston swells that think so much of 
 themselves because they come from rich old families and went 
 to college and everything. Believe me, it's us new business men 
 that are running Beantown today, and not a lot of fussy old 
 bucks snoozing in their clubs! " 
 
 Carol realized that he was not one of the sons of Gopher 
 Prairie who, if they do not actually starve in the East, are 
 invariably spoken of as "highly successful"; and she found 
 behind his too incessant flattery a genuine affection for his 
 mates. It was in the matter of the war that he most favored 
 and thrilled them. Dropping his voice while they bent nearer 
 (there was no one within two miles to overhear), he disclosed 
 the fact that in both Boston and Washington he'd been getting 
 a lot of inside stuff on the war right straight from head- 
 quarters he was in touch with some men couldn't name 
 them but they were darn high up in both the War and State 
 Departments and he would say only for Pete's sake they 
 mustn't breathe one word of this; it was strictly on the Q.T. 
 and not generally known outside of Washington but just 
 between ourselves and they could take this for gospel Spain 
 had finally decided to join the Entente allies in the Grand 
 Scrap. Yes, sir, there'd be two million fully equipped Spanish 
 soldiers fighting with us in France in one month now. Some 
 surprise for Germany, all right! 
 
 " How about the prospects for revolution in Germany? " 
 reverently asked Kennicott. 
 
 The authority grunted, " Nothing to it. The one thing you 
 can bet on is that no matter what happens to the German 
 people, win or lose, they'll stick by the Kaiser till hell freezes 
 over. I got that absolutely straight, from a fellow who's on 
 the inside of the inside in Washington. No, sir! I don't 
 pretend to know much about international affairs but one thing 
 you can put down as settled is that Germany will be a Hohen- 
 zollern empire for the next forty years. At that, I don't know 
 as it's so bad. The Kaiser and the Junkers keep a firm hand 
 on a lot of these red agitators who'd be worse than a king if 
 they could get control." 
 
 " I'm terribly interested in this uprising that overthrew 
 the Czar in Russia," suggested Carol. She had finally been 
 conquered by the man's wizard knowledge of affairs. 
 
 Kennicott apologized for her: " Carrie's nuts about this 
 Russian revolution. Is there much to it, Perce? " 
 
MAIN STREET 281 
 
 " There is not! " Bresnahan said flatly. " I can speak by 
 the book there. Carol, honey, I'm surprised to find you talking 
 like a New York Russian Jew, or one of these long-hairs! I 
 can tell you, only you don't need to let every one in on it, 
 this is confidential, I got it from a man who's close to the 
 State Department, but as a matter of fact the Czar will be back 
 in power before the end of the year. You read a lot about 
 his retiring and about his being killed, but I know he's got a 
 big army back of him, and he'll show these damn agitators, 
 lazy beggars hunting for a soft berth bossing the poor goats 
 that fall for 'em, he'll show 'em where they get off! " 
 
 Carol was sorry to hear that the Czar was coming back, 
 but she said nothing. The others had looked vacant at the 
 mention of a country so far away as Russia. Now they edged 
 in and asked Bresnahan what he thought about the Packard 
 car, investments in Texas oil-wells, the comparative merits of 
 young men born in Minnesota and in Massachusetts, the ques- 
 tion of prohibition, the future cost of motor tires, and wasn't 
 it true that American aviators put it all over these French- 
 men? 
 
 They were glad to find that he agreed with them on every 
 point. 
 
 As she heard Bresnahan announce, " We're perfectly willing 
 to talk to any committee the men may choose, but we're not 
 going to stand for some outside agitator butting in and telling 
 us how we're going to run our plant! " Carol remembered 
 that Jackson Elder (now meekly receiving New Ideas) had 
 said the same thing in the same words. 
 
 While Sam Clark was digging up from his memory a long 
 and immensely detailed story of the crushing things he had 
 said to a Pullman porter, named George, Bresnahan hugged 
 his knees and rocked and watched Carol. She wondered if he 
 did not understand the laboriousness of the smile with which 
 she listened to Kennicott's account of the " good one he had 
 on Carrie," that marital, coyly improper, ten-times-told tale 
 of how she had forgotten to attend to Hugh because she was 
 " all het up pounding the box " which may be translated as 
 " eagerly playing the piano." She was certain that Bresnahan 
 saw through her when she pretended not to hear Kennicott's 
 invitation to join a game of cribbage. She feared the comments 
 he might make; she was irritated by her fear. 
 
 She was equally irritated, when the motor returned through 
 
MAIN STREET 
 
 Gopher Prairie, to find that she was proud of sharing in 
 Bresnahan's kudos as people waved, and Juanita, Haydock 
 leaned from a window. She said to herself, " As though I 
 cared whether I'm seen with this fat phonograph! " and 
 simultaneously, " Everybody has noticed how much Will and 
 I are playing with Mr. Bresnahan." 
 
 The town was full of his stories, his friendliness, his memory 
 for names, his clothes, his trout-flies, his generosity. He had 
 given a hundred dollars to Father Klubok the priest, and a 
 hundred to the Reverend Mr. Zitterel the Baptist minister, 
 for Americanization work. 
 
 At the Bon Ton, Carol heard Nat Hicks the tailor exulting: 
 " Old Perce certainly pulled a good one on this fellow 
 Bjornstam that always is shooting off his mouth. He's 
 supposed to of settled down since he got married, but Lord, 
 those fellows that think they know it all, they never change. 
 Well, the Red Swede got the grand razz handed to him, all 
 right. He had the nerve to breeze up to Perce, at Dave Dyer's, 
 and he said, he said to Perce, * I've always wanted to look 
 at a man that was so useful that folks would pay him a million 
 dollars for existing/ and Perce gave him the once-over and 
 come right back, * Have, eh? ' he says. l Well/ he says, l I've 
 been looking for a man so useful sweeping floors that I could 
 pay him four dollars a day. Want the job, my friend? ' Ha, 
 ha, ha! Say, you know how lippy Bjornstam is? Well for 
 once he didn't have a thing to say. He tried to get fresh, 
 and tell what a rotten town this is, and Perce come right 
 back at him, l If you don't like this country, you better get 
 out of it and go back to Germany, where you belong! ' Say, 
 maybe us fellows didn't give Bjornstam the horse-laugh though! 
 Oh, Perce is the white-haired boy in this burg, all rightee! " 
 
 Bresnahan had borrowed Jackson Elder's motor; he stopped 
 at the Kennicotts'; he bawled at Carol, rocking with Hugh 
 on the porch, " Better come for a ride." 
 
 She wanted to snub him. " Thanks so much, but I'm being 
 maternal." 
 
 " Bring him along! Bring him along! " Bresnahan was 
 out of the seat, stalking up the sidewalk, and the rest of her 
 protests and dignities were feeble. 
 
MAIN STREET 283 
 
 She did not bring Hugh along. 
 
 Bresnahan was silent for a mile, in words, But he looked 
 at her as though he meant her to know that he understood 
 everything she thought. 
 
 She observed how deep was his chest. 
 
 " Lovely fields over there," he said. 
 
 " You really like them? There's no profit in them." 
 
 He chuckled. " Sister, you can't get away with it. I'm 
 onto you. You consider me a big bluff. Well, maybe I am. 
 But so are you, my dear and pretty enough so that I'd 
 try to make love to you, if I weren't afraid you'd slap me." 
 
 " Mr. Bresnahan, do you talk that way to your wife's 
 friends? And do you call them f sister ' ? " 
 
 "As a matter of fact, I do! And I make 'em like it. 
 Score two! " But his chuckle was not so rotund, and he was 
 very attentive to the ammeter. 
 
 In a moment he was cautiously attacking: " That's a wonder- 
 ful boy, Will Kennicott. Great work these country practi- 
 tioners are doing. The other day, in Washington, I was 
 talking to a big scientific shark, a professor in Johns Hopkins 
 medical school, and he was saying that no one has ever 
 sufficiently appreciated the general practitioner and the sym- 
 pathy and help he gives folks. These crack specialists, the 
 young scientific fellows, they're so cocksure and so wrapped 
 up in their laboratories that they miss the human element. 
 Except in the case of a few freak diseases that no respectable 
 human being would waste his time having, it's the old doc 
 that keeps a community well, mind and body. And strikes me 
 that Will is one of the steadiest and clearest-headed country 
 practitioners I've ever met. Eh? " 
 
 " I'm sure he is. He's a servant of reality." 
 
 "Come again? Urn. Yes. All of that, whatever that 
 is. ... Say, child, you don't care a whole lot for Gopher 
 Prairie, if I'm not mistaken." 
 
 " Nope." 
 
 " There's where you're missing a big chance. There's noth- 
 ing to these cities. Believe me, I know! This is a good town, 
 as they go. You're lucky to be here. I wish I could stay 
 on! " 
 
 " Very well, why don't you? " 
 
 " Huh? Why Lord can't get away fr " 
 
 "You don't have to stay. I do! So I want to change it. 
 
284 MAIN STREET 
 
 Do you know that men like you, prominent men, do quite a 
 reasonable amount of harm by insisting that your native towns 
 and native states are perfect? It's you who encourage the 
 denizens not to change. They quote you, and go on believing 
 
 that they live in paradise, and " She clenched her fist. 
 
 " The incredible dullness of it! " 
 
 " Suppose you were right. Even so, don't you think you 
 waste a lot of thundering on one poor scared little town? 
 Kind of mean! " 
 
 "I tell you it's dull. Dull! 99 
 
 "The folks don't find it dull. These couples like the 
 Haydocks have a high old time; dances and cards " 
 
 "They don't. They're bored. Almost every one here is. 
 Vacuousness and bad manners and spiteful gossip that's what 
 I hate." 
 
 " Those things course they're here. So are they in Boston! 
 And every place else! Why, the faults you find in this town 
 are simply human nature, and never will be changed." 
 
 " Perhaps. But in a Boston all the good Carols (I'll admit 
 I have no faults) can find one another and play. But here 
 I'm alone, in a stale pool except as it's stirred by the great 
 Mr. Bresnahan! " 
 
 " My Lord, to hear you tell it, a fellow 'd think that all 
 the denizens, as you impolitely call 'em, are so confoundedly 
 unhappy that it's a wonder they don't all up and commit 
 suicide. But they seem to struggle along somehow! " 
 
 " They don't know what they miss. And anybody can 
 endure anything. Look at men in mines and in prisons." 
 
 He drew up on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie. 
 He glanced across the reeds reflected on the water, the quiver 
 of wavelets like crumpled tinfoil, the distant shores patched 
 with dark woods, silvery oats and deep yellow wheat. He 
 
 patted her hand. " Sis Carol, you're a darling girl, but 
 
 you're difficult. Know what I think? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Humph. Maybe you do, but My humble (not too 
 
 humble!) opinion is that you like to be different. You like 
 to think you're peculiar. Why, if you knew how many tens 
 .of thousands of women, especially in New York, say just what 
 you do, you'd lose all the fun of thinking you're a lone genius 
 and you'd be on the band-wagon whooping it up for Gopher 
 Prairie and a good decent family life. There's always about 
 
MAIN STREET 285 
 
 a million young women just out of college who want to teach 
 their grandmothers how to suck eggs." 
 
 " How proud you are of that homely rustic metaphor! You 
 use it at 4 banquets ' and directors' meetings, and boast of 
 your climb from a humble homestead." 
 
 " Huh! You may have my number. I'm not telling. But 
 look here: You're so prejudiced against Gopher Prairie that 
 you overshoot the mark; you antagonize those who might be 
 
 inclined to agree with you in some particulars but Great 
 
 guns, the town can't be all wrong! " 
 
 " No, it isn't. But it could be. Let me tell you a fable. 
 Imagine a cavewoman complaining to her mate. She doesn't 
 like one single thing; she hates the damp cave, the rats 
 running over her bare legs, the stiff skin garments, the eating 
 of half-raw meat, her husband's bushy face, the constant 
 battles, and the worship of the spirits who will hoodoo her 
 unless she gives the priests her best claw necklace. Her man 
 protests, 'But it can't all be wrong! ' and he thinks he has 
 reduced her to absurdity. Now you assume that a world 
 which produces a Percy Bresnahan and a Velvet Motor Com- 
 pany must be civilized. It is? Aren't we only about half-way 
 along in barbarism? I suggest Mrs. Bogart as a test. And 
 we'll continue in barbarism just as long as people as nearly 
 intelligent as you continue to defend things as they are be- 
 cause they are." 
 
 " You're a fair spieler, child. But, by golly, I'd like to see 
 you try to design a new manifold, or run a factory and keep 
 a lot of your fellow reds from Czech-slovenski-magyar- 
 godknowswheria on the job! You'd drop your theories so 
 darn quick! I'm not any defender of things as they are. 
 Sure. They're rotten. Only I'm sensible." 
 
 He preached his gospel: love of outdoors, Playing the Game, 
 loyalty to friends. She had the neophyte's shock of discovery 
 that, outside of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find 
 no answer when an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with 
 agility and confusing statistics. 
 
 He was so much the man, the worker, the friend, that she 
 liked him when she most tried to stand out against him; he 
 was so much the successful executive that she did not want 
 him to despise her. His manner of sneering at what he called 
 " parlor socialists " (though the phrase was not overwhelmingly 
 new) had a power which made her wish to placate his 
 
286 MAIN STREET 
 
 company of well-fed, speed-loving administrators. When he 
 demanded, " Would you like to associate with nothing but a 
 lot of turkey-necked, horn-spectacled nuts that have ade- 
 noids and need a hair-cut, and that spend all their time kicking 
 about ' conditions ' and never do a lick of work? " she said, 
 
 " No, but just the same " When he asserted, " Even if 
 
 your cavewoman was right in knocking the whole works, I 
 bet some red-blooded Regular Fellow, some real He-man, 
 found her a nice dry cave, and not any whining criticizing 
 radical," she wriggled her head feebly, between a nod and a 
 shake. 
 
 His large hands, sensual lips, easy voice supported his self- 
 confidence. He made her feel young and soft as Kenni- 
 cott had once made her feel. She had nothing to say when he 
 bent his powerful head and experimented, " My dear, I'm 
 sorry I'm going away from this town. You'd be a darling 
 child to play with. You are pretty! Some day in Boston 
 I'll show you how we buy a lunch. Well, hang it, got to be 
 starting back." 
 
 The only answer to his gospel of beef which she could find, 
 when she was home, was a wail of " But just the same " 
 
 She did not see him again before he departed for Washing- 
 ton. 
 
 His eyes remained. His glances at her lips and hair and 
 shoulders had revealed to her that sHe was not a wife-and- 
 mother alone, but a girl; that there still were men in the 
 world, as there had been in college days. 
 
 That admiration led her to study Kennicott, to tear at the 
 shroud of intimacy, to perceive the strangeness of the most 
 familiar. 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 ALL that midsummer month Carol was sensitive to Kennicott. 
 She recalled a hundred grotesqueries: her comic dismay at 
 his having chewed tobacco, the evening when she had tried 
 to read poetry to him; matters which had seemed to vanish 
 with no trace or sequence. Always she repeated that he had 
 been heroically patient in his desire to join the army. She 
 made much of her consoling affection for him in little things. 
 She liked the homeliness of his tinkering about the house; his 
 strength and handiness as he tightened the hinges of a shutter; 
 his boyishness when he ran to her to be comforted because he 
 had found rust in the barrel of his pump-gun. But at the 
 highest he was to her another Hugh, without the glamor of 
 Hugh's unknown future. 
 
 There was, late in June, a day of heat-lightning. 
 
 Because of the work imposed by the absence of the other 
 doctors the Kennicotts had not moved to the lake cottage 
 but remained in town, dusty and irritable. In the afternoon, 
 when she went to Oleson & McGuire's (formerly Dahl & 
 Oleson's), Carol was vexed by the assumption of the youthful 
 clerk, recently come from the farm, that he had to be neigh- 
 borly and rude. He was no more brusquely familiar than 
 a dozen other clerks of the town, but her nerves were heat- 
 scorched. 
 
 When she asked for codfish, for supper, he grunted, " What 
 d'you want that darned old dry stuff for? " 
 
 " I like it! " 
 
 " Punk! Guess the doc can afford something better than 
 that. Try some of the new wienies we got in. Swell. The 
 Haydocks use 'em." 
 
 She exploded. " My dear young man, it is not your duty to 
 instruct me in housekeeping, and it doesn't particularly con- 
 cern me what the Haydocks condescend to approve! " 
 
 He was hurt. He hastily wrapped up the leprous fragment 
 of fish; he gaped as she trailed out. She lamented, "I 
 
 287 
 
283 MAIN STREET 
 
 shouldn't have spoken so. He didn't mean anything. He 
 doesn't know when he is being rude." 
 
 Her repentance was not proof against Uncle Whittier when 
 she stopped in at his grocery for salt and a package of 
 safety matches. Uncle Whittier, in a shirt collarless and soaked 
 with sweat in a brown streak down his back, was whining 
 at a clerk, " Come on now, get a hustle on and lug that pound 
 cake up to Mis' Cass's. Some folks in this town think a 
 storekeeper ain't got nothing to do but chase out 'phone- 
 orders. . . . Hello, Carrie. That dress you got on looks 
 kind of low in the neck to me. May be decent and modest 
 I suppose I'm old-fashioned but I never thought much of 
 showing the whole town a woman's bust! Hee, hee, hee! 
 .... Afternoon, Mrs. Hicks. Sage? Just out of it. 
 Lemme sell you some other spices. Heh? " Uncle Whittier was 
 nasally indignant "Certainly! Got plenty other spices jus' 
 good as sage for any purp'se whatever! What's the matter 
 with well, with allspice? " When Mrs. Hicks had gone, he 
 raged, " Some folks don't know what they want! " 
 
 " Sweating sanctimonious bully my husband's uncle! " 
 thought Carol. 
 
 She crept into Dave Dyer's. Dave held up his arms with, 
 " Don't shoot! I surrender! " She smiled, but it occurred to 
 her that for nearly five years Dave had kept up this game of 
 pretending that she threatened his life. 
 
 As she went dragging through the prickly-hot street she 
 reflected that a citizen of Gopher Prairie does not have jests 
 he has a jest. Every cold morning for five winters Lyman Cass 
 had remarked, " Fair to middlin' chilly get worse before it 
 gets better." Fifty times had Ezra Stowbody informed the 
 public that Carol had once asked, " Shall I indorse this check 
 on the back? " Fifty times had Sam Clark called to her, 
 " Where'd you steal that hat? " Fifty times had the mention 
 of Barney Cahoon, the town drayman, like a nickel in a slot 
 produced from Kennicott the apocryphal story of Barney's 
 directing a minister, " Come down to the depot and get your 
 case of religious books they're leaking! " 
 
 She came home by the unvarying route. She knew every 
 house-front, every street-crossing, every billboard, every tree, 
 every dog. She knew every blackened banana-skin and empty 
 cigarette-box in the gutters. She knew every greeting. When 
 Jim Rowland stopped and gaped at her there was no possibility 
 
MAIN STREET 289 
 
 that he was about to confide anything but his grudging, " Well, 
 haryuh t'day? " 
 
 All her future life, this same red-labeled bread-crate in 
 front of the bakery, this same thimble-shaped crack in the 
 sidewalk a quarter of a block beyond Stowbody's granite hitch- 
 ing-post 
 
 She silently handed her purchases to the silent Oscarina. 
 She sat on the porch, rocking, fanning, twitchy with Hugh's 
 whining. 
 
 Kennicott came home, grumbled, " What the devil is the kid 
 yapping about? " 
 
 " I guess you can stand it ten minutes if I can stand it all 
 day! " 
 
 He came to supper in his shirt sleeves, his vest partly open, 
 revealing discolored suspenders. 
 
 " Why don't you put on your nice Palm Beach suit, and take 
 off that hideous vest? " she complained. 
 
 " Too much trouble. Too hot to go up-stairs." 
 
 She realized that for perhaps a year she had not definitely 
 looked at her husband. She regarded his table-manners. He 
 violently chased fragments of fish about his plate with a knife 
 and licked the knife after gobbling them. She was slightly 
 sick. She asserted, " I'm ridiculous. What do these things 
 matter! Don't be so simple! " But she knew that to her they 
 did matter, these solecisms and mixed tenses of the table. 
 
 She realized that they found little to say; that, incredibly, 
 they were like the talked-out couples whom she had pitied at 
 restaurants. 
 
 Bresnahan would have spouted in a lively, exciting, unre- 
 liable manner. . . . 
 
 She realized that Kennicott's clothes were seldom pressed. 
 His coat was wrinkled; his trousers would flap at the knees 
 when he arose. His shoes were unblacked, and they were of 
 an elderly shapelessness. He refused to wear soft hats; 
 cleaved to a hard derby, as a symbol of virility and pros- 
 perity; and sometimes he forgot to take it off in the house. 
 She peeped at his cuffs. They were frayed in prickles of 
 starched linen. She had turned them once; she clipped them 
 every week; but when she had begged him to throw the 
 shirt away, last Sunday morning at the crisis of the weekly 
 bath, he had uneasily protested, " Oh, it'll wear quite a while 
 yet." 
 
290 MAIN STREET 
 
 He was shaved (by himself or more socially by Del Snafflin) 
 only three times a week. This morning had not been one of 
 the three times. 
 
 Yet he was vain of his new turn-down collars and sleek ties; 
 he often spoke of the "sloppy dressing" of Dr. McGanum; 
 and he laughed at old men who wore detachable cuffs or Glad- 
 stone collars. 
 
 Carol did not care much for the creamed codfish that eve- 
 ning. 
 
 She noted that his nails were jagged and ill-shaped from 
 his habit of cutting them with a pocket-knife and despising 
 a nail-file as effeminate and urban. That they were invariably 
 clean, that his were the scoured fingers of the surgeon, made 
 his stubborn untidiness the more jarring. They were wise 
 hands, kind hands, but they were not the hands of love. 
 
 She remembered him in the days of courtship. He had tried 
 to please her, then; had touched her by sheepishly wearing 
 a colored band on his straw hat. Was it possible that those 
 days of fumbling for each other were gone so completely? 
 He had read books, to impress her; had said (she recalled it 
 ironically) that she was to point out his every fault; had 
 insisted once, as they sat in the secret place beneath the walls 
 of Fort Snelling 
 
 She shut the door on her thoughts. That was sacred ground. 
 But it was a shame that 
 
 She nervously pushed away her cake and stewed apricots. 
 
 After supper, when they had been driven in from the porch 
 by mosquitos, when Kennicott had for the two-hundredth 
 time in five years commented, "We must have a new screen 
 on the porch lets all the bugs in," they sat reading, and she 
 noted, and detested herself for noting, and noted again his 
 habitual awkwardness. He slumped down in one chair, his 
 legs up on another, and he explored the recesses of his left 
 ear with the end of his little finger she could hear the 
 faint smack he kept it up he kept it up 
 
 He blurted, " Oh. Forgot tell you. Some of the fellows com- 
 ing in to play poker this evening. Suppose we could have some 
 crackers and cheese and beer? " 
 
 She nodded. 
 
 "He might have mentioned it before. Oh well, it's his 
 house." 
 
 The poker-party straggled in: Sam Clark, Jack Elder, 
 
MAIN STREET 291 
 
 Dave Dyer, Jim Rowland. To her they mechanically said, 
 " 'Devenin'," but to Kennicott, in a heroic male manner, 
 " Well, well, shall we start playing? Got a hunch I'm going 
 to lick somebody real bad." No one suggested that she join 
 them. She told herself that it was her own fault, because 
 she was not more friendly; but she remembered that they 
 never asked Mrs. Sam Clark to play. 
 
 Bresnahan would have asked her. 
 
 She sat in the living-room, glancing across the hall at the 
 men as they humped over the dining table. 
 
 They were in shirt sleeves; smoking, chewing, spitting in- 
 cessantly; lowering their voices for a moment so that she 
 did not hear what they said and afterward giggling hoarsely; 
 using over and over the canonical phrases: " Three to dole," 
 " I raise you a finif," " Come on now, ante up ; what do you 
 think this is, a pink tea? " The cigar-smoke was acrid and 
 pervasive. The firmness with which the men mouthed their 
 cigars made the lower part of their faces expressionless, heavy, 
 unappealing. They were like politicians cynically dividing 
 appointments. 
 
 How could they understand her world? 
 
 Did that faint and delicate world exist? Was she a fool? 
 She doubted her world, doubted herself, and was sick in the 
 acid, smoke-stained air. 
 
 She slipped back into brooding upon the habituality of the 
 house. 
 
 Kennicott was as fixed in routine as an isolated old man. 
 At first he had amorously deceived himself into liking her 
 experiments with food the one medium in which she could 
 express imagination but now he wanted only his round of 
 favorite dishes: steak, roast beef, boiled pig's- feet, oatmeal, 
 baked apples. Because at some more flexible period he had 
 advanced from oranges to grape-fruit he considered himself an 
 epicure. 
 
 During their first autumn she had smiled over his affection 
 for his hunting-coat, but now that the leather had come un- 
 stitched in dribbles of pale yellow thread, and tatters of can- 
 vas, smeared with dirt of the fields and grease from gun- 
 cleaning, hung in a border of rags, she hated the thing. 
 
 Wasn't her whole life like that hunting-coat? 
 
 She knew every nick and brown spot on each piece of the 
 get of china purchased by Kennicott's mother in 1895 discreet 
 
292 MAIN STREET 
 
 china with a pattern of washed-out forget-me-nots, rimmed 
 with blurred gold: the gravy-boat, in a saucer which did not 
 match, the solemn and evangelical covered vegetable-dishes, 
 the two platters. 
 
 Twenty times had Kennicott sighed over the fact that Bea 
 had broken the other platter the medium-sized one. 
 
 The kitchen. 
 
 Damp black iron sink, damp whitey-yellow drain-board with 
 shreds of discolored wood which from long scrubbing were 
 as soft as cotton thread, warped table, alarm clock, stove 
 bravely blackened by Oscarina but an abomination in its 
 loose doors and broken drafts and oven that never would keep 
 an even heat. 
 
 Carol had done her best by the kitchen: painted it white, 
 put up curtains, replaced a six-year-old calendar by a color 
 print. She had hoped for tiling, and a kerosene range for 
 summer cooking, but Kennicott always postponed these ex- 
 penses. 
 
 She was better acquainted with the utensils in the kitchen 
 than with Vida Sherwin or Guy Pollock. The can-opener, 
 whose soft gray metal handle was twisted from some ancient 
 effort to pry open a window, was more pertinent to her than 
 all the cathedrals in Europe; and more significant than the 
 future of Asia was the never-settled weekly question as to 
 whether the small kitchen knife with the unpainted handle or 
 the second-best buckhorn carving-knife was better for cutting 
 up cold chicken for Sunday supper. 
 
 n 
 
 She was ignored by the males till midnight. Her husband 
 called, " Suppose we could have some eats, Carrie?" As she 
 passed through the dining-room the men smiled on her, belly- 
 smiles. None of them noticed her while she was serving the 
 crackers and cheese and sardines and beer. They were de- 
 termining the exact psychology of Dave Dyer in standing 
 pat, two hours before. 
 
 When they were gone she said to Kennicott, " Your friends 
 have the manners of a barroom. They expect me to wait on 
 them like a servant. They're not so much interested in me as 
 they would be in a waiter, because they don't have to tip me. 
 Unfortunately! Well, good night." 
 
MAIN STREET 293 
 
 So rarely did she nag in this petty, hot-weather fashion 
 that he was astonished rather than angry. "Hey! Wait! 
 
 What's the idea? I must say I don't get you. The boys 
 
 Barroom? Why, Perce Bresnahan was saying there isn't a 
 finer bunch of royal good fellows anywhere than just the 
 crowd that were here tonight! " 
 
 They stood in the lower hall. He was too shocked to go on 
 with his duties of locking the front door and winding his 
 watch and the clock. 
 
 " Bresnahan! I'm sick of him! " She meant nothing in 
 particular. 
 
 " Why, Carrie, he's one of the biggest men in the country!, 
 Boston just eats out of his hand! " 
 
 " I wonder if it does? How do we know but that in Boston, 
 among well-bred people, he may be regarded as an absolute 
 lout? The way he calls women * Sister/ and the way " 
 
 " Now look here! That'll do! Of course I know you don't 
 mean it you're simply hot and tired, and trying to work 
 off your peeve on me. But just the same, I won't stand your 
 
 jumping on Perce. You It's just like your attitude 
 
 toward the war so darn afraid that America will become mili- 
 taristic " 
 
 " But you are the pure patriot! " 
 
 " By God, I am! " 
 
 " Yes, I heard you talking to Sam Clark tonight about ways 
 of avoiding the income tax! " 
 
 He had recovered enough to lock the door; he clumped 
 up-stairs ahead of her, growling, " You don't know what you're 
 talking about. I'm perfectly willing to pay my full tax fact, 
 I'm in favor of the income tax even though I do think it's 
 a penalty on frugality and enterprise fact, it's an unjust, 
 darn-fool tax. But just the same, I'll pay it. Only, I'm not 
 idiot enough to pay more than the government makes me pay, 
 and Sam and I were just figuring out whether all automobile 
 expenses oughn't to be exemptions. I'll take a lot off you, 
 Carrie, but I don't propose for one second to stand your say- 
 ing I'm not patriotic. You know mighty well and good that 
 I've tried to get away and join the army. And at the beginning 
 of the whole fracas I said I've said right along that we 
 ought to have entered the war the minute Germany invaded 
 Belgium. You don't get me at all. You can't appreci- 
 ate a man's work. You're abnormal. You've fussed so much 
 
294 MAIN STREET 
 
 with these fool novels and books and all this highbrow 
 junk : You like to argue! " 
 
 It ended, a quarter of an hour later, in his calling her a 
 " neurotic " before he turned away and pretended to sleep. 
 
 For the first time they had failed to make peace. 
 
 " There are two races of people, only two, and they live side 
 by side. His calls mine l neurotic 7 ; mine calls his ' stupid.' 
 Well never understand each other, never; and it's madness 
 for us to debate to lie together in a hot bed in a creepy 
 room enemies, yoked." 
 
 rn 
 
 It clarified in her the longing for a place of her own. 
 
 " While it's so hot, I think I'll sleep in the spare room," she 
 said next day. 
 
 " Not a bad idea." He was cheerful and kindly. 
 
 The room was filled with a lumbering double bed and a 
 cheap pine bureau. She stored the bed in the attic; replaced 
 it by a cot which, with a denim cover, made a couch by 
 day; put in a dressing-table, a rocker transformed by a cre- 
 tonne cover; had Miles Bjornstam build book-shelves. 
 
 Kennicott slowly understood that she meant to keep up 
 her seclusion. In his queries, " Changing the whole room? " 
 " Putting your books in there? " she caught his dismay. But 
 it was so easy, once her door was closed, to shut out his worry. 
 That hurt her the ease of forgetting him. 
 
 Aunt Bessie Smail sleuthed out this anarchy. She yam- 
 mered, "Why, Carrie, you ain't going to sleep all alone by 
 yourself? I don't believe in that. Married folks should have 
 the same room, of course ! Don't go getting silly notions. No 
 telling what a thing like that might lead to. Suppose I up 
 and told your Uncle Whit that I wanted a room of my own! " 
 
 Carol spoke of recipes for corn-pudding. 
 
 But from Mrs. Dr. Westlake she drew encouragement. She 
 had made an afternoon call on Mrs. Westlake. She was for 
 the first time invited up-stairs, and found the suave old 
 woman sewing in a white and mahogany room with a small 
 bed. 
 
 " Oh, do you have your own royal apartments, and the 
 doctor his? " Carol hinted. 
 
 " Indeed I do! The doctor says it's bad enough to have to 
 
MAIN STREET 295 
 
 stand my temper at meals. Do " Mrs. Westlake looked 
 
 at her sharply. " Why, don't you do the same thing? " 
 
 " I've been thinking about it." Carol laughed in an em- 
 barrassed way. " Then you wouldn't regard me as a complete 
 hussy if I wanted to be by myself now and then? " 
 
 " Why, child, every woman ought to get off by herself and 
 turn over her thoughts about children, and God, and how 
 bad her complexion is, and the way men don't really under- 
 stand her, and how much work she finds to do in the house, 
 and how much patience it takes to endure some things in a 
 man's love." 
 
 " Yes! " Carol said it in a gasp, her hands twisted to- 
 gether. She wanted to confess not only her hatred for the 
 Aunt Bessies but her covert irritation toward those she best 
 loved: her alienation from Kennicott, her disappointment in 
 Guy Pollock, her uneasiness in the presence of Vida. She had 
 enough self-control to confine herself to, "Yes. Men! The 
 dear blundering souls, we do have to get off and laugh at 
 them." 
 
 " Of course we do. Not that you have to laugh at Dr. 
 Kennicott so much, but my man, heavens, now there's a 
 rare old bird ! Reading story-books when he ought to be tend- 
 ing to business! i Marcus Westlake/ I say to him, ' you're a 
 romantic old fool.' And does he get angry? He does not! 
 He chuckles and says, ' Yes, my beloved, folks do say that 
 married people grow to resemble each other I ' Drat him! " 
 Mrs. Westlake laughed comfortably. 
 
 After such a disclosure what could Carol do but return 
 the courtesy by remarking that as for Kennicott, he wasn't 
 romantic enough the darling. Before she left she had babbled 
 to Mrs. Westlake her dislike for Aunt Bessie, the fact that 
 Kennicott's income was now more than five thousand a year, 
 her view of the reason why Vida had married Raymie (which 
 included some thoroughly insincere praise of Raymie's " kind 
 heart"), her opinion of the library-board, just what Kenni- 
 cott had said about Mrs. Carthal's diabetes, and what Kenni- 
 cott thought of the several surgeons in the Cities. 
 
 She went home soothed by confession, inspirited by finding 
 a new friend. 
 
296 MAIN STREET 
 
 IV 
 
 The tragicomedy of the " domestic situation." 
 
 Oscarma went back home to help on the farm, and Carol had 
 a succession of maids, with gaps between. The lack of servants 
 was becoming one of the most cramping problems of the prairie 
 town. Increasingly the farmers 7 daughters rebelled against 
 village dullness, and against the unchanged attitude of the 
 Juanitas toward " hired girls." They went off to city kitchens, 
 or to city shops and factories, that they might be free and 
 even human after hours. 
 
 The Jolly Seventeen were 'delighted at Carol's desertion by 
 the loyal Oscarina. They reminded her that she had said, " I 
 don't have any trouble with maids; see how Oscarina stays on." 
 ^ Between incumbencies of Finn maids from the North Woods, 
 Germans from the prairies, occasional Swedes and Norwegians 
 and Icelanders, Carol did her own work and endured Aunt 
 Bessie's skittering in to tell her how to dampen a broom for 
 fluffy dust, how to sugar doughnuts, how to stuff a goose. 
 Carol was deft, and won shy praise from Kennicott, but as her 
 shoulder blades began to sting, she wondered how many 
 millions of women had lied to themselves during tie death- 
 rimmed years through which they had pretended to enjoy the 
 puerile methods persisting in housework. 
 
 She doubted the convenience and, as a natural sequent, the 
 sanctity of the monogamous and separate home which she had 
 regarded as the basis of all decent life. 
 
 She considered her doubts vicious. She refused to remember 
 how many of the women of the Jolly Seventeen nagged their 
 husbands and were nagged by them. 
 
 She energetically did not whine to Kennicott. But her eyes 
 ached ; she was not the girl in breeches and a flannel shirt who 
 had cooked over a camp-fire in the Colorado mountains five 
 years ago. Her ambition was to get to bed at nine; her 
 strongest emotion was resentment over rising at half-past six 
 to care for Hugh. The back of her neck ached as she got out 
 of bed. She was cynical about the joys of a simple laborious 
 life. She understood why workmen and workmen's wives are 
 not grateful to their kind employers. 
 
 At mid-morning, when she was momentarily free from the 
 ache in her neck and back, she was glad of the reality of 
 work. The hours were living and nimble. But she had no 
 
MAIN STREET 297 
 
 desire to read the eloquent little newspaper essays in praise of 
 labor which are daily written by the white-browed journal- 
 istic prophets. She felt independent and (though she hid it) 
 a bit surly. 
 
 In cleaning the house she pondered upon the maid's-room. 
 It was a slant-roofed, small-windowed hole above the kitchen, 
 oppressive in summer, frigid in winter. She saw that while 
 she had been considering herself an unusually good mistress, 
 she had been permitting her friends Bea and Oscarina to live 
 in a sty. She complained to Kennicott. " What's the matter 
 with it? " he growled, as they stood on the perilous stairs 
 dodging up from the kitchen. She commented upon the slop- 
 ing roof of unplastered boards stained in brown rings by the 
 rain, the uneven floor, the cot and its tumbled discouraged- 
 looking quilts, the broken rocker, the distorting mirror. 
 
 " Maybe it ain't any Hotel Radisson parlor, but still, it's 
 so much better than anything these hired girls are accustomed 
 to at home that they think it's fine. Seems foolish to spend 
 money when they wouldn't appreciate it." 
 
 Rut that night he drawled, with the casualness of a man who 
 wishes to be surprising and delightful, " Carrie, don't know 
 but what we might begin to think about building a new 
 house, one of these days. How'd you like that? " 
 
 w-why " 
 
 " I'm getting to the point now where I feel we can afford 
 one and a corker! I'll show this burg something like a real 
 house! We'll put one over on Sam and Harry! Make folks 
 sit up an 7 take notice! " 
 
 " Yes," she said. 
 
 He did not go on. 
 
 Daily he returned to the subject of the new house, but as 
 to time and mode he was indefinite. At first she believed. 
 She babbled of a low stone house with lattice windows and 
 tulip-beds, of colonial brick, of a white frame cottage with 
 green shutters and dormer windows. To her enthusiasms he 
 answered, " Well, ye-es, might be worth thinking about. Re- 
 member where I put my pipe? " When she pressed him he 
 fidgeted, " I don't know; seems to me those kind of houses you 
 speak of have been overdone." 
 
 It proved that what he wanted was a house exactly like 
 Sam Clark's, which was exactly like every third new house in 
 every town in the country: a square, yellow stolidity with im- 
 
298 MAIN STREET 
 
 maculate clapboards, a broad screened porch, tidy grass-plots, 
 and concrete walks; a house resembling the mind of a mer- 
 chant who votes the party ticket straight and goes to church 
 once a month and owns a good car. 
 
 He admitted, "Well, yes, maybe it isn't so darn artistic 
 
 but Matter of fact, though, I don't want a place just like 
 
 Sam's. Maybe I would cut off that fool tower he's got, and 
 I think probably it would look better painted a nice cream 
 color. That yellow on Sam's house is too kind of flashy. 
 Then there's another kind of house that's mighty nice and 
 substantial-looking, with shingles, in a nice brown stain, in- 
 stead of clapboards seen some in Minneapolis. You're way 
 off your base when you say I only like one kind of house! " 
 
 Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie came in one evening when 
 Carol was sleepily advocating a rose-garden cottage. 
 
 " YouVe had a lot of experience with housekeeping, aunty, 
 and don't you think," Kennicott appealed, " that it would be 
 sensible to have a nice square house, and pay more attention 
 to getting a crackajack furnace than to all this architecture 
 and doodads? " 
 
 Aunt Bessie worked her lips as though they were an elastic 
 band. " Why of course! I know how it is witn young folks 
 like you, Carrie; you want towers and bay-windows and pianos 
 and heaven knows what all, but the thing to get is closets and 
 a good furnace and a handy place to hang out the washing, and 
 the rest don't matter." 
 
 Uncle Whittier dribbled a little, put his face near to Carol's, 
 and sputtered, " Course it don't! What d'you care what folks 
 think about the outside of your house? It's the inside you're 
 living in. None of my business, but I must say you young 
 folks that'd rather have cakes than potatoes get me riled." 
 
 She reached her room before she became savage. Below, 
 dreadfully near, she could hear the broom-swish of Aunt 
 Bessie's voice, and the mop-pounding of Uncle Whittier's 
 grumble. She had a reasonless dread that they would in- 
 trude on her, then a fear that she would yield to Gopher 
 Prairie's conception of duty toward an Aunt Bessie and go 
 down-stairs to be " nice." She felt the demand for standard- 
 ized behavior coming in waves from all the citizens who sat 
 in their sitting-rooms watching her with respectable eyes, 
 waiting, demanding, unyielding. She snarled, " Oh, all right, 
 I'll go! " She powdered her nose, straightened her collar, 
 
MAIN STREET 299 
 
 and coldly marched down-stairs. The three elders ignored 
 her. They had advanced from the new house to agreeable 
 general fussing. Aunt Bessie was saying, in a tone like the 
 munching of dry toast: 
 
 " I do think Mr. Stowbody ought to have had the rain-pipe 
 fixed at our store right away. I went to see him on Tuesday 
 morning before ten, no, it was couple minutes after ten, but 
 anyway, it was long before noon I know because I went right 
 from the bank to the meat market to get some steak my! I 
 think it's outrageous, the prices Oleson & McGuire charge for 
 their meat, and it isn't as if they gave you a good cut either, 
 but just any old thing, and I had time to get it, and I 
 stopped in at Mrs. Bogart's to ask about her rheumatism " 
 
 Carol was watching Uncle Whittier. She knew from his 
 taut expression that he was not listening to Aunt Bessie but 
 herding his own thoughts, and that he would interrupt her 
 bluntly. He did: 
 
 " Will, where c'n I get an extra pair of pants for this coat 
 and vest? D' want to pay too much." 
 
 " Well, guess Nat Hicks could make you up a pair. But 
 if I were you, I'd drop into Ike Rifkin's his prices are lower, 
 than the Bon Ton's." 
 
 " Humph. Got the new stove in your office yet? " 
 
 " No, been looking at some at Sam Clark's but " 
 
 " Well, y' ought get J t in. Don't do to put off getting a 
 stove all summer, and then have it come cold on you in the 
 fall." 
 
 Carol smiled upon them ingratiatingly. "Do you dears 
 mind if I slip up to bed? I'm rather tired cleaned the up- 
 stairs today." 
 
 She retreated. She was certain that they were discussing 
 her, and foully forgiving her. She lay awake till she heard the 
 distant creak of a bed which indicated that Kennicott had 
 retired. Then she felt safe. 
 
 It was Kennicott who brought up the matter of the Smails 
 at breakfast. With no visible connection he said, " Uncle 
 Whit is kind of clumsy, but just the same, he's a pretty wise 
 old coot. He's certainly making good with the store." 
 
 Carol smiled, and Kennicott was pleased that she had come 
 to her senses. " As Whit says, after all the first thing is to 
 have the inside of a house right, and darn the people on the 
 outside looking in! " 
 
300 MAIN STREET 
 
 It seemed settled that the house was to be a sound example 
 of the Sam Clark school. 
 
 Kennicott made much of erecting it entirely for her and the 
 baby. He spoke of closets for her frocks, and " a comfy sew- 
 ing-room." But when he drew on a leaf from an old account- 
 book (he was a paper-saver and a string-picker) the plans for 
 the garage, he gave much more attention to a cement floor 
 and a work-bench and a gasoline-tank than he had to sewing- 
 rooms. 
 
 She sat back and was afraid. 
 
 In the present rookery there were odd things a step up 
 from the hall to the dining-room, a picturesqueness in the shed 
 and bedraggled lilac bush. But the new place would be smooth, 
 standardized, fixed. It was probable, now that Kennicott was 
 past forty, and settled, that this would be the last venture 
 he would ever make in building. So long as she stayed in this 
 ark, she would always have a possibility of change, but once 
 she was in the new house, there she would sit for all the rest 
 of her life there she would die. Desperately she wanted to 
 put it off, against the chance of miracles. While Kennicott 
 was chattering about a patent swing-door for the garage she 
 saw the swing-doors of a prison. 
 
 She never voluntarily returned to the project. Aggrieved, 
 Kennicott stopped drawing plans, and in ten days the new 
 house was forgotten. 
 
 v 
 
 Every year since their marriage Carol had longed for a trip 
 through the East. Every year Kennicott had talked of at- 
 tending the American Medical Association convention, " and 
 then afterwards we could do the East up brown. I know New 
 York clean through spent pretty near a week there but I 
 would like to see New England and all these historic places 
 and have some sea-food." He talked of it from February to 
 May, and in May he invariably decided that coming confine- 
 ment-cases or land-deals would prevent his " getting away from 
 home-base for very long this year and no sense going till we 
 can do it right." 
 
 The weariness of dish-washing had increased her desire to 
 go. She pictured herself looking at Emerson's manse, bathing 
 in a surf of jade and ivory, wearing a trottoir and a summer 
 
MAIN STREET 301 
 
 fur, meeting an aristocratic Stranger. In the spring Kennicott 
 had pathetically volunteered, " S'pose you'd like to get in a 
 good long tour this summer, but with Gould and Mac away 
 and so many patients depending on me, don't see how I can 
 make it. By golly, I feel like a tightwad though, not taking 
 you." Through all this restless July after she had tasted Bres- 
 nahan's disturbing flavor of travel and gaiety, she wanted to go, 
 but she said nothing. They spoke of and postponed a trip 
 to the Twin Cities. When she suggested, as though it were a 
 tremendous joke, " I think baby and I might up and leave you, 
 and run off to Cape Cod by ourselves! " his only reaction was 
 " Golly, don't know but what you may almost have to do 
 that, if we don't get in a trip next year." 
 
 Toward the end of July he proposed, " Say, the Beavers are 
 holding a convention in Joralemon, street fair and everything. 
 We might go down tomorrow. And I'd like to see Dr. Cali- 
 bree about some business. Put in the whole day. Might help 
 some to make up for our trip. Fine fellow, Dr. Calibree." 
 
 Joralemon was a prairie town of the size of Gopher Prairie. 
 
 Their motor was out of order, and there was no passenger- 
 train at an early hour. They went down by freight-train, 
 after the weighty and conversational business of leaving Hugh 
 with Aunt Bessie. Carol was exultant over this irregular jaunt- 
 ing. It was the first unusual thing, except the glance of 
 Bresnahan, that had happened since the weaning of Hugh. 
 They rode in the caboose, the small red cupola-topped car 
 jerked along at the end of the train. It was a roving shanty, 
 the cabin of a land schooner, with black oilcloth seats along 
 the side, and for desk, a pine board to be let down on hinges. 
 Kennicott played seven-up with the conductor and two brake- 
 men. Carol liked the blue silk kerchiefs about the brakemen's 
 throats; she liked their welcome to her, and their air of 
 friendly independence. Since there were no sweating passengers 
 crammed in beside her, she reveled in the train's slowness. She 
 was part of these lakes and tawny wheat-fields. She liked the 
 smell of hot earth and clean grease; and the leisurely chug-a- 
 chug, chug-a-chug of the trucks was a song of contentment in 
 the sun. 
 
 She pretended that she was going to the Rockies. When 
 they reached Joralemon she was radiant with holiday-making. 
 
 Her eagerness began to lessen the moment they stopped at 
 a red frame station exactly like the one they had just left 
 
302 MAIN STREET 
 
 at Gopher Prairie, and Kennicott yawned, " Right on time. 
 Just in time for dinner at the Calibrees'. I 'phoned the doctor 
 from G. P. that we'd be here. ' We'll catch the freight that 
 gets in before twelve/ I told him. He said he'd meet us at the 
 depot and take us right up to the house for dinner. Calibree 
 is a good man, and you'll find his wife is a mighty brainy 
 little woman, bright as a dollar. By golly, there he is." 
 
 Dr. Calibree was a squat, clean-shaven, conscientious-looking 
 man of forty. He was curiously like his own brown-painted 
 motor car, with eye-glasses for windshield. " Want you to 
 meet my wife, doctor Carrie, make you 'quainted with Dr. 
 Calibree," said Kennicott. Calibree bowed quietly and shook 
 her hand, but before he had finished shaking it he was con- 
 centrating upon Kennicott with, "Nice to see you, doctor. 
 Say, don't let me forget to ask you about what you did in that 
 exopthalmic goiter case that Bohemian woman at Wahkeen- 
 yan." 
 
 The two men, on the front seat of the car, chanted goiters 
 and ignored her. She did not know it. She was trying to feed 
 her illusion of adventure by staring at unfamiliar houses. . . . 
 drab cottages, artificial stone bungalows, square painty stolidi- 
 ties with immaculate clapboards and broad screened porches 
 and tidy grass-plots. 
 
 Calibree handed her over to his wife, a thick woman who 
 called her "dearie," and asked if she was hot and, visibly 
 searching for conversation, produced, " Let's see, you and the 
 doctor have a Little One, haven't you? " At dinner Mrs. Cali- 
 bree served the corned beef and cabbage and looked steamy, 
 looked like the steamy leaves of cabbage. The men were 
 oblivious of their wives as they gave the social passwords of 
 Main Street, the orthodox opinions on weather, crops, and 
 motor cars, then flung away restraint and gyrated in the de- 
 bauch of shop-talk. Stroking his chin, drawling in the ecstasy 
 of being erudite, Kennicott inquired, " Say, doctor, what suc- 
 cess have you had with thyroid for treatment of pains in the 
 legs before child-birth? " 
 
 Carol did not resent their assumption that she was too igno- 
 rant to be admitted to masculine mysteries. She was used to 
 it. But the cabbage and Mrs. Calibree's monotonous " I don't 
 know what we're coming to with all this difficulty getting hired 
 girls " were gumming her eyes with drowsiness. She sought 
 to clear them by appealing to Calibree, in a manner of exag- 
 
MAIN STREET 303 
 
 gerated liveliness, " Doctor, have the medical societies in Min- 
 nesota e^ver advocated legislation for help to nursing mothers? " 
 Calibree slowly revolved toward her. " Uh I've never 
 uh never looked into it. I don't believe much in getting 
 mixed up in politics." He turned squarely from her and, peer- 
 ing earnestly at Kennicott, resumed, " Doctor, what's been your 
 experience with unilateral pyelonephritis? Buckburn of Balti- 
 more advocates decapsulation and nephrotomy, but seems to 
 
 Not till after two did they rise. In the lee of the stonily 
 mature trio Carol proceeded to the street fair which added 
 mundane gaiety to the annual rites of the United and Fraternal 
 Order of Beavers. Beavers, human Beavers, were everywhere: 
 thirty-second degree Beavers in gray sack suits and decent 
 derbies, more flippant Beavers in crash summer coats and straw 
 hats, rustic Beavers in shirt sleeves and frayed suspenders; 
 but whatever his caste-symbols, every Beaver was distinguished 
 by an enormous shrimp-colored ribbon lettered in silver, " Sir 
 Knight and Brother, U. F. O. B., Annual State Convention." 
 On the motherly shirtwaist of each of their wives was a badge, 
 " Sir Knight's Lady." The Duluth delegation had brought their 
 famous Beaver amateur band, in Zouave costumes of green 
 velvet jacket, blue trousers, and scarlet fez. The strange 
 thing was that beneath their scarlet pride the Zouaves' faces 
 remained those of American business-men, pink, smooth, eye- 
 glassed; and as they stood playing in a circle, at the corner 
 of Main Street and Second, as they tootled on fifes or with 
 swelling cheeks blew into cornets, their eyes remained as 
 owlish as though they were sitting at desks under the sign 
 " This Is My Busy Day." 
 
 Carol had supposed that the Beavers were average citizens 
 organized for the purposes of getting cheap life-insurance and 
 playing poker at the lodge-rooms every second Wednesday, but 
 she saw a large poster which proclaimed: 
 
 BEAVERS 
 U. F. O. B. 
 
 The greatest influence for good citizenship in the 
 
 country. The j oiliest aggregation of red-blooded, 
 
 open-handed, hustle-em-up good fellows in the world. 
 
 Joralemon welcomes you to her hospitable city. 
 
304 MAIN STREET 
 
 Kennicott read the poster and to Calibree admired, " Strong 
 lodge, the Beavers. Never joined. Don't know but what I 
 will." 
 
 Calibree adumbrated, " They're a good bunch. Good strong 
 lodge. See that fellow there that's playing the snare drum? 
 He's the smartest wholesale grocer in Duluth, they say. Guess 
 it would be worth joining. Oh say, are you doing much in- 
 surance examining? " 
 
 They went on to the street fair. 
 
 'Lining one block of Main Street were the " attractions " 
 two hot-dog stands, a lemonade and pop-corn stand, a merry- 
 go-round, and booths in which balls might be thrown at rag 
 dolls, if one wished to throw balls at rag dolls. The dignified 
 delegates were shy of the booths, but country boys with brick- 
 red necks and pale-blue ties and bright-yellow shoes, who had 
 brought sweethearts into town in somewhat dusty and listed 
 Fords, were wolfing sandwiches, drinking strawberry pop out of 
 bottles, and riding the revolving crimson and gold horses. They 
 shrieked and giggled; peanut-roasters whistled; the merry-go- 
 round pounded out monotonous music; the barkers bawled, 
 " Here's your chance here's your chance come on here, boy 
 come on here give that girl a good time give her a swell 
 time here's your chance to win a genuwine gold watch for 
 five cents, half a dime, the twentieth part of a dollah! " The 
 prairie sun jabbed the unshaded street with shafts that were 
 like poisonous thorns; the tinny cornices above the brick stores 
 were glaring; the dull breeze scattered dust on sweaty Beavers 
 who crawled along in tight scorching new shoes, up two blocks 
 and back, up two blocks and back, wondering what to do next, 
 working at having a good time. 
 
 Carol's head ached as she trailed behind the unsmiling 
 Calibrees along the block of booths. She chirruped at Kenni- 
 cott, " Let's be wild! Let's ride on the merry-go-round and 
 grab a gold ring! " 
 
 Kennicott considered it, and mumbled to Calibree, " Think 
 you folks would like to stop and try a ride on the merry-go- 
 round? " 
 
 Calibree considered it, and mumbled to his wife, "Think 
 you'd like to stop and try a ride on the merry-go-round? " 
 
 Mrs. Calibree smiled in a washed-out manner, and sighed, 
 " Oh no, I don't believe I care to much, but you folks go ahead 
 and try it." 
 
MAIN STREET 305 
 
 Calibree stated to Kennicott, " No, I don't believe we care 
 to a whole lot, but you folks go ahead and try it." 
 
 Kennicott summarized the whole case against wildness: 
 " Let's try it some other time, Carrie." 
 
 She gave it up. She looked at the town. She saw that in 
 adventuring from Main Street, Gopher Prairie, to Main Street, 
 Joralemon, she had not stirred. There were the same two- 
 story brick groceries with lodge-signs above the awnings; the 
 same one-story wooden millinery shop; the same fire-brick 
 garages; the same prairie at the open end of the wide street; 
 the same people wondering whether the levity of eating a hot- 
 dog sandwich would break their taboos. 
 
 They reached Gopher Prairie at nine in the evening. 
 
 " You look kind of hot," said Kennicott. 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Joralemon is an enterprising town, don't you think so? " 
 
 She broke. "No! I think it's an ash-heap." 
 
 " Why, Carrie! " 
 
 He worried over it for a week. While he ground his plate 
 with his knife as he energetically pursued fragments of bacon, 
 he peeped at her. 
 
CHAPTER XXV 
 
 " CARRIE'S all right. She's finicky, but she'll get over it. But 
 I wish she'd hurry up about it! What she can't understand 
 is that a fellow practising medicine in a small town like this 
 has got to cut out the highbrow stuff, and not spend all his 
 time going to concerts and shining his shoes. (Not but what 
 he might be just as good at all these intellectual and art 
 things as some other folks, if he had the time for it!) " Dr. 
 Will Kennicott was brooding in his office, during a free moment 
 toward the end of the summer afternoon. He hunched down 
 in his tilted desk-chair, undid a button of his shirt, glanced 
 at the state news in the back of the Journal of the American 
 Medical Association, dropped the magazine, leaned back with 
 his right thumb hooked in the arm-hole of his vest and his 
 left thumb stroking the back of his hair. 
 
 " By golly, she's taking an awful big chance, though. You'd 
 expect her to learn by and by that I won't be a parlor lizard. 
 She says we try to ' make her over.' Well, she's always trying 
 to make me over, from a perfectly good M. D. into a damn 
 poet with a socialist necktie! She'd have a fit if she knew 
 how many women would be willing to cuddle up to Friend Will 
 and comfort him, if he'd give ? em the chance! There's 
 still a few dames that think the old man isn't so darn un- 
 attractive! I'm glad I've ducked all that woman-game since 
 
 I've been married but Be switched if sometimes I don't 
 
 feel tempted to shine up to some girl that has sense enough 
 to take life as it is; some frau that doesn't want to talk 
 Longfellow all the time, but just hold my hand and say, ' You 
 look all in, honey. Take it easy, and don't try to talk.' 
 
 " Carrie thinks she's such a whale at analyzing folks. Giving 
 the town the once-over. Telling us where we get off. Why, 
 she'd simply turn up her toes and croak if she found out how 
 much she doesn't know about the high old times a wise guy 
 could have in this burg on the Q.T., if he wasn't faithful to 
 his wife. But I am. At that, no matter what faults she's 
 
 306 
 
MAIN STREET 307 
 
 got, there's nobody here, no, nor in Minn'aplus either, that's 
 as nice-looking and square and bright as Carrie. She ought 
 to of been an artist or a writer or one of those things. But 
 once she took a shot at living here, she ought to stick by it. 
 
 Pretty Lord yes. But cold. She simply doesn't know 
 
 what passion is. She simply hasn't got an i-dea how hard 
 it is for a full-blooded man to go on pretending to be satisfied 
 with just being endured. It gets awful tiresome, having to 
 feel like a criminal just because I'm normal. She's getting 
 so she doesn't even care for my kissing her. Well 
 
 " I guess I can weather it, same as I did earning my way 
 through school and getting started in practise. But I wonder 
 how long I can stand being an outsider in my own home? " 
 
 He sat up at the entrance of Mrs. Dave Dyer. She slumped 
 into a chair and gasped with the heat. He chuckled, " Well, 
 well, Maud, this is fine. Where's the subscription-list? What 
 cause do I get robbed for, this trip? " 
 
 " I haven't any subscription-list, Will. I want to see you 
 professionally." 
 
 " And you a Christian Scientist? Have you given that up? 
 What next? New Thought or Spiritualism? " 
 
 " No, I have not given it up! " 
 
 " Strikes me it's kind of a knock on the sisterhood, your 
 coming to see a doctor! " 
 
 " No, it isn't. It's just that my faith isn't strong enough 
 yet. So there now! And besides, you are kind of consoling, 
 Will. I mean as a man, not just as a doctor. You're so strong 
 and placid." 
 
 He sat on the edge of his desk, coatless, his vest swinging 
 open with the thick gold line of his watch-chain across the 
 gap, his hands in his trousers pockets, his big arms bent and 
 easy. As she purred he cocked an interested eye. Maud 
 Dyer was neurotic, religiocentric, faded; her emotions were 
 moist, and her figure was unsystematic splendid thighs and 
 arms, with thick ankles, and a body that was bulgy in the 
 wrong places. But her milky skin was delicious, her eyes were 
 alive, her chestnut hair shone, and there was a tender slope 
 from her ears to the shadowy place below her jaw. 
 
 With unusual solicitude he uttered his stock phrase, " Well, 
 what seems to be the matter, Maud? w 
 
 " I've got such a backache all the time. I'm afraid thr 
 organic trouble that you treated me for is coming back. 31 
 
308 MAIN STREET 
 
 " Any definite signs of it? " 
 
 " N-no, but I think you'd better examine me." 
 
 " Nope. Don't believe it's necessary, Maud. To be honest, 
 between old friends, I think your troubles are mostly imaginary. 
 I can't really advise you to have an examination." 
 
 She flushed, looked out of the window. He was conscious 
 that his voice was not impersonal and even. 
 
 She turned quickly. "Will, you always say my troubles 
 are imaginary. Why can't you be scientific? I've been reading 
 an article about these new nerve-specialists, and they claim 
 that lots of ' imaginary ' ailments, yes, and lots of real pain, 
 too, are what they call psychoses, and they order a change in 
 a woman's way of living so she can get on a higher plane " 
 
 "Wait! Wait! Whoa-up! Wait now! Don't mix up 
 your Christian Science and your psychology! They're two 
 entirely different fads! You'll be mixing in socialism next! 
 You're as bad as Carrie, with your * psychoses/ Why, Good 
 Lord, Maud, I could talk about neuroses and psychoses and 
 inhibitions and repressions and complexes just as well as any 
 damn specialist, if I got paid for it, if I was in the city and 
 had the nerve to charge the fees that those fellows do. If a 
 specialist stung you for a hundred-dollar consultation-fee and 
 told you to go to New York to duck Dave's nagging, you'd 
 do it, to save the hundred dollars! But you know me I'm 
 your neighbor you see me mowing the lawn you figure I'm 
 just a plug general practitioner. If I said, ' Go to New York,' 
 Dave and you would laugh your heads off and say, f Look at 
 the airs Will is putting on. What does he think he is? ' 
 
 " As a matter of fact, you're right. You have a perfectly 
 well-developed case of repression of sex instinct, and it raises 
 the old Ned with your body. What you need is to get away 
 from Dave and travel, yes, and go to every dog-gone kind of 
 New Thought and Bahai and Swami and Hooptedoodle meet- 
 ing you can find. I know it, well 's you do. But how can 
 I advise it? Dave would be up here taking my hide off. 
 I'm willing to be family physician and priest and lawyer and 
 plumber and wet-nurse, but I draw the line at making Dave 
 loosen up on money. Too hard a job in weather like this! 
 So, savvy, my dear? Believe it will rain if this heat 
 keeps " 
 
 " But, Will, he'd never give it to me on my say-so. He'd 
 never let me go away. You know how Dave is: so jolly and 
 
MAIN STREET 309 
 
 liberal in society, and oh, just loves to match quarters, and such 
 a perfect sport if he loses! But at home he pinches a nickel 
 till the buffalo drips blood. I have to nag him for every 
 single dollar." 
 
 " Sure, I know, but it's your fight, honey. Keep after him. 
 He'd simply resent my butting in." 
 
 He crossed over and patted her shoulder. Outside the win- 
 dow, beyond the fly-screen that was opaque with dust and 
 cottonwood lint, Main Street was hushed except for the im- 
 patient throb of a standing motor car. She took his firm 
 hand, pressed his knuckles against her cheek. 
 
 " O Will, Dave is so mean and little and noisy the shrimp! 
 You're so calm. When he's cutting up at parties I see you 
 standing back and watching him the way a mastiff watches 
 a terrier." 
 
 He fought for professional dignity with, "Dave 's not a 
 bad fellow." 
 
 Lingeringly she released his hand. "Will, drop round by 
 the house this evening and scold me. Make me be good and 
 sensible. And I'm so lonely." 
 
 " If I did, Dave would be there, and we'd have to play cards. 
 It's his evening off from the store." 
 
 "No. The clerk just got called to Corinth mother sick. 
 Dave will be in the store till midnight. Oh, come on over. 
 There's some lovely beer on the ice, and we can sit and talk 
 and be all cool and lazy. That wouldn't be wrong of us, 
 would it! " 
 
 " No, no, course it wouldn't be wrong. But still, oughtn't 
 
 to " He saw Carol, slim black and ivory, cool, scornful 
 
 of intrigue. 
 
 All right. But 111 be so lonely." 
 
 Her throat seemed young, above her loose blouse of muslin 
 and machine-lace. 
 
 " Tell you, Maud: I'll drop in just for a minute, if I happen 
 to be called down that way." 
 
 " If you'd like," demurely. " O Will, I just want comfort. 
 I know you're all married, and my, such a proud papa, and of 
 
 course now If I could just sit near you in the dusk, and 
 
 be quiet, and forget Dave! You will come? " 
 
 " Sure I will! " 
 
 " I'll expect you. I'll be lonely if you don't come! Good- 
 
 by." 
 
3io MAIN STREET 
 
 He cursed himself: " Darned fool, what 'd I promise to go 
 for? I'll have to keep my promise, or she'll feel hurt. She's 
 a good, decent, affectionate girl, and Dave's a cheap skate, 
 all right. She's got more life to her than Carol has. All my 
 fault, anyway. Why can't I be more cagey, like Calibree and 
 McGanum and the rest of the doctors? Oh, I am, but Maud's 
 such a demanding idiot. Deliberately bamboozling me into 
 going up there tonight. Matter of principle: ought not to 
 let her get away with it. I won't go. I'll call her up and 
 tell her I won't go. Me, with Carrie at home, finest little 
 woman in the world, and a messy-minded female like Maud 
 Dyer no, sir! Though there's no need of hurting her feelings. 
 I may just drop in for a second, to tell her I can't stay. All 
 my fault anyway; ought never to have started in and jollied 
 Maud along in the old days. If it's my fault, I've got no 
 right to punish Maud. I could just drop in for a second and 
 then pretend I had a country call and beat it. Damn nuisance, 
 though, having to fake up excuses. Lord, why can't the women 
 let you alone? Just because once or twice, seven hundred 
 million years ago, you were a poor fool, why can't they let 
 you forget it? Maud's own fault. I'll stay strictly away. 
 Take Carrie to the movies, and forget Maud. . . . But it 
 would be kind of hot at the movies tonight." 
 
 He fled from himself. He rammed on his hat, threw his 
 coat over his arm, banged the door, locked it, tramped down- 
 stairs. "I won't go! " he said sturdily and, as he said it, 
 he would have given a good deal to know whether he was 
 going. 
 
 He was refreshed, as always, by the familiar windows and 
 faces. It restored his soul to have Sam Clark trustingly bel- 
 low, " Better come down to the lake this evening and have a 
 swim, doc. Ain't you going to open your cottage at all, this 
 summer? By golly, we miss you." He noted the progress 
 on the new garage. He had triumphed in the laying of every 
 course of bricks; in them he had seen the growth of the town. 
 His pride was ushered back to its throne by the respectfulness 
 of Oley Sundquist: " Evenin', doc! The woman is a lot 
 better. That was swell medicine you gave her." He was 
 calmed by the mechanicalness of the tasks at home: burning 
 the gray web of a tent-worm on the wild cherry tree, sealing 
 with gum a cut in the right front tire of the car, sprinkling 
 the road before the house. The hose was cool to his hands. 
 
MAIN STREET 311 
 
 As the bright arrows fell with a faint puttering sound, a 
 crescent of blackness was formed in the gray dust. 
 
 Dave Dyer came along. 
 
 " Where going, Dave? " 
 
 " Down to the store. Just had supper." 
 
 " But Thursday 's your night off." 
 
 " Sure, but Pete went home. His mother ? s supposed to 
 be sick. Gosh, these clerks you get nowaday s-??-overpay 'em 
 and then they won't work! " 
 
 " That's tough, Dave. You'll have to work clear up till 
 twelve, then." 
 
 " Yup. Better drop in and have a cigar, if you're down- 
 town." 
 
 " Well, I may, at that. May have to go down and see Mrs. 
 Champ Perry. She's ailing. So long, Dave." 
 
 Kennicott had not yet entered the house. He was con- 
 scious that Carol was near him, that she was important, that 
 he was afraid of her disapproval; but he was content to be 
 alone. When he had finished sprinkling he strolled into the 
 house, up to the baby's room, and cried to Hugh, " Story- 
 time for the old man, eh? " 
 
 Carol was in a low chair, framed and haloed by the window 
 behind her, an image in pale gold. The baby curled in her 
 lap, his head on her arm, listening with gravity while she 
 sang from Gene Field: 
 
 'Tis little Luddy-Dud in the morning 
 
 'Tis little Luddy-Dud at night; 
 
 And all day long 
 
 'Tis the same dear song, 
 
 Of that growing, crowing, knowing little sprite. 
 
 Kennicott was enchanted. 
 
 " Maud Dyer? I should say not! " 
 
 When the current maid bawled up-stairs, " Supper on de 
 table! " Kennicott was upon his back, flapping his hands in 
 the earnest effort to be a seal, thrilled by the strength with 
 which his son kicked him. He slipped his arm about Carol's 
 shoulder ; he went down to supper rejoicing that he was cleansed 
 of perilous stuff. While Carol was putting the baby to bed 
 he sat on the front steps. Nat Hicks, tailor and roue, came 
 to sit beside him. Between waves of his hand as he drove 
 off mosquitos, Nat whispered, " Say, doc, you don't feel like 
 
3i2 MAIN STREET 
 
 imagining you're a bacheldore again, and coming out for a Time 
 tonight, do you? " 
 
 " As how? " 
 
 "You know this new dressmaker, Mrs. Swiftwaite? swell 
 dame with blondine hair? Well, she's a pretty good goer. 
 Me and Harry Haydock are going to take her and that fat 
 wren that works in the Bon Ton nice kid, too on an auto 
 ride tonight. Maybe we'll drive down to that farm Harry 
 bought. We're taking some beer, and some of the smoothest 
 rye you ever laid tongue to. I'm not predicting none, but 
 if we don't have a picnic, I'll miss my guess." 
 
 " Go to it. No skin off my ear, Nat. Think I want to 
 be fifth wheel in the coach? " 
 
 " No, but look here: The little Swiftwaite has a friend with 
 her from Winona, dandy looker and some gay bird, and Harry 
 and me thought maybe you'd like to sneak off for one evening." 
 
 " No no " 
 
 " Rats now, doc, forget your everlasting dignity. You used 
 to be a pretty good sport yourself, when you were foot-free." 
 
 It may have been the fact that Mrs. Swiftwaite's friend 
 remained to Kennicott an ill-told rumor, it may have been 
 Carol's voice, wistful in the pallid evening as she sang to 
 Hugh, it may have been natural and commendable virtue, but 
 certainly he was positive: 
 
 " Nope. I'm married for keeps. Don't pretend to be any 
 saint. Like to get out and raise Cain and shoot a few drinks. 
 
 But a fellow owes a duty Straight now, won't you feel 
 
 like a sneak when you come back to the missus after your 
 jamboree? " 
 
 " Me? My moral in life is, c What they don't know won't 
 hurt ; em none.' The way to handle wives, like the fellow 
 says, is to catch 'em early, treat 'em rough, and tell 'em 
 nothing! " 
 
 "Well, that's your business, I suppose. But I can't get 
 away with it. Besides that way I figure it, this illicit love- 
 making is the one game that you always lose at. If you do 
 lose, you feel foolish; and if you win, as soon as you find out 
 how little it is that you've been scheming for, why then you 
 lose worse than ever. Nature stinging us, as usual. But at 
 that, I guess a lot of wives in this burg would be surprised if 
 they knew everything that goes on behind their backs, eh, 
 Nattie? " 
 
MAIN STREET 313 
 
 "Would they! Say, boy! If the good wives knew what 
 some of the boys get away with when they go down to the 
 Cities, why, they'd throw a fit! Sure you won't come, doc? 
 Think of getting all cooled off by a good long drive, and then 
 the lov-e-ly Swiftwaite's white hand mixing you a good stiff 
 highball! " 
 
 "Nope. Nope. Sorry. Guess I won't," grumbled 
 Kennicott. 
 
 He was glad that Nat showed signs of going. But he was 
 restless. He heard Carol on the stairs. " Come have a seat 
 have the whole earth! " he shouted jovially. 
 
 She did not answer his joviality. She sat on the porch, 
 rocked silently, then sighed, " So many mosquitos out here. 
 You haven't had the screen fixed." 
 
 As though he was testing her he said quietly, " Head aching 
 again? " 
 
 " Oh, not much, but This maid is so slow to learn. 
 
 I have to show her everything. I had to clean most of the 
 silver myself. And Hugh was so bad all afternoon. He 
 whined so. Poor soul, he was hot, but he did wear me out." 
 
 " Uh You usually want to get out. Like to walk down 
 
 to the lake shore? (The girl can stay home.) Or go to 
 the movies? Come on, let's go to the movies! Or shall we 
 jump in the car and run out to Sam's, for a swim? " 
 
 " If you don't mind, dear, I'm afraid I'm rather tired." 
 
 " Why don't you sleep down-stairs tonight, on the couch? 
 Be cooler. I'm going to bring down my mattress. Come on! 
 Keep the old man company. Can't tell I might get scared of 
 burglars. Lettin' little fellow like me stay all alone by him- 
 self! " 
 
 " It's sweet of you to think of it, but I like my own room 
 so much. But you go ahead and do it, dear. Why don't 
 you sleep on the couch, instead of putting your mattress on 
 
 the floor? Well I believe I'll run in and read for just 
 
 a second want to look at the last Vogue and then perhaps 
 I'll go by-by. Unless you want me, dear? Of course if 
 there's anything you really want me for ? " 
 
 " No. No. ... Matter of fact, I really ought to run 
 down and see Mrs. Champ Perry. She's ailing. So you skip 
 
 in and May drop in at the drug store. If I'm not home 
 
 when you get sleepy, don't wait up for me." 
 
 He kissed her, rambled off, nodded to Jim Rowland, stopped 
 
3H MAIN STREET 
 
 indifferently to speak to Mrs. Terry Gould. But his heart 
 was racing, his stomach was constricted. He walked more 
 slowly. He reached Dave Dyer's yard. He glanced in. On 
 the porch, sheltered by a wild-grape vine, was the figure of a 
 woman in white. He heard the swing-couch creak as she 
 sat up abruptly, peered, then leaned back and pretended 
 to relax. 
 
 " Be nice to have some cool beer. Just drop in for a second," 
 he insisted, as he opened the Dyer gate. 
 
 n 
 
 Mrs. Bogart was calling upon Carol, protected by Aunt 
 Bessie Smail. 
 
 " Have you heard about this awful woman that's supposed 
 to have come here to do dressmaking a Mrs. Swiftwaite 
 awful peroxide blonde? " moaned Mrs. Bogart./ " They say 
 there's some of the awfullest goings-on at her house mere 
 boys and old gray-headed rips sneaking in there evenings 
 and drinking licker and every kind of goings-on. We women 
 can't never realize the carnal thoughts in the hearts of men. 
 I tell you, even though I been acquainted with Will Kennicott 
 almost since he was a mere boy, seems like, I wouldn't trust 
 even him! Who knows what designin' women might tempt 
 him! Especially a doctor, with women rushin' in to see him 
 at his office and all! You know I never hint around, but 
 haven't you felt that " 
 
 Carol was furious. "I don't pretend that Will has no 
 faults. But one thing I do know: He's as simple-hearted 
 about what you call ' goings-on ' as a babe. And if he ever 
 were such a sad dog as to look at another woman, I certainly 
 hope he'd have spirit enough to do the tempting, and not be 
 coaxed into it, as in your depressing picture! " 
 
 " Why, what a wicked thing to say, Carrie! " from Aunt 
 Bessie. 
 
 " No, I mean it! Oh, of course, I don't mean it! But 
 
 I know every thought in his head so well that he couldn't 
 
 hide anything even if he wanted to. Now this morning 
 
 He was out late, last night; he had to go see Mrs. Perry, 
 who is ailing, and then fix a man's hand, and this morning 
 he was so quiet and thoughtful at breakfast and " She 
 
MAIN STREET 315 
 
 leaned forward, breathed dramatically to the two perched 
 harpies, " What do you suppose he was thinking of? " 
 
 " What? " trembled Mrs. Bogart. 
 
 " Whether the grass needs cutting, probably! There, there! 
 Don't mind my naughtiness. I have some fresh-made raisin 
 cookies for you." 
 
CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 CAROL'S liveliest interest was in her walks with the baby. 
 Hugh wanted to know what the box-elder tree said, and what 
 the Ford garage said, and what the big cloud said, and she 
 told him, with a feeling that she was not in the least making 
 up stories, but discovering the souls of things. They had an 
 especial fondness for the hitching-post in front of the mill. 
 It was a brown post, stout and agreeable; the smooth leg 
 of it held the sunlight, while its neck, grooved by hitching- 
 straps, tickled one's fingers. Carol had never been awake 
 to the earth except as a show of changing color and great 
 satisfying masses; she had lived in people and in ideas about 
 having ideas; but Hugh's questions made her attentive to the 
 comedies of sparrows, robins, blue jays, yellowhammers ; she 
 regained her pleasure in the arching flight of swallows, and 
 added to it a solicitude about their nests and family squabbles. 
 
 She forgot her seasons of boredom. She said to Hugh, 
 " We're two fat disreputable old minstrels roaming round the 
 world," and he echoed her, " Roamin' round roamin' round." 
 
 The high adventure, the secret place to which they both 
 fled joyously, was the house of Miles and Bea and Olaf 
 Bjornstam. 
 
 Kennicott steadily disapproved of the Bjornstams. He pro- 
 tested, " What do you want to talk to that crank for? " He 
 hinted that a former " Swede hired girl " was low company 
 for the son of Dr. Will Kennicott. She did not explain. She 
 did not quite understand it herself; did not know that in the 
 Bjornstams she found her friends, her club, her sympathy, 
 and her ration of blessed cynicism. For a time the gossip of 
 Juanita Haydock and the Jolly Seventeen had been a refuge 
 from the droning of Aunt Bessie, but the relief had not con- 
 tinued. The young matrons made her nervous. They talked 
 so loud, always so loud. They filled a room with clashing 
 cackle; their jests and gags they repeated nine times over. 
 Unconsciously, she had discarded the Jolly Seventeen, Guy 
 
 316 
 
MAIN STREET 317 
 
 Pollock, Vida, and every one save Mrs. Dr. Westlake and the 
 friends whom she did not clearly know as friends the 
 Bjornstams. 
 
 To Hugh, the Red Swede was the most heroic and powerful 
 person in the world. With unrestrained adoration he trotted 
 after while Miles fed the cows, chased his one pig an animal 
 of lax and migratory instincts or dramatically slaughtered a 
 chicken. And to Hugh, Olaf was lord among mortal men, less 
 stalwart than the old monarch, King Miles, but more under- 
 standing of the relations and values of things, of small sticks, 
 lone playing-cards, and irretrievably injured hoops. 
 
 Carol saw, though she did not admit, that Olaf was not 
 only more beautiful than her own dark child, but more gracious. 
 Olaf was a Norse chieftain: straight, sunny-haired, large- 
 limbed, resplendently amiable to his subjects. Hugh was a 
 vulgarian; a bustling business man. It was Hugh that bounced 
 and said " Let's play "; Olaf that opened luminous blue eyes 
 and agreed " All right," in condescending gentleness. If Hugh 
 batted him and Hugh did bat him Olaf was unafraid but 
 shocked. In magnificent solitude he marched toward the 
 house, while Hugh bewailed his sin and the overclouding of 
 august favor. 
 
 The two friends played with an imperial chariot which 
 Miles had made out of a starch-box and four red spools; to- 
 gether they stuck switches into a mouse-hole, with vast satisfac- 
 tion though entirely without known results. 
 
 Bea, the chubby and humming Bea, impartially gave cookies 
 and scoldings to both children, and if Carol refused a cup of 
 coffee and a wafer of buttered kridckebrod, she was desolated. 
 
 Miles had done well with his dairy. He had six cows, 
 two hundred chickens, a cream separator, a Ford truck. In the 
 spring he had built a two-room addition to his shack. That 
 illustrious building was to Hugh a carnival. Uncle Miles did 
 the most spectacular, unexpected things: ran up the ladder; 
 stood on the ridge-pole, waving a hammer and singing some- 
 thing about "To arms, my citizens"; nailed shingles faster 
 than Aunt Bessie could iron handkerchiefs; and lifted a two- 
 by-six with Hugh riding on one end and Olaf on the other. 
 Uncle Miles's most ecstatic trick was to make figures not on 
 paper but right on a new pine board, with the broadest softest 
 pencil in the world. There was a thing worth seeing! 
 
 The tools! In his office Father had tools fascinating in their 
 
3i8 MAIN STREET 
 
 shininess and curious shapes, but they were sharp, they were 
 something called sterized, and they distinctly were not for 
 boys to touch. In fact it was a good dodge to volunteer " I 
 must not touch," when you looked at the tools on the glass 
 shelves in Father's office. But Uncle Miles, who was a person 
 altogether superior to Father, let you handle all his kit except 
 the saws. There was a hammer with a silver head ; there was a 
 metal thing like a big L; there was a magic instrument, very 
 precious, made out of costly red wood and gold, with a tube 
 which contained a drop no, it wasn't a drop, it was a nothing, 
 which lived in the water, but the nothing looked like a drop, 
 and it ran Jn a frightened way up and down the tube, no 
 matter how cautiously you tilted the magic instrument. And 
 there were nails, very different and clever big valiant spikes, 
 middle-sized ones which were not very interesting, and shingle- 
 nails much jollier than the fussed-up fairies in the yellow 
 book. 
 
 n 
 
 While he had worked on the addition Miles had talked 
 frankly to Carol. He admitted now that so long as he stayed 
 in Gopher Prairie he would remain a pariah. Bea's Lutheran 
 friends were as much offended by his agnostic gibes as the 
 merchants by his radicalism. " And I can't seem to keep my 
 mouth shut. I think I'm being a baa-lamb, and not springing 
 any theories wilder than <c-a-t spells cat,' but when folks 
 have gone, I re'lize I've been stepping on their pet religious 
 corns. Oh, the mill foreman keeps dropping in, and that Danish 
 shoemaker, and one fellow from Elder's factory, and a few 
 Svenskas, but you know Be: big good-hearted wench like 
 her wants a lot of folks around likes to fuss over 'em never 
 satisfied unless she tiring herself out making coffee for some- 
 body. 
 
 " Once she kidnapped me and drug me to the Methodist 
 Church. I goes in, pious as Widow Bogart, and sits still 
 and never cracks a smile while the preacher is favoring us 
 with his misinformation on evolution. But afterwards, when 
 the old stalwarts were pumphandling everybody at the door 
 and calling 'em * Brother ' and ' Sister,' they let me sail right 
 by with nary a clinch. They figure I'm the town badman. 
 Always will be, I guess. It'll have to be Olaf who goes on. 
 
MAIN STREET 319 
 
 And sometimes Blamed if I don't feel like coming out and 
 
 saying, * I've been conservative. Nothing to it. Now I'm 
 going to start something in these rotten one-horse lumber- 
 camps west of town. 7 But Be's got me hynotized. Lord, Mrs. 
 Kennicott, do you re'lize what a jolly, square, faithful woman 
 
 she is? And I love Olaf Oh well, I won't go and get 
 
 sentimental on you. 
 
 "Course I've had thoughts of pulling up stakes and going 
 West. Maybe if they didn't know it beforehand, they wouldn't 
 find out I'd ever been guilty of trying to think for myself. 
 But oh, I've worked hard, and built up this dairy business, 
 and I hate to start all over again, and move Be and the kid 
 into another one-room shack. That's how they get us! En- 
 courage us to be thrifty and own our own houses, and then, 
 by golly, they've got us; they know we won't dare risk 
 everything by committing lez what is it? lez majesty? I 
 mean they know we won't be hinting around that if we had 
 a co-operative bank, we could get along without Stowbody. 
 
 Well As long as I can sit and play pinochle with Be, 
 
 and tell whoppers to Olaf about his daddy's adventures in the 
 woods, and how he snared a wapaloosie and knew Paul Bun- 
 yan, why, I don't mind being a bum. It's just for them that 
 I mind. Say! Say! Don't whisper a word to Be, but when 
 I get this addition done, I'm going to buy her a phonograph! " 
 
 He did. 
 
 While she was busy with the activities her work-hungry 
 muscles found washing, ironing, mending, baking, dusting, 
 preserving, plucking a chicken, painting the sink; tasks which, 
 because she was Miles's full partner, were exciting and crea- 
 tive Bea listened to the phonograph records with rapture like 
 that of cattle in a warm stable. The addition gave her a 
 kitchen with a bedroom above. The original one-room shack 
 was now a living-room, with the phonograph, a genuine leather- 
 upholstered golden-oak rocker, and a picture of Governor John 
 Johnson. 
 
 In late July Carol went to the Bjornstams' desirous of a 
 chance to express her opinion of Beavers and Calibrees and 
 Joralemons. She found Olaf abed, restless from a slight fever, 
 and Bea flushed and dizzy but trying to keep up her work. 
 She lured Miles aside and worried: 
 
 " They don't look at all well. What's the matter? " 
 
 "Their stomachs are out of whack. I wanted to call in 
 
320 MAIN STREET 
 
 Doc Kennicott, but Be thinks the doc doesn't like us 
 she thinks maybe he's sore because you come down here. But 
 I'm getting worried.' 7 
 
 " I'm going to call the doctor at once." 
 
 She yearned over Olaf. His lambent eyes were stupid, he 
 moaned, he rubbed his forehead. 
 
 " Have they been eating something that's been bad for 
 them? " she fluttered to Miles. 
 
 " Might be bum water. I'll tell you: We used to get our 
 water at Oscar Eklund's place, over across the street, but 
 Oscar kept dinging at me, and hinting I was a tightwad not 
 to dig a well of my own. One time he said, ' Sure, you 
 socialists are great on divvying up other folks' money and 
 water! ' I knew if he kept it up there'd be a fuss, and I 
 ain't safe to have around, once a fuss starts; I'm likely to 
 forget myself and let loose with a punch in the snoot. I 
 offered to pay Oscar but he refused he'd rather have the 
 chance to kid me. So I starts getting water down at Mrs. 
 Fageros's, in the hollow there, and I don't believe it's real 
 good. Figuring to dig my own well this fall." 
 
 One scarlet word was before Carol's eyes while she listened. 
 She fled to Kennicott's office. He gravely heard her out, 
 nodded, said, " Be right over." 
 
 He examined Bea and Olaf. He shook his head. " Yes. 
 Looks to me like typhoid." 
 
 " Golly, I've seen typhoid in lumber-camps," groaned Miles, 
 all the strength dripping out of him. " Have they got it 
 very bad? " 
 
 "Oh, we'll take good care of them," said Kennicott, and 
 for the first time in their acquaintance he smiled on Miles 
 and clapped his shoulder. 
 
 " Won't you need a nurse? " demanded Carol. 
 
 " Why " To Miles, Kennicott hinted, " Couldn't you 
 
 get Bea's cousin, Tina? " 
 
 " She's down at the old folks', in the country." 
 
 " Then let me do it! " Carol insisted. " They need some 
 one to cook for them, and isn't it good to give them sponge 
 baths, in typhoid? " 
 
 "Yes. All right."- Kennicott was automatic; he was the 
 official, the physician. " I guess probably it would be hard to 
 get a nurse here in town just now. Mrs. Stiver is busy with 
 an obstetrical case, and that town nurse of yours is off on 
 
MAIN STREET 321 
 
 vacation, ain't she? All right, Bjornstam can spell you at 
 night." 
 
 All week, from eight each morning till midnight, Carol fed 
 them, bathed them, smoothed sheets, took temperatures. 
 Miles refused to let her cook. Terrified, pallid, noiseless in 
 stocking feet, he did the kitchen work and the sweeping, his 
 big red hands awkwardly careful. Kennicott came in three 
 times a day, unchangingly tender and hopeful in the sick- 
 room, evenly polite to Miles. 
 
 Carol understood how great was her love for her friends. 
 It bore her through; it made her arm steady and tireless to 
 bathe them. What exhausted her was the sight of Bea and 
 Olaf turned into flaccid invalids, uncomfortably flushed after 
 taking food, begging for the healing of sleep at night. 
 
 During the second week Olaf's powerful legs were flabby. 
 Spots of a viciously delicate pink came out on his chest and 
 back. His cheeks sank. He looked frightened. His tongue 
 was brown and revolting. His confident voice dwindled to a 
 bewildered murmur, ceaseless and racking. 
 
 Bea had stayed on her feet too long at the beginning. The 
 moment Kennicott had ordered her to bed she had begun to 
 collapse. One early evening she startled them by screaming, 
 in an intense abdominal pain, and within half an hour she was 
 in a delirium. Till dawn Carol was with her, and not all of 
 Bea's groping through the blackness of half-delirious pain 
 was so pitiful to Carol as the way in which Miles silently 
 peered into the room from the top of the narrow stairs. Carol 
 slept three hours next morning, and ran back. Bea was alto- 
 gether delirious but she muttered nothing save, " Olaf ve 
 have such a good time " 
 
 At ten, while Carol was preparing an ice-bag in the kitchen, 
 Miles answered a knock. At the front door she saw 
 Vida Sherwin, Maud Dyer, and Mrs. Zitterel, wife of the 
 Baptist pastor. They were carrying grapes, and women's- 
 magazines, magazines with high-colored pictures and optimistic 
 fiction. 
 
 " We just heard your wife was sick. WeVe come to see 
 if there isn't something we can do," chirruped Vida. 
 
 Miles looked steadily at the three women. " You're too 
 late. You can't do nothing now. Bea's always kind of hoped 
 that you folks would come see her. She wanted to have a 
 chance and be friends. She used to sit waiting for somebody 
 
322 MAIN STREET 
 
 to knock. Fve seen her sitting here, waiting. Now Oh, 
 
 you ain't worth God-damning." He shut the door. 
 
 All day Carol watched Olaf's strength oozing. He was 
 emaciated. His ribs were grim clear lines, his skin was 
 clammy, his pulse was feeble but terrifyingly rapid. It beat 
 beat beat in a drum-roll of death. Late that afternoon 
 he sobbed, and died. 
 
 Bea did not know it. She was delirious. Next morning, 
 when she went, she did not know that Olaf would no longer 
 swing his lath sword on the door-step, no longer rule his 
 subjects of the cattle-yard; that Miles's son would not go 
 East to college. 
 
 Miles, Carol, Kennicott were silent. They washed the bodies 
 together, their eyes veiled. 
 
 " Go home now and sleep. You're pretty tired. I can't ever 
 pay you back for what you done," Miles whispered to Carol, 
 
 " Yes. But I'll be back here tomorrow. Go with you to 
 the funeral," she said laboriously. 
 
 When the time for the funeral came, Carol was in bed, 
 collapsed. She assumed that neighbors would go. They had 
 not told her that word of Miles's rebuff to Vida had spread 
 through town, a cyclonic fury. 
 
 It was only by chance that, leaning on her elbow in bed, 
 she glanced through the window and saw the funeral of Bea 
 and Olaf. There was no music, no carriages. There was only 
 Miles Bjornstam, in his black wedding-suit, walking quite 
 alone, head down, behind the shabby hearse that bore the 
 bodies of his wife and baby. 
 
 An hour after, Hugh came into her room crying, and when 
 she said as cheerily as she could, " What is it, dear? " he be- 
 sought, " Mummy, I want to go play with Olaf." 
 
 That afternoon Juanita Haydock dropped in to brighten 
 Carol. She said, "Too bad about this Bea that was your 
 hired girl. But I don't waste any sympathy on that man of 
 hers. Everybody says he drank too much, and treated his 
 family awful, and that's how they got sick." 
 
CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 A LETTER from Raymie Wutherspoon, in France, said that he 
 had been sent to the front, been slightly wounded, been made 
 a captain. From Vida's pride Carol sought to draw a stimulant 
 to rouse her from depression. 
 
 Miles had sold his dairy. He had several thousand dollars. 
 To Carol he said good-by with a mumbled word, a harsh 
 hand-shake, " Going to buy a farm in northern Alberta far 
 off from folks as I can get." He turned sharply away, but 
 he did not walk with his former spring. His shoulders seemed 
 old. 
 
 It was said that before he went he cursed the town. 
 There was talk of arresting him, of riding him on a rail. It 
 was rumored that at the station old Champ Perry rebuked 
 him, " You better not come back here. We've got respect for 
 your dead, but we haven't got any for a blasphemer and a 
 traitor that won't do anything for his country and only bought 
 one Liberty Bond." 
 
 Some of the people who had been at the station declared that 
 Miles made some dreadful seditious retort: something about 
 loving German workmen more than American bankers; but 
 others asserted that he couldn't find one word with which to 
 answer the veteran; that he merely sneaked up on the plat- 
 form of the train. He must have felt guilty, everybody agreed, 
 for as the train left town, a farmer saw him standing in the 
 vestibule and looking out. 
 
 His house with the addition which he had built four 
 months ago was very near the track on which his train passed. 
 
 When Carol went there, for the last time, she found Olaf's 
 chariot with its red spool wheels standing in the sunny corner 
 beside the stable. She wondered if a quick eye could have 
 noticed it from a train. 
 
 That day and that week she went reluctantly to Red Cross 
 work; she stitched and packed silently, while Vida read the war 
 bulletins. And she said nothing at all when Kennicott com- 
 
 323 
 
324 MAIN STREET 
 
 mented, " From what Champ says, I guess Bjornstam was a 
 bad egg, after all. In spite of Bea, don't know but what the 
 citizens* committee ought to have forced him to be patriotic 
 let on like they could send him to jail if he didn't volunteer and 
 come through for bonds and the Y. M. C. A. They Ve worked 
 that stunt fine with all these German farmers." 
 
 n 
 
 She found no inspiration but she did find a dependable 
 kindness in Mrs. Westlake, and at last she yielded to the old 
 woman's receptivity and had relief in sobbing the story of 
 Bea. 
 
 Guy Pollock she often met on the street, but he was merely 
 a pleasant voice which said things about Charles Lamb and 
 sunsets. 
 
 Her most positive experience was the revelation of Mrs. 
 Flickerbaugh, the tall, thin, twitchy wife of the attorney. 
 Carol encountered her at the drug store. 
 
 " Walking? " snapped Mrs. Flickerbaugh. 
 
 "Why, yes." 
 
 " Humph. Guess you're the only female in this town that 
 retains the use of her legs. Come home and have a cup o' 
 tea with me." 
 
 Because she had nothing else to do, Carol went. But she 
 was uncomfortable in the presence of the amused stares which 
 Mrs. Flickerbaugh's raiment drew. Today, in reeking early 
 August, she wore a man's cap, a skinny fur like a dead cat, 
 a necklace of imitation pearls, a scabrous satin blouse, and a 
 thick cloth skirt hiked up in front. 
 
 " Come in. Sit down. Stick the baby in that rocker. Hope 
 you don't mind the house looking like a rat's nest. You don't 
 like this town. Neither do I," said Mrs. Flickerbaugh. 
 
 why " 
 
 " Course you don't! " 
 
 " Well then, I don't! But I'm sure that some day I'll find 
 some solution. Probably I'm a hexagonal peg. Solution: find 
 the hexagonal hole." Carol was very brisk. 
 
 " How do you know you ever will find it? " 
 
 " There's Mrs. Westlake. She's naturally a big-city woman 
 she ought to have a lovely old house in Philadelphia or Boston 
 but she escapes by being absorbed in reading." 
 
 " You be satisfied to never do anything but read? " 
 
MAIN STREET 325 
 
 "No, but Heavens, one can't go on hating a town 
 
 always! " 
 
 " Why not? lean! I've hated it for thirty-two years. Ill 
 die here and I'll hate it till I die. I ought to have been a 
 business woman. I had a good deal of talent for tending to 
 figures. All gone now. Some folks think I'm crazy. Guess 
 I am. Sit and grouch. Go to church and sing hymns. Folks 
 think I'm religious. Tut! Trying to forget washing and 
 ironing and mending socks. Want an office of my own, and 
 sell things. Julius never hear of it. Too late." 
 
 Carol sat on the gritty couch, and sank into fear. Could 
 this drabness of life keep up forever, then? Would she some 
 day so despise herself and her neighbors that she too would 
 walk Main Street an old skinny eccentric woman in a mangy 
 cat's-fur? As she crept home she felt that the trap had 
 finally closed. She went into the house, a frail small woman, 
 still winsome but hopeless of eye as she staggered with the 
 weight of the drowsy boy in her arms. 
 
 She sat alone on the porch, that evening. It seemed that 
 Kennicott had to make a professional call on Mrs. Dave 
 Dyer. 
 
 Under the stilly boughs and the black gauze of dusk the 
 street was meshed in silence. There was but the hum of 
 motor tires crunching the road, the creak of a rocker on the 
 Rowlands' porch, the slap of a hand attacking a mosquito, a 
 heat-weary conversation starting and dying, the precise rhythm 
 of crickets, the thud of moths against the screen sounds that 
 were a distilled silence. It was a street beyond the end of the 
 world, beyond the boundaries of hope. Though she should sit 
 here forever, no brave procession, no one who was interesting, 
 would be coming by. It was tediousness made tangible, a 
 street builded of lassitude and of futility. 
 
 Myrtle Cass appeared, with Cy Bogart. She giggled and 
 bounced when Cy tickled her ear in village love. They strolled 
 with the half-dancing gait of lovers, kicking their feet out side- 
 ways or shuffling a dragging jig, and the concrete walk sounded 
 to the broken two-four rhythm. Their voices had a dusky 
 turbulence. Suddenly, to the woman rocking on the porch of 
 the doctor's house, the night came alive, and she felt that 
 everywhere in the darkness panted an ardent quest which she 
 
 was missing as she sank back to wait for There must be 
 
 something. 
 
CHAPTER XXVHI 
 
 IT WAS at a supper of the Jolly Seventeen in August that 
 Carol heard of " Elizabeth," from Mrs. Dave Dyer. 
 
 Carol was fond of Maud Dyer, because she had been particu- 
 larly agreeable lately; had obviously repented of the nervous 
 distaste which she had once shown. Maud patted her hand 
 when they met, and asked about Hugh. 
 
 Kennicott said that he was " kind of sorry for the girl, 
 some ways; she's too darn emotional, but still, Dave is sort 
 of mean to her." He was polite to poor Maud when they 
 all went down to the cottages for a swim. Carol was proud of 
 that sympathy in him, and now she took pains to sit with their: 
 new friend. 
 
 Mrs. Dyer was bubbling, " Oh, have you folks heard about 
 this young fellow that's just come to town that the boys call 
 * Elizabeth '? He's working in Nat Hicks's tailor shop. I bet 
 he doesn't make eighteen a week, but my I isn't he the perfect 
 lady though! He talks so refined, and oh, the lugs he puts on 
 belted coat, and pique collar with a gold pin, and socks 
 to match his necktie, and honest you won't believe this, but 
 I got it straight this fellow, you know he's staying at Mrs. 
 Gurrey's punk old boarding-house, and they say he asked Mrs. 
 Gurrey if he ought to put on a dress-suit for supper! Imagine! 
 Can you beat that? And him nothing but a Swede tailor Erik 
 Valborg his name is. But he used to be in a tailor shop 
 in Minneapolis (they do say he's a smart needle-pusher, at 
 that) and he tries to let on that he's a regular city fellow. 
 They say he tries to make people think he's a poet carries 
 books around and pretends to read 'em. Myrtle Cass says 
 she met him at a dance, and he was mooning around all 
 over the place, and he asked her did she like flowers and 
 poetry and music and everything; he spieled like he was a 
 regular United States Senator; and Myrtle she's a devil, that 
 girl, ha! ha! she kidded him along, and got him going, and 
 honest, what d'you think he said? He said he didn't find any 
 
 326 
 
MAIN STREET 327 
 
 intellectual companionship in this town. Can you beat it? 
 Imagine! And him a Swede tailor! My! And they say he's 
 the most awful mollycoddle looks just like a girl. The boys 
 call him ' Elizabeth,' and they stop him and ask about the 
 books he lets on to have read, and he goes and tells them, and 
 they take it all in and jolly him terribly, and he never gets 
 onto the fact they're kidding him. Oh, I think it's just too 
 funny! " 
 
 The Jolly Seventeen laughed, and Carol laughed with them. 
 Mrs. Jack Elder added that this Erik Valborg had confided 
 to Mrs. Gurrey that he would " love to design clothes for 
 women." Imagine! Mrs. Harvey Dillon had had a glimpse 
 of him, but honestly, she'd thought he was awfully hand- 
 some. This was instantly controverted by Mrs. B. J. Gouger- 
 ling, wife of the banker. Mrs. Gougerling had had, she re- 
 ported, a good look at this Valborg fellow. She and B. J. 
 had been motoring, and passed " Elizabeth " out by McGruder's 
 Bridge. He was wearing the awfullest clothes, with the waist 
 pinched in like a girl's. He was sitting on a rock doing 
 nothing, but when he heard the Gougerling car coming he 
 snatched a book out of his pocket, and as they went by he 
 pretended to be reading it, to show off. And he wasn't really 
 good-looking just kind of soft, as B. J. had pointed out. 
 
 When the husbands came they joined in the expose. " My 
 name is Elizabeth. I'm the celebrated musical tailor. The 
 skirts fall for me by the thou. Do I get some more veal 
 loaf? " merrily shrieked Dave Dyer. He had some admirable 
 stories about the tricks the town youngsters had played on 
 Valborg. They had dropped a decaying perch into his pocket. 
 They had pinned on his back a sign, " I'm the prize boob, 
 kick me." 
 
 Glad of any laughter, Carol joined the frolic, and surprised 
 them by crying, " Dave, I do think you're the dearest thing 
 since you got your hair cut! " That was an excellent sally. 
 Everybody applauded. Kennicott looked proud. 
 
 She decided that sometime she really must go out of her 
 way to pass Hicks's shop and see this freak. 
 
 ii 
 
 She was at Sunday morning service at the Baptist Church, 
 in a solemn row with her husband, Hugh, Uncle Whittier, 
 Aunt Bessie. 
 
328 MAIN STREET 
 
 Despite Aunt Bessie's nagging the Kennicotts rarely at- 
 tended church. The doctor asserted, " Sure, religion is a fine 
 influence got to have it to keep the lower classes in order 
 fact, it's the only thing that appeals to a lot of those fellows 
 and makes 'em respect the rights of property. And I guess this 
 theology is O.K.; lot of wise old coots figured it all out, and 
 they knew more about it than we do." He believed in the 
 Christian religion, and never thought about it; he believed 
 in the church, and seldom went near it; he was shocked by 
 Carol's lack of faith, and wasn't quite sure what was the 
 nature of the faith that she lacked. 
 
 Carol herself was an uneasy and dodging agnostic. 
 
 When she ventured to Sunday School and heard the teachers 
 droning that the genealogy of Shamsherai was a valuable 
 ethical problem for children to think about; when she ex- 
 perimented with Wednesday prayer-meeting and listened to 
 store-keeping elders giving their unvarying weekly testimony 
 in primitive erotic symbols and such gory Chaldean phrases 
 as " washed in the blood of the lamb " and " a vengeful God "; 
 when Mrs. Bogart boasted that through his boyhood she had 
 made Cy confess nightly upon the basis of the Ten Com- 
 mandments; then Carol was dismayed to find the Christian 
 religion, in America, in the twentieth century, as abnormal as 
 Zoroastrianism without the splendor. But when she went 
 to church suppers and felt the friendliness, saw the gaiety with 
 which the sisters served cold ham and scalloped potatoes; 
 when Mrs. Champ Perry cried to her, on an afternoon call, 
 " My dear, if you just knew how happy it makes you to come 
 into abiding grace," then Carol found the humanness behind 
 the sanguinary and alien theology. Always she perceived that 
 the churches Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Catholic, 
 all of them which had seemed so unimportant to the judge's 
 home in her childhood, so isolated from the city struggle in 
 St. Paul, were still, in Gopher Prairie, the strongest of the 
 forces compelling respectability. 
 
 This August Sunday she had been tempted by the announce- 
 ment that the Reverend Edmund Zitterel would preach on the 
 topic " America, Face Your Problems ! " With the great war, 
 workmen in every nation showing a desire to control indus- 
 tries, Russia hinting a leftward revolution against Kerensky, 
 woman suffrage coming, there seemed to be plenty of problems 
 for the Reverend Mr. Zitterel to call on America to face. 
 
MAIN STREET 329 
 
 Carol gathered her family and trotted off behind Uncle 
 Whittier. 
 
 The congregation faced the heat with informality. Men 
 with highly plastered hair, so painfully shaved that their faces 
 looked sore, removed their coats, sighed, and unbuttoned two 
 buttons of their uncreased Sunday vests. Large-bosomed, 
 white-bloused, hot-necked, spectacled matrons the Mothers 
 in Israel, pioneers and friends of Mrs. Champ Perry waved 
 their palm-leaf fans in a steady rhythm. Abashed boys slunk 
 into the rear pews and giggled, while milky little girls, up front 
 with their mothers, self-consciously kept from turning around. 
 
 The church was half barn and half Gopher Prairie parlor. 
 The streaky brown wallpaper was broken in its dismal sweep 
 only by framed texts, " Come unto Me " and " The Lord is 
 My Shepherd," by a list of hymns, and by a crimson and 
 green diagram, staggeringly drawn upon hemp-colored paper, 
 indicating the alarming ease with which a young man may 
 descend from Palaces of Pleasure and the House of Pride to 
 Eternal Damnation. But the varnished oak pews and the new 
 red carpet and the three large chairs on the platform, behind 
 the bare reading-stand, were all of a rocking-chair comfort. 
 
 Carol was civic and neighborly and commendable today. 
 She beamed and bowed. She trolled out with the others the 
 hymn: 
 
 How pleasant 'tis on Sabbath morn 
 To gather in the church, 
 And there I'll have no carnal thoughts, 
 Nor sin shall me besmirch. 
 
 With a rustle of starched linen skirts and stiff shirt-fronts, 
 the congregation sat down, and gave heed to the Reverend 
 Mr. Zitterel. The priest was a thin, swart, intense young 
 man with a bang. He wore a black sack suit and a lilac tie. 
 He smote the enormous Bible on the reading-stand, vociferated, 
 " Come, let us reason together," delivered a prayer informing 
 Almighty God of the news of the past week, and began to 
 reason. 
 
 It proved that the only problems which America had to 
 face were Mormonism and Prohibition: 
 
 " Don't let any of these self-conceited fellows that are 
 always trying to stir up trouble deceive you with the belief 
 that there's anything to all these smart-aleck movements to 
 
330 MAIN STREET 
 
 let the unions and the Farmers' Nonpartisan League kill all 
 our initiative and enterprise by fixing wages and prices. There 
 isn't any movement that amounts to a whoop without it's got 
 a moral background. And let me tell you that while folks 
 are fussing about what they call ' economics ' and ' socialism ' 
 and ' science ' and a lot of things that are nothing in the world 
 but a disguise for atheism, the Old Satan is busy spreading 
 his secret net and tentacles out thero in Utah, under his guise 
 of Joe Smith or Brigham Young or whoever their leaders 
 happen to be today, it doesn't make any difference, and they're 
 making game of the Old Bible that has led this American 
 people through its' manifold trials and tribulations to its firm 
 position as the fulfilment of the prophecies and the recognized 
 leader of all nations. c Sit thou on my right hand till I make 
 thine enemies the footstool of my feet/ said the Lord of Hosts, 
 Acts II, the thirty-fourth verse and let me tell you right now, 
 you got to get up a good deal earlier in the morning than you 
 get up even when you're going fishing, if you want to be 
 smarter than the Lord, who has shown us the straight and nar- 
 row way, and he that passeth therefrom is in eternal peril and, 
 to return to this vital and terrible subject of Mormonism and 
 as I say, it is terrible to realize how little attention is given 
 to this evil right here in our midst and on our very doorstep, 
 as it were it's a shame and a disgrace that the Congress of 
 these United States spends all its time talking about incon- 
 sequential financial matters that ought to be left to the Treasury 
 Department, as I understand it, instead of arising in their 
 might and passing a law that any one admitting he is a Mormon 
 shall simply be deported and as it were kicked out of this 
 free country in which we haven't got any room for polygamy 
 and the tyrannies of Satan. 
 
 " And, to digress for a moment, especially as there are more 
 of them in this state than there are Mormons, though you 
 never can tell what will happen with this vain generation of 
 young girls, that think more about wearing silk stockings than 
 about minding their mothers and learning to bake a good loaf 
 of bread, and many of them listening to these sneaking Mormon 
 missionaries and I actually heard one of them talking right 
 out on a street-corner in Duluth, a few years ago, and the 
 officers of the law not protesting but still, as they are a smaller 
 but more immediate problem, let me stop for just a moment 
 to pay my respects to these Seventh-Day Adventists. Not that 
 
MAIN STREET 33* 
 
 they are immoral, I don't mean, but when a body of men 
 go on insisting that Saturday is the Sabbath, after Christ him- 
 self has clearly indicated the new dispensation, then I think 
 the legislature ought to step in " 
 
 At this point Carol awoke. 
 
 She got through three more minutes by studying the face 
 of a girl in the pew across: a sensitive unhappy girl whose 
 longing poured out with intimidating self-revelation as she wor- 
 shiped Mr. Zitterel. Carol wondered who the girl was. She 
 had seen her at church suppers. She considered how many 
 of the three thousand people in the town she did not know; 
 to how many of them the Thanatopsis and the Jolly Seventeen 
 were icy social peaks; how many of them might be toiling 
 through boredom thicker than her own with greater courage. 
 
 She examined her nails. She read two hymns. She got some 
 satisfaction out of rubbing an itching knuckle. She pillowed 
 on her shoulder the head of the baby who, after killing time 
 in the same manner as his mother, was so fortunate as to 
 fall asleep. She read the introduction, title-page, and acknowl- 
 edgment of copyrights, in the hymnal. She tried to evolve 
 a philosophy which would explain why Kennicott could never 
 tie his scarf so that it would reach the top of the gap in his 
 turn-down collar. 
 
 There were no other diversions to be found in the pew. 
 She glanced back at the congregation. She thought that it 
 would be amiable to bow to Mrs. Champ Perry. 
 
 Her slow turning head stopped, galvanized. 
 
 Across the aisle, two rows back, was a strange young man 
 who shone among the cud-chewing citizens like a visitant from 
 the sun amber curls, low forehead, fine nose, chin smooth 
 but not raw from Sabbath shaving. His lips startled her. The 
 lips of men in Gopher Prairie are flat in the face, straight and 
 grudging. The stranger's mouth was arched, the upper lip 
 short. He wore a brown jersey coat, a delft-blue bow, a white 
 silk shirt, white flannel trousers. He suggested the ocean 
 beach, a tennis court, anything but the sun-blistered utility 
 of Main Street. 
 
 A visitor from Minneapolis, here for business? No. He 
 wasn't a business man. He was a poet. Keats was in his face, 
 and Shelley, and Arthur Upson, whom she had once seen in 
 Minneapolis. He was at once too sensitive and too sophis- 
 ticated to touch business as she knew it in Gopher Prairie. 
 
332 MAIN STREET 
 
 With restrained amusement he was analyzing the noisy Mr. 
 Zitterel. Carol was ashamed to have this spy from the Great 
 World hear the pastor's maundering. She felt responsible for 
 the town. She resented his gaping at their private rites. 
 She flushed, turned away. But she continued to feel his 
 presence. 
 
 How could she meet him? She must! For an hour of talk. 
 He was all that she was hungry for. She could not let 
 him get away without a word and she would have to. She 
 pictured, and ridiculed, herself as walking up to him and 
 remarking, " I am sick with the Village Virus. Will you please 
 tell me what people are saying and playing in New York? " 
 She pictured, and groaned over, the expression of Kennicott 
 if she should say, " Why wouldn't it be reasonable for you, my 
 soul, to ask that complete stranger in the brown jersey coat to 
 come to supper tonight? " 
 
 She brooded, not looking back. She warned herself that 
 she was probably exaggerating; that no young man could have 
 all these exalted qualities. Wasn't he too obviously smart, 
 too glossy-new? Like a movie actor. Probably he was a 
 traveling salesman who sang tenor and fancied himself in 
 imitations of Newport clothes and spoke of " the swellest 
 business proposition that ever came down the pike." In a 
 panic she peered at him. No ! This was no hustling salesman, 
 this boy with the curving Grecian lips and the serious eyes. 
 
 She rose after the service, carefully taking Kennicott's arm 
 and smiling at him in a mute assertion that she was devoted 
 to him no matter what happened. She followed the Mystery's 
 soft brown jersey shoulders out of the church. 
 
 Fatty Hicks, the shrill and puffy son of Nat, flapped his 
 hand at the beautiful stranger and jeered, " How's the kid? 
 All dolled up like a plush horse today, ain't we! " 
 
 Carol was exceeding sick. Her herald from the outside 
 was Erik Valborg, "Elizabeth." Apprentice tailor! Gasoline 
 and hot goose! Mending dirty 'jackets! Respectfully holding 
 a tape-measure about a paunch! 
 
 And yet, she insisted, this boy was also himself. 
 
 in 
 
 They had Sunday dinner with the Smails, in a dining-room 
 which centered about a fruit and flower piece and a crayon- 
 
MAIN STREET 335 
 
 enlargement of Uncle Whittier. Carol did not heed Aunt 
 Bessie's fussing in regard to Mrs. Robert B. Schminke's bead 
 necklace and Whittier's error in putting on the striped pants, 
 day like this. She did not taste tie shreds of roast pork. She 
 said vacuously: 
 
 " Uh Will, I wonder if that young man in the white flannel 
 trousers, at church this morning, was this Valborg person that 
 they're all talking about? " 
 
 " Yump. That's him. Wasn't that the darndest get-up he 
 had on! " Kennicott scratched at a white smear on his hard 
 gray sleeve. 
 
 " It wasn't so bad. I wonder where he comes from? He 
 seems to have lived in cities a good deal. Is he from the 
 East? " 
 
 " The East? Him? Why, he comes from a farm right up 
 north here, just this side of Jefferson. I know his father 
 slightly Adolph Valborg typical cranky old Swede farmer." 
 
 " Oh, really? " blandly. 
 
 " Believe he has lived in Minneapolis for quite some time, 
 though. Learned his trade there. And I will say he's bright, 
 some ways. Reads a lot. Pollock says he takes more books 
 out of the library than anybody else in town. Huh! He's 
 kind of like you in that! " 
 
 The Smails and Kennicott laughed very much at this sly 
 jest. Uncle Whittier seized the conversation. "That fellow 
 that's working for Hicks? Milksop, that's what he is. Makes 
 me tired to see a young fellow that ought to be in the war, 
 or anyway out in the fields earning his living honest, like 
 I done when I was young, doing a woman's work and then 
 come out and dress up like a show-actor! Why, when I was 
 his age " 
 
 Carol reflected that the carving-knife would make an 
 excellent dagger with which to kill Uncle Whittier. It would 
 slide in easily. The headlines would be terrible. 
 
 Kennicott said judiciously, " Oh, I don't want to be unjust 
 to him. I believe he took his physical examination for military 
 service. Got varicose veins not bad, but enough to disqualify 
 him. Though I will say he doesn't look like a fellow that 
 would be so awful darn crazy to poke his bayonet into a 
 Hun's guts." 
 
 "Will! Please!" 
 
 " Well, he don't. Looks soft to me. And they say he told 
 
334 MAIN STREET 
 
 Del Snafflin, when he was getting a hair-cut on Saturday, that 
 he wished he could play the piano." 
 
 " Isn't it wonderful how much we all know about one another 
 in a town like this," said Carol innocently. 
 
 Kennicott was suspicious, but Aunt Bessie, serving the float- 
 ing island pudding, agreed, " Yes, it is wonderful. Folks can 
 get away with all sorts of meannesses and sins in these ter- 
 rible cities, but they can't here. I was noticing this tailor 
 fellow this morning, and when Mrs. Riggs offered to share her 
 hymn-book with him, he shook his head, and all the while we 
 was singing he just stood there like a bump on a log and never 
 opened his mouth. Everybody says he's got an idea that 
 he's got so much better manners and all than what the rest 
 of us have, but if that's what he calls good manners, I want to 
 know! " 
 
 Carol again studied the carving-knife. Blood on the white- 
 ness of a tablecloth might be gorgeous. 
 
 Then: 
 
 " Fool! Neurotic impossibilist! Telling yourself orchard 
 fairy-tales at thirty. . . . Dear Lord, am I really thirty? 
 That boy can't be more than twenty-five." 
 
 IV 
 
 She went calling. 
 
 Boarding with the Widow Bogart was Fern Mullins, a girl 
 of twenty-two who was to be teacher of English, French, and 
 gymnastics in the high school this coming session. Fern 
 Mullins had come to town early, for the six-weeks normal 
 course for country teachers. Carol had noticed her on the 
 street, had heard almost as much about her as about Erik 
 Valborg. She was tall, weedy, pretty, and incurably rakish. 
 Whether she wore a low middy collar or dressed reticently 
 for school in a black suit with a high-necked blouse, she was 
 airy, flippant. " She looks like an absolute totty," said all 
 the Mrs. Sam Clarks, disapprovingly, and all the Juanita Hay- 
 docks, enviously. 
 
 That Sunday evening, sitting in baggy canvas lawn-chairs 
 beside the house, the Kennicotts saw Fern laughing with Cy 
 Bogart who, though still a junior in high school, was now 
 a lump of a man, only two or three years younger than Fern. 
 Cy had to go downtown for weighty matters connected with the 
 
MAIN STREET 335 
 
 pool-parlor. Fern drooped on the Bogart porch, her chin in 
 her hands. 
 
 " She looks lonely," said Kennicott. 
 
 " She does, poor soul. I believe I'll go over and speak to 
 her. I was introduced to her at Dave's but I haven't called." 
 Carol was slipping across the lawn, a white figure in the dim- 
 ness, faintly brushing the dewy grass. She was thinking of 
 Erik and of the fact that her feet were wet, and she was casual 
 in her greeting: "Hello! The doctor and I wondered if you 
 were lonely." 
 
 Resentfully, "I am! " 
 
 Carol concentrated on her. " My dear, you sound so! I 
 know how it is. I used to be tired when I was on the job 
 I was a librarian. What was your college? I was Blodgett." 
 
 More interestedly, " I went to the U." Fern meant the 
 University of Minnesota. 
 
 " You must have had a splendid time. Blodgett was a bit 
 dull." 
 
 " Where were you a librarian? " challengingly. 
 
 " St. Paul the main library." 
 
 " Honest? Oh dear, I wish I was back in the Cities! This 
 is my first year of teaching, and I'm scared stiff. I did have 
 the best time in college: dramatics and basket-ball and fussing 
 and dancing I'm simply crazy about dancing. And here, 
 except when I have the kids in gymnasium class, or when I'm 
 chaperoning the basket-ball team on a trip out-of-town, I won't 
 dare to move above a whisper. I guess they don't care much 
 if you put any pep into teaching or not, as long as you look 
 like a Good Influence out of school-hours and that means 
 never doing anything you want to. This normal course is 
 bad enough, but the regular school will be fierce! If it wasn't 
 too late to get a job in the Cities, I swear I'd resign here. 
 I bet I won't dare to go to a single dance all winter. If I cut 
 loose and danced the way I like to, they'd think I was a 
 perfect hellion poor harmless me! Oh, I oughtn't to be 
 talking like this. Fern, you never could be cagey! " 
 
 "Don't be frightened, my dear! . . . Doesn't that 
 sound atrociously old and kind! I'm talking to you the way 
 Mrs. Westlake talks to me! That's having a husband and a 
 kitchen range, I suppose. But I feel young, and I want to 
 dance like a like a hellion? too. So I sympathize." 
 
 Fern made a sound of gratitude. Carol inquired, "What 
 
336 MAIN STREET 
 
 experience did you have with college dramatics? I tried to 
 start a kind of Little Theater here. It was dreadful. I must 
 tell you about it " 
 
 Two hours later, when Kennicott came over to greet Fern 
 and to yawn, " Look here, Carrie, don't you suppose you better 
 be thinking about turning in? I've got a hard day tomorrow," 
 the two were talking so intimately that they constantly inter- 
 rupted each other. 
 
 As she went respectably home, convoyed by a husband, and 
 decorously holding up her skirts, Carol rejoiced, " Everything 
 
 has changed! I have two friends, Fern and But who's 
 
 the other? That's queer; I thought there was Oh, how 
 
 absurd! " 
 
 She often passed Erik Valborg on the street; the brown 
 jersey coat became unremarkable. When she was driving with 
 Kennicott, in early evening, she saw him on the lake shore, 
 reading a thin book which might easily have been poetry. She 
 noted that he was the only person in the motorized town who 
 still took long walks. 
 
 She told herself that she was the daughter of a judge, the 
 wife of a doctor, and that she did not care to know a capering 
 tailor. She told herself that she was not responsive to men 
 . . . not even to Percy Bresnahan. She told herself 
 that a woman of thirty who heeded a boy of twenty-five was 
 ridiculous. And on Friday, when she had convinced herself 
 that the errand was necessary, she went to Nat Hicks's shop, 
 bearing the not very romantic burden of a pair of her husband's 
 trousers. Hicks was in the back room. She faced the Greek 
 god who, in a somewhat ungodlike way, was stitching a coat 
 on a scaley sewing-machine, in a room of smutted plaster walls. 
 
 She saw that his hands were not in keeping with a Hellenic 
 face. They were thick, roughened with needle and hot iron 
 and plow-handle. Even in the shop he persisted in his finery. 
 He wore a silk shirt, a topaz scarf, thin tan shoes. 
 
 This she absorbed while she was saying curtly, "Can I 
 get these pressed, please? " 
 
 Not rising from the sewing-machine he stuck out his hand, 
 mumbled, " When do you want them? " 
 
 " Oh, Monday." 
 
MAIN STREET 337 
 
 The adventure was over. She was marching out. 
 
 " What name? " he called after her. 
 
 He had risen and, despite the farcicality of Dr. Will Kenni- 
 cott's bulgy trousers draped over his arm, he had the grace 
 of a cat. 
 
 " Kennicott." 
 
 " Kennicott. Oh I Oh say, you're Mrs. Dr. Kennicott then, 
 aren't you? " 
 
 " Yes." She stood at the door. Now that she had carried 
 out her preposterous impulse to see what he was like, she was 
 cold, she was as ready to detect familiarities as the virtuous 
 Miss Ella Stowbody. 
 
 " I've heard about you. Myrtle Cass was saying you got 
 up a dramatic club and gave a dandy play. I've always wished 
 I had a chance to belong to a Little Theater, and give some 
 European plays, or whimsical like Barrie, or a pageant." 
 
 He pronounced it " pagent "; he rhymed " pag " with " rag." 
 
 Carol nodded in the manner of a lady being kind to a trades- 
 man, and one of her selves sneered, " Our Erik is indeed a lost 
 John Keats." 
 
 He was appealing, " Do you suppose it would be possible 
 to get up another dramatic club this coming fall? " 
 
 " Well, it might be worth thinking of." She came out of 
 her several conflicting poses, and said sincerely, " There's a new 
 teacher, Miss Mullins, who might have some talent. That 
 would make three of us for a nucleus. If we could scrape up 
 half a dozen we might give a real play with a small cast. Have 
 you had any experience? " 
 
 " Just a bum club that some of us got up in Minneapolis 
 when I was working there. We had one good man, an interior 
 decorator maybe he was kind of sis and effeminate, but he 
 really was an artist, and we gave one dandy play. But I 
 Of course I've always had to work hard, and study by myself, 
 and I'm probably sloppy, and I'd love it if I had training in 
 rehearsing I mean, the crankier the director was, the better 
 I'd like it. If you didn't want to use me as an actor, I'd love 
 to design the costumes. I'm crazy about fabrics textures 
 and colors and designs." 
 
 She knew that he was trying to keep her from going, trying 
 to indicate that he was something more than a person to whom 
 one brought trousers for pressing. He besought: 
 
 " Some day I hope I can get away from this fool repairing, 
 
338 MAIN STREET 
 
 when I have the money saved up. I want to go East and work 
 for some big dressmaker, and study art drawing, and become 
 a high-class designer. Or do you think that's a kind of fiddlin' 
 ambition for a fellow? I was brought up on a farm. And then 
 monkeyin' round with silks! I don't know. What do you 
 think? Myrtle Cass says you're awfully educated." 
 
 " I am. Awfully. Tell me: Have the boys made fun of 
 your ambition? " 
 
 She was seventy years old, and sexless, and more advisory 
 than Vida Sherwin. 
 
 " Well, they have, at that. They've jollied me a good deal, 
 here and Minneapolis both. They say dressmaking is ladies' 
 work. (But I was willing to get drafted for the war! I tried 
 to get in. But they rejected me. But I did try!) I thought 
 some of working up in a gents' furnishings store, and I had 
 a chance to travel on the road for a clothing house, but some- 
 how I hate this tailoring, but I can't seem to get enthusiastic 
 about salesmanship. I keep thinking about a room in gray 
 oatmeal paper with prints in very narrow gold frames or 
 would it be better in white enamel paneling? but anyway, it 
 
 looks out on Fifth Avenue, and I'm designing a sumptuous " 
 
 He made it " sump-too-ous " " robe of linden green chiffon 
 over cloth of gold! You know tileul. It's elegant. . . 
 What do you think? " 
 
 " Why not? What do you care for the opinion of city 
 rowdies, or a lot of farm boys? But you mustn't, you really 
 mustn't, let casual strangers like me have a chance to judge 
 you." 
 
 " Well You aren't a stranger, one way. Myrtle Cass 
 
 Miss Cass, should say she's spoken about you so often. I 
 wanted to call on you and the doctor but I didn't quite 
 have the nerve. One evening I walked past your house, but 
 you and your husband were talking on the porch, and you 
 looked so chummy and happy I didn't dare butt in." 
 
 Maternally, "I think it's extremely nice of you to want 
 to be trained in in enunciation by a stage-director. Perhaps 
 I could help you. I'm a thoroughly sound and uninspired 
 schoolma'am by instinct; quite hopelessly mature." 
 
 " Oh, you aren't either! " 
 
 She was not very successful at accepting his fervor with the 
 air of amused woman of the world, but she sounded reasonably 
 impersonal: " Thank you. Shall we see if we really can get 
 
MAIN STREET 339 
 
 up a new dramatic club? I'll tell you: Come to the house this 
 evening, about eight. I'll ask Miss Mullins to come over, and 
 we'll talk about it." 
 
 VI 
 
 " He has absolutely no sense of humor. Less than Will. But 
 
 hasn't he What is a * sense of humor ' ? Isn't the thing 
 
 he lacks the back-slapping jocosity that passes for humor here? 
 
 Anyway Poor lamb, coaxing me to stay and play with 
 
 him! Poor lonely lamb! If he could be free from Nat Hickses, 
 from people who say ' dandy ' and ' bum,' would he develop? 
 
 " I wonder if Whitman didn't use Brooklyn back-street slang, 
 as a boy? 
 
 "No. Not Whitman. He's Keats sensitive to silken 
 things. ' Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes as are the 
 tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings.' Keats, here! A bewildered 
 spirit fallen on Main Street. And Main Street laughs till it 
 aches, giggles till the spirit doubts his own self and tries to give 
 up the use of wings for the correct uses of a ' gents' furnishings 
 store.' Gopher Prairie with its celebrated eleven miles of 
 cement walk. ... I wonder how much of the cement 
 is made out of the tombstones of John Keatses? " 
 
 vn 
 
 Kennicott was cordial to Fern Mullins, teased her, told her 
 he was a " great hand for running off with pretty school- 
 teachers," and promised that if the school-board should object 
 to her dancing, he would " bat 'em one over the head and tell 
 'em how lucky they were to get a girl with some go to her, for 
 once." 
 
 But to Erik Valborg he was not cordial. He shook hands 
 loosely, and said, "H' are yuh." 
 
 Nat Hicks was socially acceptable; he had been here for 
 years, and owned his shop; but this person was merely Nat's 
 workman, and the town's principle of perfect democracy was 
 not meant to be applied indiscriminately. 
 
 The conference on a dramatic club theoretically included 
 Kennicott, but he sat back, patting yawns, conscious of Fern's 
 ankles, smiling amiably on the children at their sport. 
 
 Fern wanted to tell her grievances; Carol was sulky every 
 
340 MAIN STREET 
 
 time she thought of " The Girl from Kankakee "; it was Erik 
 who made suggestions. He had read with astounding breadth, 
 and astounding lack of judgment. His voice was sensitive to 
 liquids, but he overused the word " glorious." He mispro- 
 nounced a tenth of the words he had from books, but he knew 
 it. He was insistent, but he was shy. 
 
 When he demanded, " I'd like to stage c Suppressed Desires,' 
 by Cook and Miss Glaspell," Carol ceased to be patronizing. 
 He was not the yearner; he was the artist, sure of his vision. 
 " I'd make it simple. Use a big window at the back, with a 
 cyclorama of a blue that would simply hit you in the eye, 
 and just one tree-branch, to suggest a park below. Put the 
 breakfast table on a dais. Let the colors be kind of arty and 
 tea-roomy orange chairs, and orange and blue table, and blue 
 Japanese breakfast set, and some place, one big flat smear of 
 black bang! Oh. Another play I wish we could do is Tenny- 
 son Jesse's 'The Black Mask/ I've never seen it but 
 
 Glorious ending, where this woman looks at the man with his 
 face all blown away, and she just gives one horrible scream." 
 
 " Good God, is that your idea of a glorious ending? " bayed 
 Kennicott. 
 
 " That sounds fierce! I do love artistic things, but not the 
 horrible ones," moaned Fern Mullins. 
 
 Erik was bewildered; glanced at Carol. She nodded loyally. 
 
 At the end of the conference they had decided nothing. 
 
CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 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 me- 
 tallic 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 
 
 34i 
 
342 MAIN STREET 
 
 studied. He had skipped from one emotion to another. Es- 
 pecially 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," sfie 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 
 IVe 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' school- 
 ing 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 l Barriers Burned 
 Away ' and then Pope's translation of Homer. Some com- 
 bination, 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 
 
MAIN STREET 345 
 
 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 under- 
 stand? " 
 
 " 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 of 
 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 any- 
 thing 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, 
 
344 MAIN STREET 
 
 "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? " 
 
 l_you " 
 
 " He doesn't care for the l 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 im- 
 personal! " 
 
 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 experi- 
 mentally took his thumb. He looked down at the baby seri- 
 ously. 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 
 
MAIN STREET 345 
 
 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. Ill 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 be- 
 came 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 
 
 will animate the Gopher Prairies. Only Does that mean 
 
 anything? Or am I echoing Vida? The world has always let 
 1 strong ' statesmen and soldiers the men with strong voices 
 take control, and what have the thundering boobies done? 
 What is ' strength 7 
 
 " 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! 
 
346 MAIN STREET 
 
 " 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." 
 
 in 
 
 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. 
 
MAIN STREET 347 
 
 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 as- 
 sembled one youthful grocery clerk, stopping his Ford delivery 
 wagon to stare from the seat, and one solemn small boy, tug- 
 ging 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 serv- 
 ice, 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: Hay- 
 docks 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 " 
 
348 MAIN STREET 
 
 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. "We'll 
 have supper at home then? " He drove off. 
 
 She hated him for his composure. He had ruined her de- 
 fiance. 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." 
 
MAIN STREET 349 
 
 "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 
 
350 MAIN STREET 
 
 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, sew- 
 ing a vest. But he looked as though he were doing this ec- 
 centric 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 lin- 
 ing. 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, Rowland & Gould's grocery was 
 smug enough, but attached to the rear was a lean-to of storm- 
 
MAIN STREET 351 
 
 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 home- 
 made 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- 
 
352 MAIN STREET 
 
 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. 
 
 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 rever- 
 ence 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 artist 
 an Apollo nameless and evasive building a house in the Berk- 
 shires 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 
 
MAIN STREET 353 
 
 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. Swift- 
 waite. 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 pre- 
 cedes 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 
 
354 MAIN STREET 
 
 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 condescend- 
 ing. She took it off, shook her head, explained with the kind 
 smile for inferiors, "I'm afraid it won't do, though it's un- 
 usually 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-depreciatf&n. 
 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 
 
MAIN STREET 355 
 
 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." 
 
CHAPTER XXX 
 
 FERN Mullins rushed into the house on a Saturday morning 
 early in September and shrieked at Carol, " School starts next 
 Tuesday. I've got to have one more spree before I'm arrested. 
 Let's get up a picnic down the lake for this afternoon. Won't 
 you come, Mrs. Kennicott, and the doctor? Cy Bogart wants 
 to go he's a brat but he's lively." 
 
 " I don't think the doctor can go," sedately. " He said 
 something about having to make a country call this afternoon. 
 But I'd love to." 
 
 " That's dandy! Who can we get? " 
 
 " Mrs. Dyer might be chaperon. She's been so nice. And 
 maybe Dave, if he could get away from the store." 
 
 " How about Erik Valborg? I think he's got lots more style 
 than these town boys. You like him all right, don't you? " 
 
 So the picnic of Carol, Fern, Erik, Cy Bogart, and the 
 Dyers was not only moral but inevitable. 
 
 They drove to the birch grove on the south shore of Lake 
 Minniemashie. Dave Dyer was his most clownish self. He 
 yelped, jigged, wore Carol's hat, dropped an ant down Fern's 
 back, and when they went swimming (the women modestly 
 changing in the car with the side curtains up, the men un- 
 dressing behind the bushes, constantly repeating, " Gee, hope 
 we don't run into poison ivy"), Dave splashed water on 
 them and dived to clutch his wife's ankle. He infected the 
 others. Erik gave an imitation of the Greek dancers he had 
 seen in vaudeville, and when they sat down to picnic supper 
 spread on a lap-robe on the grass, Cy climbed a tree to throw 
 acorns at them. 
 
 But Carol could not frolic. 
 
 She had made herself young, with parted hair, sailor blouse 
 and large blue bow, white canvas shoes and short linen skirt. 
 Her mirror had asserted that she looked exactly as she had in 
 college, that her throat was smooth, her collar-bone not very 
 noticeable. But she was under restraint. When they swam 
 
 356 
 
MAIN STREET 357 
 
 she enjoyed the freshness of the water but she was irritated by 
 Cy's tricks, by Dave's excessive good spirits. She admired 
 Erik's dance; he could never betray bad taste, as Cy did, and 
 Dave. She waited for him to come to her. He did not come. 
 By his joyousness he had apparently endeared himself to 
 the Dyers. Maud watched him and, after supper, cried to 
 him, " Come sit down beside me, bad boy! " Carol winced 
 at his willingness to be a bad boy and come and sit, at his en- 
 joyment of a not very stimulating game in which Maud, Dave, 
 and Cy snatched slices of cold tongue from one another's 
 plates. Maud, it seemed, was slightly dizzy from the swim. 
 She remarked publicly, " Dr. Kennicott has helped me so much 
 by putting me on a diet," but it was to Erik alone that she 
 gave the complete version of her peculiarity in being so sensi- 
 tive, so easily hurt by the slightest cross word, that she simply 
 had to have nice cheery friends. 
 
 Erik was nice and cheery. 
 
 Carol assured herself, " Whatever faults I may have, I 
 certainly couldn't ever be jealous. I do like Maud; she's 
 always so pleasant. But I wonder if she isn't just a bit fond of 
 fishing for men's sympathy? Playing with Erik, and her 
 married Well But she looks at him in that languish- 
 ing, swooning, mid- Victorian way. Disgusting! " 
 
 Cy Bogart lay between the roots of a big birch, smoking his 
 pipe and teasing Fern, assuring her that a week from now, 
 when he was again a high-school boy and she his teacher, he'd 
 wink at her in class. Maud Dyer wanted Erik to " come down 
 to the beach to see the darling little minnies." Carol was left 
 to Dave, who tried to entertain her with humorous accounts 
 of Ella Stowbody's fondness for chocolate peppermints. She 
 watched Maud Dyer put her hand on Erik's shoulder to steady 
 herself. 
 
 " Disgusting! " she thought. 
 
 Cy Bogart covered Fern's nervous hand with his red paw, and 
 when she bounced with half-anger and shrieked, "Let go, I 
 tell you! " he grinned and waved his pipe a gangling twenty- 
 year-old satyr. 
 
 " Disgusting! " 
 
 When Maud and Erik returned and the grouping shifted, 
 Erik muttered at Carol, " There's a boat on shore. Let's skip 
 off and have a row." 
 
 " What will they think? " she worried. She saw Maud 
 
358 MAIN STREET 
 
 Dyer peer at Erik with moist possessive eyes. " Yes! Let's! " 
 she said. 
 
 She cried to the party, with the canonical amount of spright- 
 liness, " Good-by, everybody. We'll wireless you from China." 
 
 As the rhythmic oars plopped and creaked, as she floated 
 on an unreality of delicate gray over which the sunset was 
 poured out thin, the irritation of Cy and Maud slipped away. 
 Erik smiled at her proudly. She considered him coatless, in 
 white thin shirt. She was conscious of his male differentness, 
 of his flat masculine sides, his thin thighs, his easy rowing. 
 They talked of the library, of the movies. He hummed and 
 she softly sang " Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." A breeze 
 shivered across the agate lake. The wrinkled water was like 
 armor damascened and polished. The breeze flowed round the 
 boat in a chill current. Carol drew the collar of her middy 
 blouse over her bare throat. 
 
 " Getting cold. Afraid we'll have to go back," she said. 
 
 "Let's not go back to them yet. They'll be cutting up. 
 Let's keep along the shore." 
 
 " But you enjoy the ' cutting up! ' Maud and you had a 
 beautiful time." 
 
 "Why! We just walked on the shore and talked about 
 fishing! " 
 
 She was relieved, and apologetic to her friend Maud. " Of 
 course. I was joking." 
 
 "I'll tell you! Let's land here and sit on the shore that 
 bunch of hazel-brush will shelter us from the wind and watch 
 the sunset. It's like melted lead. Just a short while! We 
 don't want to go back and listen to them! " 
 
 "No, but " She said nothing while he sped ashore. 
 
 The keel clashed on the stones. He stood on the forward seat, 
 holding out his hand. They were alone, in the ripple-lapping 
 silence. She rose slowly, slowly stepped over the water in the 
 bottom of the old boat. She took his hand confidently. Un- 
 speaking they sat on a bleached log, in a russet twilight which 
 hinted of autumn. Linden leaves fluttered about them. 
 
 " I wish Are you cold now? " he whispered. 
 
 " A little." She shivered. But it was not with cold. 
 
 " I wish we could curl up in the leaves there, covered all 
 up, and lie looking out at the dark." 
 
 " I wish we could." As though it was comfortably under- 
 stood that he did not mean to be taken seriously. 
 
MAIN STREET 359 
 
 " Like what all the poets say brown nymph and faun." 
 
 " No. I can't be a nymph any more. Too old Erik, 
 
 am I old? Am I faded and small- towny? " 
 
 "Why, you're the youngest Your eyes are like a 
 
 girl's. They're so well, I mean, like you believed every- 
 thing. Even if you do teach me, I feel a thousand years older 
 than you, instead of maybe a year younger." 
 
 " Four or five years younger! " 
 
 "Anyway, your eyes are so innocent and your cheeks so 
 
 soft Damn it, it makes me want to cry, somehow, you're 
 
 so defenseless; and I want to protect you and There's 
 
 nothing to protect you against! " 
 
 " Am I young? Am I? Honestly? Truly? " She be- 
 trayed for a moment the childish, mock-imploring tone that 
 comes into the voice of the most serious woman when an 
 agreeable man treats her as a girl; the childish tone and 
 childish pursed-up lips and shy lift of the cheek. 
 
 "Yes, you are! " 
 
 " You're dear to believe it, Will Erik! " 
 
 " Will you play with me? A lot? " 
 
 " Perhaps." 
 
 " Would you really like to curl in the leaves and watch the 
 stars swing by overhead? " 
 
 " I think it's rather better to be sitting here! " He twined 
 his fingers with hers. "And Erik, we must go back." 
 
 " Why? " 
 
 " It's somewhat late to outline all the history of social 
 custom! " 
 
 " I know. We must. Are you glad we ran away though? " 
 
 " Yes." She was quiet, perfectly simple. But she rose. 
 
 He circled her waist with a brusque arm. She did not resist. 
 She did not care. He was neither a peasant tailor, a potential 
 artist, a social complication, nor a peril. He was himself, and 
 in him, in the personality flowing from him, she was unreason- 
 ingly content. In his nearness she caught a new view of his 
 head; the last light brought out the planes of his neck, his 
 flat ruddied cheeks, the side of his nose, the depression of his 
 temples. Not as coy or uneasy lovers but as companions they 
 walked to the boat, and he lifted her up on the prow. 
 
 She began to talk intently, as he rowed: " Erik, you've got 
 to work! You ought to be a personage. You're robbed of 
 your kingdom. Fight for it! Take one of these correspon- 
 
3 6o MAIN STREET 
 
 dence courses in drawing they mayn't be any good in them- 
 selves, but they'll make you try to draw and " 
 
 As they reached the picnic ground she perceived that it was 
 dark, that they had been gone for a long time. 
 
 " What will they say? " she wondered. 
 
 The others greeted them with the inevitable storm of humor 
 and slight vexation: "Where the deuce do you think you've 
 been? " " You're a fine pair, you are! " Erik and Carol 
 looked self-conscious; failed in their effort to be witty. All the 
 way home Carol was embarrassed. Once Cy winked at her. 
 That Cy, the Peeping Tom of the garage-loft, should consider 
 
 her a fellow-sinner She was furious and frightened and 
 
 exultant by turns, and in all her moods certain that Kennicott 
 would read her adventuring in her face. 
 
 She came into the house awkwardly defiant. 
 
 Her husband, half asleep under the lamp, greeted her, " Well, 
 well, have nice time? " 
 
 She could not answer. He looked at her. But his look 
 did not sharpen. He began to wind his watch, yawning the old 
 " Welllllll, guess it's about time to turn in." 
 
 That was all. Yet she was not glad. She was almost disap- 
 pointed. 
 
 ii 
 
 Mrs. Bogart called next day. She had a hen-like, crumb- 
 pecking, diligent appearance. Her smile was too innocent. The 
 pecking started instantly: 
 
 " Cy says you had lots of fun at the picnic yesterday. Did 
 you enjoy it? " 
 
 " Oh yes. I raced Cy at swimming. He beat me badly. 
 He's so strong, isn't he! " 
 
 "Poor boy, just crazy to get into the war, too, but 
 
 This Erik Valborg was along, wa'n't he? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " I think he's an awful handsome fellow, and they say he's 
 smart. Do you like him? " 
 
 " He seems very polite." 
 
 " Cy says you and him had a lovely boat-ride. My, that 
 must have been pleasant." 
 
 " Yes, except that I couldn't get Mr. Valborg to say a word. 
 I wanted to ask him about the suit Mr. Hicks is making for 
 
MAIN STREET 361 
 
 my husband. But he insisted on singing. Still, it was restful, 
 floating around on the water and singing. So happy and in- 
 nocent. Don't you think it's a shame, Mrs. Bogart, that people 
 in this town don't do more nice clean things like that, instead 
 of all this horrible gossiping? " 
 
 "Yes. . . . Yes." 
 
 Mrs. Bogart sounded vacant. Her bonnet was awry; she 
 was incomparably dowdy. Carol stared at her, felt contemp- 
 tuous, ready at last to rebel against the trap, and as the rusty 
 goodwife fished again, " Plannin' some more picnics? " she 
 flung out, " I haven't the slightest idea! Oh. Is that Hugh 
 crying? I must'run up to him." 
 
 But up-stairs she remembered that Mrs. Bogart had seen her 
 walking with Erik from the railroad track into town, and she 
 was chilly with disquietude. 
 
 At the Jolly Seventeen, two days after, she was effusive to 
 Maud Dyer, to Juanita Haydock. She fancied that every one 
 was watching her, but she could not be sure, and in rare strong 
 moments she did not care. She could rebel against the town's 
 prying now that she had something, however indistinct, for 
 which to rebel. 
 
 In a passionate escape there must be not only a place from 
 which to flee but a place to which to flee. She had known 
 that she would gladly leave Gopher Prairie, leave Main Street 
 and all that it signified, but she had had no destination. She 
 had one now. That destination was not Erik Valborg and the 
 love of Erik. She continued to assure herself that she wasn't 
 in love with him but merely " fond of him, and interested in 
 his success." Yet in him she had discovered both her need of 
 youth and the fact that youth would welcome her. It was not 
 Erik to whom she must escape, but universal and joyous youth, 
 in class-rooms, in studios, in offices, in meetings to protest 
 against Things in General. . . . But universal and joyous 
 youth rather resembled Erik. 
 
 All week she thought of things she wished to say to him. 
 High, improving things. She began to admit that she was 
 lonely without him. Then she was afraid. 
 
 It was at the Baptist church supper, a week after the picnic, 
 that she saw him again. She had gone with Kennicott and 
 Aunt Bessie to the supper, which was spread on oilcloth- 
 covered and trestle-supported tables in the church basement. 
 Erik was helping Myrtle Cass to fill coffee cups for the wait- 
 
362 MAIN STREET 
 
 resses. The congregation had doffed their piety. Children 
 tumbled under the tables, and Deacon Pierson greeted the 
 women with a rolling, " Where's Brother Jones, sister, where 's 
 Brother Jones? Not going to be with us tonight? Well, 
 you tell Sister Perry to hand you a plate, and make 'em give 
 you enough oyster pie! " 
 
 Erik shared in the cheerfulness. He laughed with Myrtle, 
 jogged her elbow when she was filling cups, made deep mock 
 bows to the waitresses as they came up for coffee. Myrtle 
 was enchanted by his humor. From the other end of the room, 
 a matron among matrons, Carol observed Myrtle, and hated 
 her, and caught herself at it. " To be jealous of a wooden- 
 faced village girl! " But she kept it up. She detested Erik; 
 gloated over his gaucheries his "breaks," she called them. 
 When he was too expressive, too much like a Russian dancer, 
 in saluting Deacon Pierson, Carol had the ecstasy of pain in 
 seeing the deacon's sneer. When, trying to talk to three girls 
 at once, he dropped a cup and effeminately wailed, " Oh dear! " 
 she sympathized with and ached over the insulting secret 
 glances of the girls. 
 
 From meanly hating him she rose to compassion as she saw 
 that his eyes begged every one to like him. She perceived how 
 inaccurate her judgments could be. At the picnic she had 
 fancied that Maud Dyer looked upon Erik too sentimentally, 
 and she had snarled, " I hate these married women who cheapen 
 themselves and feed on boys." But at the supper Maud was one 
 of the waitresses; she bustled with platters of cake, she was 
 pleasant to old women; and to Erik she gave no attention at all. 
 Indeed, when she. had her own supper, she joined the Kenni- 
 cotts, and how ludicrous it was to suppose that Maud was a 
 gourmet of emotions Carol saw in the fact that she talked 
 not to one of the town beaux but to the safe Kennicott him- 
 self! 
 
 When Carol glanced at Erik again she discovered that Mrs. 
 Bogart had an eye on her. It was a shock to know that at last 
 there was something which could make her afraid of Mrs. 
 Bogart's spying. 
 
 " What am I doing? Am I in love with Erik? Unfaithful? 
 I? I want youth but I don't want him I mean, I don't want 
 youth enough to break up my life. I must get out of this. 
 Quick." 
 
 She said to Kennicott on their way home, " Will! I want to 
 
MAIN STREET 363 
 
 run away for a few days. Wouldn't you like to skip down to 
 Chicago? " 
 
 " Still be pretty hot there. No fun in a big city till winter. 
 What do you want to go for? " 
 
 " People! To occupy my mind. I want stimulus." 
 
 " Stimulus? " He spoke good-naturedly. " Who's been feed- 
 ing you meat? You got that ' stimulus ' out of one of these fool 
 stories about wives that don't know when they're well off. 
 Stimulus! Seriously, though, to cut out the jollying, I can't 
 get away." 
 
 " Then why don't I run off by myself? " 
 
 " Why Tisn't the money, you understand. But what 
 
 about Hugh? " 
 
 " Leave him with Aunt Bessie. It would be just for a few 
 days." 
 
 " I don't think much of this business of leaving kids around. 
 Bad for 'em." 
 
 " So you don't think " 
 
 " I'll tell you: I think we better stay put till after the war. 
 Then we'll have a dandy long trip. No, I don't think you 
 better plan much about going away now." 
 
 So she was thrown at Erik. 
 
 in 
 
 She awoke at ebb-time, at three of the morning, woke sharply 
 and fully; and sharply and coldly as her father pronouncing 
 sentence on a cruel swindler she gave judgment: 
 
 " A pitiful and tawdry love-affair. 
 
 " No splendor, no defiance. A self-deceived little woman 
 whispering in corners with a pretentious little man. 
 
 " No, he is not. He is fine. Aspiring. It's not his fault. 
 His eyes are sweet when he looks at me. Sweet, so sweet." 
 
 She pitied herself that her romance should be pitiful; she 
 sighed that in this colorless hour, to this austere self, it should 
 seem tawdry. 
 
 Then, in a very great desire of rebellion and unleashing of all 
 her hatreds, " The pettier and more tawdry it is, the more blame 
 to Main Street. It shows how much I've been longing to escape. 
 Any way out! Any humility so long as I can flee. Main Street 
 has done this to me. I came here eager for nobilities, ready for 
 work, and now Any way out. 
 
364 MAIN STREET 
 
 " I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. 
 They don't know, they don't understand how agonizing their 
 complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound. 
 
 "Tawdry! Pitiful! Carol the clean girl that used to 
 walk so fast! sneaking and tittering in dark corners, being 
 sentimental and jealous at church suppers! " 
 
 At breakfast-time her agonies were night-blurred, and per- 
 sisted only as a nervous irresolution. 
 
 Few of the aristocrats of the Jolly Seventeen attended the 
 humble folk-meets of the Baptist and Methodist church suppers, 
 where the Willis Woodfords, the Dillons, the Champ Perrys, 
 Oleson the butcher, Brad Bemis the tinsmith, and Deacon Pier- 
 son found release from loneliness. But all of the smart set 
 went to the lawn-festivals of the Episcopal Church, and were 
 reprovingly polite to outsiders. 
 
 The Harry Haydocks gave the last lawn-festival of the sea- 
 son; a splendor of Japanese lanterns and card- tables and 
 chicken patties and Neapolitan ice-cream. Erik was no longer 
 entirely an outsider. He was eating his ice-cream with a group 
 of the people most solidly " in " the Dyers, Myrtle Cass, Guy 
 Pollock, the Jackson Elders. The Haydocks themselves kept 
 aloof, but the others tolerated him. He would never, Carol 
 fancied, be one of the town pillars, because he was not ortho- 
 dox in hunting and motoring and poker. But he was winning 
 approbation by his liveliness, his gaiety the qualities least 
 important in him. 
 
 When the group summoned Carol she made several very 
 well-taken points in regard to the weather. 
 
 Myrtle cried to Erik, " Come on! We don't belong with 
 these old folks. I want to make you 'quainted with the jolliest 
 girl, she comes from Wakamin, she's staying with Mary How- 
 land." 
 
 Carol saw him being profuse to the guest from Wakamin. 
 She saw him confidentially strolling with Myrtle. She burst 
 out to Mrs. Westlake, " Valborg and Myrtle seem to have quite 
 a crush on each other." 
 
 Mrs. Westlake glanced at her curiously before she mumbled, 
 " Yes, don't they." 
 
 " I'm mad, to talk this way," Carol worried. 
 
MAIN STREET 365 
 
 She had regained a feeling of social virtue by telling Juanita 
 Haydock "how darling her lawn looked with the Japanese 
 lanterns " when she saw that Erik was stalking her. Though 
 he was merely ambling about with his hands in his pockets, 
 though he did not peep at her, she knew that he was calling 
 her. She sidled away from Juanita. Erik hastened to her. She 
 nodded coolly (she was proud of her coolness). 
 
 "Carol! Fve got a wonderful chance! Don't know but 
 what some ways it might be better than going East to take 
 
 art. Myrtle Cass says I dropped in to say howdy to 
 
 Myrtle last evening, and had quite a long talk with her father, 
 and he said he was hunting for a fellow to go to work in the 
 flour mill and learn the whole business, and maybe become 
 general manager. I know something about wheat from my 
 farming, and I worked a couple of months in the flour mill at 
 Curlew when I got sick of tailoring. What do you think? You 
 said any work was artistic if it was done by an artist. And 
 flour is so important. What do you think? " 
 
 "Wait! Wait!" 
 
 This sensitive boy would be very skilfully stamped into con- 
 formity by Lyman Cass and his sallow daughter; but did she 
 detest the plan for this reason? " I must be honest. I mustn't 
 tamper with his future to please my vanity." But she had no 
 sure vision. She turned on him: 
 
 " How can I decide? It's up to you. Do you want to 
 become a person like Lym Cass, or do you want to become a 
 person like yes, like me! Wait! Don't be flattering. Be 
 honest. This is important." 
 
 " I know. I am a person like you now! I mean, I want to 
 rebel." 
 
 " Yes. We're alike," gravely. 
 
 " Only I'm not sure I can put through my schemes. I really 
 can't draw much. I guess I have pretty fair taste in fabrics, but 
 since I've known you I don't like to think about fussing with 
 dress-designing. But as a miller, I'd have the means books, 
 piano, travel." 
 
 " I'm going to be frank and beastly. Don't you realize that 
 it isn't just because her papa needs a bright young man in the 
 mill that Myrtle is amiable to you? Can't you understand 
 what she'll do to you when she has you, when she sends you to 
 church and makes you become respectable? " 
 
 He glared at her. " I don't know. I suppose so." 
 
366 MAIN STREET 
 
 "You are thoroughly unstable! " 
 
 " What if I am? Most fish out of water are! Don't talk 
 like Mrs. Bogart ! How can I be anything but ' unstable ' 
 wandering from farm to tailor shop to books, no training, 
 nothing but trying to make books talk to me! Probably I'll 
 fail. Oh, I know it; probably I'm uneven. But I'm not un- 
 stable in thinking about this job in the mill and Myrtle. I 
 know what I want. I want you! " 
 
 " Please, please, oh, please! " 
 
 " I do. I'm not a schoolboy any more. I want you. If 
 I take Myrtle, it's to forget you." 
 
 " Please, please! " 
 
 " It's you that are unstable! You talk at things and play 
 at things, but you're scared. Would I mind it if you and I 
 went off to poverty, and I had to dig ditches? I would not! 
 But you would. I think you would come to like me, but you 
 won't admit it. I wouldn't have said this, but when you 
 
 sneer at Myrtle and the mill If I'm not to have good 
 
 sensible things like those, d' you think I'll be content with 
 trying to become a damn dressmaker, after you? Are you 
 fair? Are you? " 
 
 " No, I suppose not." 
 
 " Do you like me? Do you? " 
 
 "Yes No! Please! I can't talk any more." 
 
 " Not here. Mrs. Haydock is looking at us." 
 
 " No, nor anywhere. O Erik, I am fond of you, but I'm 
 afraid." 
 
 " What of? " 
 
 " Of Them! Of my rulers Gopher Prairie. ... My 
 dear boy, we are talking very foolishly. I am a normal wife 
 and a good mother, and you are oh, a college freshman." 
 
 "You do like me! I'm going to make you love me! " 
 
 She looked at him once, recklessly, and walked away with a 
 serene gait that was a disordered flight. 
 
 Kennicott grumbled on their way home, " You and this 
 Valborg fellow seem quite chummy." 
 
 " Oh, we are. He's interested in Myrtle Cass, and I was 
 telling him how nice she is." 
 
 In her room she marveled, " I have become a liar. I'm 
 snarled with lies and foggy analyses and desires I who was 
 clear and sure." 
 
 She hurried into Kennicott's room, sat on the edge of his 
 
MAIN STREET 367 
 
 bed. He flapped a drowsy welcoming hand at her from the 
 expanse of quilt and dented pillows. 
 
 "Will, I really think I ought to trot off to St. Paul or 
 Chicago or some place." 
 
 "I thought we settled all that, few nights ago! Wait till 
 we can have a real trip." He shook himself out of his 
 drowsiness. "You might give me a good-night kiss." 
 
 She did dutifully. He held her lips against his for an intol- 
 erable time. " Don't you like the old man any more? " he 
 coaxed. He sat up and shyly fitted his palm about the 
 slimness of her waist. 
 
 " Of course. I like you very much indeed." Even to her- 
 self it sounded flat. She longed to be able to throw into her 
 voice the facile passion of a light woman. She patted his cheek. 
 
 He sighed, "I'm sorry you're so tired. Seems like- 
 But of course you aren't very strong." 
 
 " Yes. . . . Then you don't think you're quite sure I 
 ought to stay here in town? " 
 
 "I told you so! I certainly do! " 
 
 She crept back to her room, a small timorous figure in white. 
 
 "I can't face Will down demand the right. He'd be 
 obstinate. And I can't even go off and earn my living again. 
 
 Out of the habit of it. He's driving me I'm afraid of 
 
 what he's driving me to. Afraid. 
 
 " That man in there, snoring in stale air, my husband? 
 Could any ceremony make him my husband? 
 
 " No. I don't want to hurt him. I want to love him. I 
 can't, when I'm thinking of Erik. Am I too honest a funny 
 topsy-turvy honesty the faithfulness of unfaith? I wish I 
 had a more compartmental mind, like men. I'm too monoga- 
 mous toward Erik! my child Erik, who needs me. 
 
 " Is an illicit affair like a gambling debt demands stricter 
 honor than the legitimate debt of matrimony, because it's not 
 legally enforced? 
 
 "That's nonsense! I don't care in the least for Erik! 
 Not for any man. I want to be let alone, in a woman world 
 a world without Main Street, or politicians, or business men, 
 or men with that sudden beastly hungry look, that glistening 
 unfrank expression that wives know 
 
 " If Erik were here, if he would just sit quiet and kind and 
 talk, I could be still, I could go to sleep. 
 
 " I am so tired. If I could sl< 
 
CHAPTER XXXI 
 
 THEIR night came unheralded. 
 
 Kennicott was on a country call. It was cool but Carol 
 huddled on the porch, rocking, meditating, rocking. The house 
 was lonely and repellent, and though she sighed, " I ought 
 to go in and read so many things to read ought to go in," she 
 remained. Suddenly Erik was coming, turning in, swinging 
 open the screen door, touching her hand. 
 
 " Erik! " 
 
 " Saw your husband driving out of town. Couldn't stand 
 it." 
 
 "Well You mustn't stay more than five minutes." 
 
 " Couldn't stand not seeing you. Every day, towards eve- 
 ning, felt I had to see you pictured you so clear. I've been 
 good though, staying away, haven't I! " 
 
 " And you must go on being good." 
 
 "Why must I?" 
 
 "We better not stay here on the porch. The Rowlands 
 across the street are such window-peepers, and Mrs. Bo- 
 gart " 
 
 She did not look at him but she could divine his tremulous- 
 ness as he stumbled indoors. A moment ago the night had been 
 coldly empty; now it was incalculable, hot, treacherous. But 
 it is women who are the calm realists once they discard the 
 fetishes of the premarital hunt. Carol was serene as she 
 murmured, " Hungry? I have some little honey-colored cakes. 
 You may have two, and then you must skip home." 
 
 " Take me up and let me see Hugh asleep." 
 
 "I don't believe " 
 
 "Just a glimpse! " 
 
 Well " 
 
 She doubtfully led the way to the hallroom-nursery. Their 
 heads close, Erik's curls pleasant as they touched her cheek, 
 they looked in at the baby. Hugh was pink with slumber. 
 He had burrowed into his pillow with such energy that it 
 
 368 
 
MAIN STREET 369 
 
 was almost smothering him. Beside it was a celluloid 
 rhinoceros; tight in his hand a torn picture of Old King 
 Cole. 
 
 " Shhh ! " said Carol, quite automatically. She tiptoed in 
 to pat the pillow. As she returned to Erik she had a friendly 
 sense of his waiting for her. They smiled at each other. She 
 did not think of Kennicott, the baby's father. What she did 
 think was that some one rather like Erik, an older and surer 
 Erik, ought to be Hugh's father. The three of them would 
 play incredible imaginative games. 
 
 " Carol ! You've told me about your own room. Let me 
 peep in at it." 
 
 " But you mustn't stay, not a second. We must go down- 
 stairs." 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 "Will you be good?" 
 
 " R-reasonably! ' He was pale, large-eyed, serious. 
 
 "You've got to be more than reasonably good! " She felt 
 sensible and superior; she was energetic about pushing open 
 the door. 
 
 Kennicott had always seemed out of place there but Erik 
 surprisingly harmonized with the spirit of the room as he 
 stroked the books, glanced at the prints. He held out his 
 hands. He came toward her. She was weak, betrayed to a 
 warm softness. Her head was tilted back. Her eyes were 
 closed. Her thoughts were formless but many-colored. She 
 felt his kiss, diffident and reverent, on her eyelid. 
 
 Then she knew that it was impossible. 
 
 She shook herself. She sprang from him. " Please! " she 
 said sharply. 
 
 He looked at her unyielding. 
 
 " I am fond of you," she said. " Don't spoil everything. 
 Be my friend." 
 
 " How many thousands and millions of women must have 
 said that! And now you! And it doesn't spoil everything. 
 It glorifies everything." 
 
 " Dear, I do think there's a tiny streak of fairy in you 
 whatever you do with it. Perhaps I'd have loved that once. 
 But I won't. It's too late. But I'll keep a fondness for you. 
 Impersonal I will be impersonal! It needn't be just a thin 
 talky fondness. You do need me, don't you? Only you and 
 my son need me. I've wanted so to be wanted! Once I 
 
370 MAIN STREET 
 
 wanted love to be given to me. Now I'll be content if I can 
 give. . . . Almost content! 
 
 " We women, we like to do things for men. Poor men ! 
 We swoop on you when you're defenseless and fuss over you 
 and insist on reforming you. But it's so pitifully deep in us. 
 You'll be the one thing in which I haven't failed. Do some- 
 thing definite! Even if it's just selling cottons. Sell beautiful 
 cottons caravans from China " 
 
 " Carol! Stop! You do love me! " 
 
 " I do not! It's just Can't you understand? Every- 
 thing crushes in on me so, all the gaping dull people, and I look 
 
 for a way out Please go. I can't stand any more. 
 
 Please! " 
 
 He was gone. And she was not relieved by the quiet of the 
 house. She was empty and the house was empty and she 
 needed him. She wanted to go on talking, to get this threshed 
 out, to build a sane friendship. She wavered down to the 
 living-room, looked out of the bay-window. He was not to 
 be seen. But Mrs. Westlake was. She was walking past, and 
 in the light from the corner arc-lamp she quickly inspected 
 the porch, the windows. Carol dropped the curtain, stood with 
 movement and reflection paralyzed. Automatically, without 
 reasoning, she mumbled, " I will see him again soon and make 
 
 him understand we must be friends. But The house is 
 
 so empty. It echoes so." 
 
 n 
 
 Kennicott had seemed nervous and absent-minded through 
 that supper-hour, two evenings after. He prowled about the 
 living-room, then growled: 
 
 " What the dickens have you been saying to Ma Westlake? " 
 
 Carol's book rattled. " What do you mean? " 
 
 " I told you that Westlake and his wife were jealous of us, 
 
 and here you been chumming up to them and From what 
 
 Dave tells me, Ma Westlake has been going around town saying 
 you told her that you hate Aunt Bessie, and that you fixed 
 up your own room because I snore, and you said Bjornstam 
 was too good for Bea, and then, just recent, that you were 
 sore on the town because we don't all go down on our knees 
 and beg this Valborg fellow to come take supper with us. God 
 only knows what else she says you said." 
 
MAIN STREET 371 
 
 "It's not true, any of it! I did like Mrs. Westlake, and 
 I've called on her, and apparently she's gone and twisted 
 everything I've said " 
 
 " Sure. Of course she would. Didn't I tell you she would? 
 She's an old cat, like her pussyfooting, hand-holding husband. 
 Lord, if I was sick, I'd rather have a faith-healer than Westlake, 
 and she's another slice off the same bacon. What I can't 
 understand though " 
 
 She waited, taut. 
 
 " is whatever possessed you to let her pump you, bright 
 
 a girl as you are. I don't care what you told her we all get 
 peeved sometimes and want to blow off steam, that's natural 
 but if you wanted to keep it dark, why didn't you advertise 
 it in the Dauntless, or get a megaphone and stand on top of 
 the hotel and holler, or do anything besides spill it to her! " 
 
 " I know. You told me. But she was so motherly. And 
 
 I didn't have any woman Vida 's become so married and 
 
 proprietary." 
 
 " Well, next time you'll have better sense." 
 
 He patted her head, flumped down behind his newspaper, 
 said nothing more. 
 
 Enemies leered through the windows, stole on her from 
 the hall. She had no one save Erik. This kind good man 
 Kennicott he was an elder brother. It was Erik, her fellow 
 outcast, to whom she wanted to run for sanctuary. Through 
 her storm she was, to the eye, sitting quietly with her fingers 
 between the pages of a baby-blue book on home-dressmaking. 
 But her dismay at Mrs. Westlake's treachery had risen to 
 active dread. What had the woman said of her and Erik? 
 What did she know? What had she seen? Who else would 
 join in the baying hunt? Who else had seen her with Erik? 
 What had she to fear from the Dyers, Cy Bogart, Juanita, 
 Aunt Bessie? What precisely had she answered to Mrs. 
 Bogart 's questioning? 
 
 All next day she was too restless to stay home, yet as she 
 walked the streets on fictitious errands she was afraid of every 
 person she met. She waited for them to speak; waited with 
 foreboding. She repeated, "I mustn't ever see Erik again." 
 But the words did not register. She had no ecstatic indulgence 
 in the sense of guilt which is, to the women of Main Street, 
 the surest escape from blank tediousness. 
 
 At five, crumpled in a chair in the living-room, she started 
 
372 MAIN STREET 
 
 at the sound of the bell. Some one opened the door. She 
 waited, uneasy. Vida Sherwin charged into the room. " Here's 
 the one person I can trust! " Carol rejoiced. 
 
 Vida was serious but affectionate. She bustled at Carol 
 with, " Oh, there you are, dearie, so glad t' find you in, sit 
 down, want to talk to you." 
 
 Carol sat, obedient. 
 
 Vida fussily tugged over a large chair and launched out: 
 
 "Fve been hearing vague rumors you were interested in 
 this Erik Valborg. I knew you couldn't be guilty, and I'm 
 surer than ever of it now. Here we are, as blooming as a 
 daisy." 
 
 "How does a respectable matron look when she feels 
 guilty? " 
 
 Carol sounded resentful. 
 
 " Why Oh, it would show! Besides! I know that you, 
 
 of all people, are the one that can appreciate Dr. Will." 
 
 " What have you been hearing? " 
 
 " Nothing, really. I just heard Mrs. Bogart say she'd seen 
 you and Valborg walking together a lot." Vida's chirping 
 
 slackened. She looked at her nails. " But I suspect 
 
 you do like Valborg. Oh, I don't mean in any wrong way. 
 But you're young; you don't know what an innocent liking 
 might drift into. You always pretend to be so sophisticated 
 and all, but you're a baby. Just because you are so innocent, 
 you don't know what evil thoughts may lurk in that fellow's 
 brain." 
 
 " You don't suppose Valborg could actually think about 
 making love to me? " 
 
 Her rather cheap sport ended abruptly as Vida cried, with 
 contorted face, "What do you know about the thoughts in 
 hearts? You just play at reforming the world. You don't 
 know what it means to suffer." 
 
 There are two insults which no human being will endure: 
 the assertion that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly 
 impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble. Carol 
 said furiously, "You think I don't suffer? You think I've 
 always had an easy " 
 
 "No, you don't. I'm going to tell you something I've 
 never told a living soul, not even Ray." The dam of repressed 
 imagination which Vida had builded for years, which r.?w, 
 with Raymie off at the wars, she was building again, gave v -/. 
 
MAIN STREET 373 
 
 " I was I liked Will terribly well. One time at a party oh, 
 before he met you, of course but we held hands, and we were 
 so happy. But I didn't feel I was really suited to him. I let 
 him go. Please don't think I still love him! I see now that 
 Ray was predestined to be my mate. But because I liked him, 
 I know how sincere and pure and noble Will is, and his 
 
 thoughts never straying from the path of rectitude, and 
 
 If I gave him up to you, at least you've got to appreciate him! 
 We danced together and laughed so, and I gave him up, 
 
 but This is my affair! I'm not intruding! I see the 
 
 whole thing as he does, because of all I've told you. Maybe 
 it's shameless to bare my heart this way, but I do it for him 
 for him and you! " 
 
 Carol understood that Vida believed herself to have recited 
 minutely and brazenly a story of intimate love; understood 
 that, in alarm, she was trying to cover her shame as she 
 struggled on, " Liked him in the most honorable way simply 
 
 can't help it if I still see things through his eyes If I 
 
 gave him up, I certainly am not beyond my rights in demanding 
 that you take care to avoid even the appearance of evil 
 and " She was weeping; an insignificant, flushed, ungrace- 
 fully weeping woman. 
 
 Carol could not endure it. She ran to Vida, kissed her 
 forehead, comforted her with a murmur of dove-like sounds, 
 sought to reassure her with worn and hastily assembled gifts 
 of words: " Oh, I appreciate it so much," and " You are so 
 fine and splendid," and " Let me assure you there isn't a thing 
 to what you've heard," and " Oh, indeed, I do know how 
 sincere Will is, and as you say, so so sincere." 
 
 Vida believed that she had explained many deep and devious 
 matters. She came out of her hysteria like a sparrow shaking 
 off rain-drops. She sat up, and took advantage of her victory: 
 
 " I don't want to rub it in, but you can see for yourself 
 now, this is all a result of your being so discontented and 
 not appreciating the dear good people here. And another 
 thing: People like you and me, who want to reform things, 
 have to be particularly careful about appearances. Think 
 how much better you can criticize conventional customs if you 
 yourself live up to them, scrupulously. Then people can't 
 say you're attacking them to excuse your own infractions." 
 
 To Carol was given a sudden great philosophical under- 
 standing, an explanation of half the cautious reforms in his- 
 
374 MAIN STREET 
 
 tory. " Yes. I've heard that plea. It's a good one. It sets 
 revolts aside to cool. It keeps strays in the flock. To word 
 it differently: 'You must live up to the popular code if you 
 believe in it; but if you don't believe in it, then you must live 
 up to it! ' 
 
 " I don't think so at all," said Vida vaguely. She began to 
 look hurt, and Carol let her be oracular. 
 
 in 
 
 Vida had done her a service; had made all agonizing seem 
 so fatuous that she ceased writhing and saw that her whole 
 problem was simple as mutton: she was interested in Erik's 
 aspiration; interest gave her a hesitating fondness for him; 
 and the future would take care of the event. . . . But 
 at night, thinking in bed, she protested, "I'm not a falsely 
 accused innocent, though! If it were some one more resolute 
 
 than Erik, a fighter, an artist with bearded surly lips 
 
 They're only in books. Is that the real tragedy, that I never 
 shall know tragedy, never find anything but blustery com- 
 plications that turn out to be a farce? 
 
 " No one big enough or pitiful enough to sacrifice for. 
 Tragedy in neat blouses; the eternal flame all nice and safe 
 in a kerosene stove. Neither heroic faith nor heroic guilt. 
 Peeping at love from behind lace curtains on Main Street! " 
 
 Aunt Bessie crept in next day, tried to pump her, tried to 
 prime the pump by again hinting that Kennicott might have 
 his own affairs. Carol snapped, " Whatever I may do, I'll 
 have you to understand that Will is only too safe! " She 
 wished afterward that she had not been so lofty. How much 
 would Aunt Bessie make of " Whatever I may do? " 
 
 When Kennicott came home he poked at things, and hemmed, 
 and brought out, " Saw aunty, this afternoon. She said you 
 weren't very polite to her." 
 
 Carol laughed. He looked at her in a puzzled way and 
 fled to his newspaper. 
 
 IV 
 
 She lay sleepless. She alternately considered ways of leaving 
 Kennicott, and remembered his virtues, pitied his bewilderment 
 in face of the subtle corroding sicknesses which he could not 
 
MAIN STREET 375 
 
 dose nor cut out. Didn't he perhaps need her more than did 
 the book-solaced Erik? Suppose Will were to die, suddenly. 
 Suppose she never again saw him at breakfast, silent but 
 amiable, listening to her chatter. Suppose he never again 
 
 played elephant for Hugh. Suppose A country call, a 
 
 slippery road, his motor skidding, the edge of the road crum- 
 bling, the car turning turtle, Will pinned beneath, suffering, 
 brought home maimed, looking at her with spaniel eyes or 
 waiting for her, calling for her, while she was in Chicago, 
 knowing nothing of it. Suppose he were sued by some vicious 
 shrieking woman for malpractice. He tried to get witnesses; 
 Westlake spread lies; his friends doubted him; his self- 
 confidence was so broken that it was horrible to see the in- 
 decision of the decisive man; he was convicted, handcuffed, 
 
 taken on a train 
 
 She ran to his room. At her nervous push the door swung 
 sharply in, struck a chair. He awoke, gasped, then in a 
 steady voice: "What is it, dear? Anything wrong?" She 
 darted to him, fumbled for the familiar harsh bristly cheek. 
 How well she knew it, every seam, and hardness of bone, and 
 roll of fat! Yet when he sighed, " This is a nice visit," and 
 dropped his hand on her thin-covered shoulder, she said, too 
 cheerily, " I thought I heard you moaning. So silly of me. 
 Good night, dear." 
 
 She did not see Erik for a fortnight, save once at church 
 and once when she went to the tailor shop to talk over the 
 plans, contingencies, and strategy of Kennicott's annual cam- 
 paign for getting a new suit. Nat Hicks was there, and he 
 was not so deferential as he had been. With unnecessary 
 jauntiness he chuckled, " Some nice flannels, them samples, 
 heh? " Needlessly he touched her arm to call attention to the 
 fashion-plates, and humorously he glanced from her to Erik. 
 At home she wondered if the little beast might not be sug- 
 gesting himself as a rival to Erik, but that abysmal be- 
 dragglement she would not consider. 
 
 She saw Juanita Haydock slowly walking past the house 
 as Mrs. Westlake had once walked past. 
 
 She met Mrs. Westlake in Uncle Whittier's store, and before 
 that alert stare forgot her determination to be rude, and was 
 shakily cordial. 
 
376 MAIN STREET 
 
 She was sure that all the men on the street, even Guy 
 Pollock and Sam Clark, leered at her in an interested hopeful 
 way, as though she were a notorious divorcee. She felt as 
 insecure as a shadowed criminal. She wished to see Erik, and 
 wished that she had never seen him. She fancied that Kenni- 
 cott was the only person in town who did not know all 
 know incomparably more than there was to know about her- 
 self and Erik. She crouched in her chair as she imagined men 
 talking of her, thick-voiced, obscene, in barber shops and the 
 tobacco-stinking pool parlor. 
 
 Through early autumn Fern Mullins was the only person 
 who broke the suspense. The frivolous teacher had come to 
 accept Carol as of her own youth, and though school had 
 begun she rushed in daily to suggest dances, welsh-rabbit 
 parties. 
 
 Fern begged her to go as chaperon to a barn-dance in the 
 country, on a Saturday evening. Carol could not go. The 
 next day, the storm crashed. 
 
CHAPTER XXXII 
 
 CAEOL was on the back porch, tightening a bolt on the baby's 
 go-cart, this Sunday afternoon. Through an open window of 
 the Bogart house she heard a screeching, heard Mrs. Bogart's 
 haggish voice: 
 
 " . . . did too, and there's no use your denying it 
 . . . no you don't, you march yourself right straight out 
 of the house . . . never in my life heard of such . . . 
 never had nobody talk to me like . . . walk in the ways 
 of sin and nastiness . . . leave your clothes here, and 
 heaven knows that's more than you deserve . . . any of 
 your lip or I'll call the policeman." 
 
 The voice of the other interlocutor Carol did not catch, 
 nor, though Mrs. Bogart was proclaiming that he was her con- 
 fidant and present assistant, did she catch the voice of Mrs. 
 Bogart's God. 
 
 " Another row with Cy," Carol inferred. 
 
 She trundled the go-cart down the back steps and tentatively 
 wheeled it across the yard, proud of her repairs. She heard 
 steps on the sidewalk. She saw not Cy Bogart but Fern 
 Mullins, carrying a suit-case, hurrying up the street with her 
 head low. The widow, standing on the porch with buttery 
 arms akimbo, yammered after the fleeing girl: 
 
 "And don't you dare show your face on this block again. 
 You can send the drayman for your trunk. My house has 
 been contaminated long enough. Why the Lord should afflict 
 me " 
 
 Fern was gone. The righteous widow glared, banged into 
 the house, came out poking at her bonnet, marched away. 
 By this time Carol was staring in a manner not visibly to be 
 distinguished from the window-peeping of the rest of Gopher 
 Prairie. She saw Mrs. Bogart enter the Rowland house, then 
 the Casses'. Not till suppertime did she reach the Kennicotts. 
 The doctor answered her ring, and greeted her, "Well, well, 
 how's the good neighbor? " 
 
 377 
 
378 MAIN STREET 
 
 The good neighbor charged into the living-room, waving the 
 most unctuous of black kid gloves and delightedly sputtering: 
 
 " You may well ask how I am! I really do wonder how I 
 could go through the awful scenes of this day and the im- 
 pudence I took from that woman's tongue, that ought to be 
 cut out " 
 
 "Whoa! Whoa! Hold up! " roared Kennicott. "Who's 
 the hussy, Sister Bogart? Sit down and take it cool and tell 
 us about it." 
 
 " I can't sit down, I must hurry home, but I couldn't devote 
 myself to my own selfish cares till I'd warned you, and heaven 
 knows I don't expect any thanks for trying to warn the town 
 against her, there's always so much evil in the world that folks 
 simply won't see or appreciate your trying to safeguard 
 
 them And forcing herself in here to get in with you and 
 
 Carrie, many 's the time I've seen her doing it, and, thank 
 heaven, she was found out in time before she could do any 
 more harm, it simply breaks my heart and prostrates me to 
 think what she may have done already, even if some of us 
 that understand and know about things " 
 
 "Whoa-up! Who are you talking about?" 
 
 " She's talking about Fern Mullins," Carol put in, not 
 pleasantly. 
 
 " Huh? " 
 
 Kennicott was incredulous. 
 
 " I certainly am! " flourished Mrs. Bogart, " and good and 
 thankful you may be that I found her out in time, before she 
 could get you into something, Carol; because even if you are 
 my neighbor and Will's wife and a cultured lady, let me tell 
 you right now, Carol Kennicott, that you ain't always as 
 respectful to you ain't as reverent you don't stick by the 
 good old ways like they was laid down for us by God in the 
 Bible, and while of course there ain't a bit of harm in having 
 a good laugh, and I know there ain't any real wickedness in 
 you, yet just the same you don't fear God and hate the trans- 
 gressors of his commandments like you ought to, and you may 
 be thankful I found out this serpent I nourished in my bosom 
 and oh yes! oh yes indeed! my lady must have two eggs 
 every morning for breakfast, and eggs sixty cents a dozen, 
 and wa'n't satisfied with one, like most folks what did she 
 care how much they cost or if a person couldn't make hardly 
 nothing on her board and room, in fact I just took her in out 
 
MAIN STREET 379 
 
 of charity and I might have known from the kind of stockings 
 and clothes that she sneaked into my house in her trunk " 
 
 Before they got her story she had five more minutes of 
 obscene wallowing. The gutter comedy turned into high 
 tragedy, with Nemesis in black kid gloves. The actual story 
 was simple, depressing, and unimportant. As to details Mrs. 
 Bogart was indefinite, and angry that she should be ques- 
 tioned. 
 
 Fern Mullins and Cy had, the evening before, driven alone 
 to a barn-dance in the country. (Carol brought out the ad- 
 mission that Fern had tried to get a chaperon.) At the dance 
 Cy had kissed Fern she confessed that. Cy had obtained a 
 pint of whisky; he said that he didn't remember where he had 
 got it; Mrs. Bogart implied that Fern had given it to him; Fern 
 herself insisted that he had stolen it from a farmer's over- 
 coat which, Mrs. Bogart raged, was obviously a lie. He had 
 become soggily drunk. Fern had driven him home; deposited 
 him, retching and wabbling, on the Bogart porch. 
 
 Never before had her boy been drunk, shrieked Mrs. Bogart. 
 When Kennicott grunted, she owned, "Well, maybe once or 
 twice I've smelled licker on his breath." She also, with an 
 air of being only too scrupulously exact, granted that some- 
 times he did not come home till morning. But he couldn't 
 ever have been drunk, for he always had the best excuses: 
 the other boys had tempted him to go down the lake spearing 
 pickerel by torchlight, or he had been out in a " machine that 
 ran out of gas." Anyway, never before had her boy fallen 
 into the hands of a " designing woman." 
 
 " What do you suppose Miss Mullins could design to do with 
 him? " insisted Carol. 
 
 Mrs. Bogart was puzzled, gave it up, went on. This morning, 
 when she had faced both of them, Cy had manfully confessed 
 that all of the blame was on Fern, because the teacher his 
 own teacher had dared him to take a drink. Fern had tried 
 to deny it. 
 
 " Then," gabbled Mrs. Bogart, " then that woman had the 
 impudence to say to me, ' What purpose could I have in want- 
 ing the filthy pup to get drunk? ' That's just what she called 
 him pup. ' I'll have no such nasty language in my house,' 
 I says, ' and you pretending and pulling the wool over people's 
 eyes and making them think you're educated and fit to be a 
 teacher and look out for young people's morals you're worse 
 
3 8o MAIN STREET 
 
 'n any street-walker! ' I says. I let her have it good. I 
 wa'n't going to flinch from my bounden duty and let her think 
 that decent folks had to stand for her vile talk. ' Purpose? ' 
 I says, ' Purpose? Ill tell you what purpose you had! Ain't 
 I seen you making up to everything in pants that'd waste 
 time and pay attention to your impertinence? Ain't I seen 
 you showing off your legs with them short skirts of yours, 
 trying to make out like you was so girlish and la-de-da, 
 running along the street? ' " 
 
 Carol was very sick at this version of Fern's eager youth, 
 but she was sicker as Mrs. Bogart hinted that no one could 
 tell what had happened between Fern and Cy before the 
 drive home. Without exactly describing the scene, by her 
 power of lustful imagination the woman suggested dark country 
 places apart from the lanterns and rude fiddling and banging 
 dance-steps in the barn, then madness and harsh hateful con- 
 quest. Carol was too sick to interrupt. It was Kennicott 
 who cried, " Oh, for God's sake quit it! You haven't any idea 
 what happened. You haven't given us a single proof yet that 
 Fern is anything but a rattle-brained youngster." 
 
 " I haven't, eh? Well, what do you say to this? I come 
 straight out and I says to her, ' Did you or did you not taste the 
 whisky Cy had? ' and she says, ' I think I did take one sip 
 Cy made me/ she said. She owned up to that much, so you 
 can imagine " 
 
 " Does that prove her a prostitute? " asked Carol. 
 
 " Carrie! Don't you never use a word like that again! " 
 wailed the outraged Puritan. 
 
 " Well, does it prove her to be a bad woman, that she took 
 a taste of whisky? I've done it myself! " 
 
 " That's different. Not that I approve your doing it. What 
 do the Scriptures tell us? * Strong drink is a mocker '! But 
 that's entirely different from a teacher drinking with one of her 
 own pupils." 
 
 " Yes, it does sound bad. Fern was silly, undoubtedly. But 
 as a matter of fact she's only a year or two older than Cy, 
 and probably a good many years younger in experience of 
 vice." 
 
 "That's not true! She is plenty old enough to corrupt 
 him! " 
 
 "The job of corrupting Cy was done by your sinless town, 
 five years ago! " 
 
MAIN STREET 381 
 
 Mrs. Bogart did not rage in return. Suddenly she was 
 hopeless. Her head drooped. She patted her black kid gloves, 
 picked at a thread of her faded brown skirt, and sighed, " He's 
 a good boy, and awful affectionate if you treat him right. 
 Some thinks he's terrible wild, but that's because he's young. 
 And he's so brave and truthful why, he was one of the first 
 in town that wanted to enlist for the war, and I had to speak 
 real sharp to him to keep him from running away. I didn't 
 want him to get into no bad influences round these camps 
 and then," Mrs. Bogart rose from her pitifulness, recovered her 
 pace, " then I go and bring into my own house a woman that's 
 worse, when all's said and done, than any bad woman he could 
 have met. You say this Mullins woman is too young and 
 inexperienced to corrupt Cy. Well then, she's too young and 
 inexperienced to teach him, too, one or t'other, you can't have 
 your cake and eat it! So it don't make no difference which 
 reason they fire her for, and that's practically almost what 
 I said to the school-board." 
 
 "Have you been telling this story to the members of the 
 school-board? " 
 
 " I certainly have! Every one of 'em! And their wives. 
 I says to them, ' 'Tain't my affair to decide what you should 
 or should not do with your teachers,' I says, * and I ain't pre- 
 suming to dictate in any way, shape, manner, or form. I just 
 want to know,' I says, ' whether you're going to go on record 
 as keeping here in our schools, among a lot of innocent boys 
 and girls, a woman that drinks, smokes, curses, uses bad lan- 
 guage, and does such dreadful things as I wouldn't lay tongue 
 to but you know what I mean,' I says, * and if so, I'll just 
 see to it that the town learns about it.' And that's what I told 
 Professor Mott, too, being superintendent and he's a righteous 
 man, not going autoing on the Sabbath like the school-board 
 members. And the professor as much as admitted he was 
 suspicious of the Mullins woman himself." 
 
 n 
 
 Kennicott was less shocked and much less frightened than 
 Carol, and more articulate in his description of Mrs. Bogart, 
 when she had gone. 
 
 Maud Dyer telephoned to Carol and, after a rather im- 
 probable question about cooking lima beans with bacon, de- 
 
382 MAIN STREET 
 
 manded, " Have you heard the scandal about this Miss Mullins 
 and Cy Bogart? " 
 
 " I'm sure it's a lie." 
 
 "Oh, probably is." Maud's manner indicated that the 
 falsity of the story was an insignificant flaw in its general 
 delightfulness. 
 
 Carol crept to her room, sat with hands curled tight to- 
 gether as she listened to a plague of voices. She could hear the 
 town yelping with it, every soul of them, gleeful at new details, 
 panting to win importance by having details of their own to 
 add. How well they would make up for what they had been 
 afraid to do by imagining it in another! They who had not 
 been entirely afraid (but merely careful and sneaky), all the 
 barber-shop roues and millinery-parlor mondaines, how archly 
 they were giggling (this second she could hear them at it); 
 with what self-commendation they were cackling their suavest 
 wit: "You can't tell me she ain't a gay bird; I'm wise! " 
 
 And not one man in town to carry out their pioneer tradition 
 of superb and contemptuous cursing, not one to verify the 
 myth that their " rough chivalry " and " rugged virtues " were 
 more generous than the petty scandal-picking of older lands, 
 not one dramatic frontiersman to thunder, with fantastic and 
 fictional oaths, "What are you hinting at? What are you 
 snickering at? What facts have you? What are these un- 
 heard-of sins you condemn so much and like so well? " 
 
 No one to say it. Not Kennicott nor Guy Pollock nor 
 Champ Perry. 
 
 Erik? Possibly. He would sputter uneasy protest. 
 
 She suddenly wondered what subterranean connection her 
 interest in Erik had with this affair. Wasn't it because they 
 had been prevented by her caste from bounding on her own 
 trail that they were howling at Fern? 
 
 in 
 
 Before supper she found, by half a dozen telephone calls, 
 that Fern had fled to the Minniemashie House. She hastened 
 there, trying not to be self-conscious about the people who 
 looked at her on the street. The clerk said indifferently that 
 he " guessed " Miss Mullins was up in Room 37, and left Carol 
 to find the way. She hunted along the stale-smelling corridors 
 with their wallpaper of cerise daisies and poison-green rosettes, 
 
MAIN STREET 383 
 
 streaked in white spots from spilled water, their frayed 
 red and yellow matting, and rows of pine doors painted a 
 sickly blue. She could not find the number. In the darkness 
 at the end of a corridor she had to feel the aluminum figures 
 on the door-panels. She was startled once by a man's voice: 
 " Yep? Whadyuh want? " and fled. When she reached the 
 right door she stood listening. She made out a long sobbing. 
 There was no answer till her third knock; then an alarmed 
 "Who is it? Go away! " 
 
 Her hatred of the town turned resolute as she pushed open 
 the door. 
 
 Yesterday she had seen Fern Mullins in boots and tweed 
 skirt and canary-yellow sweater, fleet and self-possessed. Now 
 she lay across the bed, in crumpled lavender cotton and shabby 
 pumps, very feminine, utterly cowed. She lifted her head in 
 stupid terror. Her hair was in tousled strings and her face 
 was sallow, creased. Her eyes were a blur from weeping. 
 
 " I didn't! I didn't! " was all she would say at first, and 
 she repeated it while Carol kissed her cheek, stroked her 
 hair, bathed her forehead. She rested then, while Carol looked 
 about the room the welcome to strangers, the sanctuary of 
 hospitable Main Street, the lucrative property of Kennicott's 
 friend, Jackson Elder. It smelled of old linen and decaying 
 carpet and ancient tobacco smoke. The bed was rickety, with 
 a thin knotty mattress; the sand-colored walls were scratched 
 and gouged; in every corner, under everything, were fluffy 
 dust and cigar ashes; on the tilted wash-stand was a nicked 
 and squatty pitcher; the only chair was a grim straight object 
 of spotty varnish; but there was an altogether splendid gilt 
 and rose cuspidor. 
 
 She did not try to draw out Fern's story; Fern insisted on 
 telling it. 
 
 She had gone to the party, not quite liking Cy but willing 
 to endure him for the sake of dancing, of escaping from Mrs. 
 Bogart's flow of moral comments, of relaxing after the first 
 strained weeks of teaching. Cy " promised to be good." He 
 was, on the way out. There were a few workmen from Gopher 
 Prairie at the dance, with many young farm-people. Half 
 a dozen squatters from a degenerate colony in a brush-hidden 
 hollow, planters of potatoes, suspected thieves, came in noisily 
 drunk. They all pounded the floor of the barn in old-fashioned 
 square dances, swinging their partners, skipping, laughing, 
 
384 MAIN STREET 
 
 under the incantations of Del Snafflin the barber, who fiddled 
 and called the figures. Cy had two drinks from pocket-flasks. 
 Fern saw him fumbling among the overcoats piled on the feed- 
 box at the far end of the barn; soon after she heard a farmer 
 declaring that some one had stolen his bottle. She taxed Cy 
 with the theft; he chuckled, "Oh, it's just a joke; I'm going 
 to give it back." He demanded that she take a drink. Unless 
 she did, he wouldn't return the bottle. 
 
 " I just brushed my lips with it, and gave it back to him," 
 moaned Fern. She sat up, glared at Carol. " Did you ever 
 take a drink? " 
 
 " I have. A few. I'd love to have one right now! This 
 contact with righteousness has about done me up! " 
 
 Fern could laugh then. " So would I! I don't suppose I've 
 had five drinks in my life, but if I meet just one more Bogart 
 
 and Son Well, I didn't really touch that bottle horrible 
 
 raw whisky though I'd have loved some wine. I felt so jolly. 
 The barn was almost like a stage scene the high rafters, and 
 the dark stalls, and tin lanterns swinging, and a silage-cutter 
 up at the end like some mysterious kind of machine. And 
 I'd been having lots of fun dancing with the nicest young 
 farmer, so strong and nice, and awfully intelligent. But I got 
 uneasy when I saw how Cy was. So I doubt if I touched two 
 drops of the beastly stuff. Do you suppose God is punishing 
 me for even wanting wine? " 
 
 " My dear, Mrs. Bogart's god may be Main Street's god. 
 But all the courageous intelligent people are fighting him 
 . though he slay us." 
 
 Fern danced again with the young farmer; she forgot Cy 
 while she was talking with a girl who had taken the University 
 agricultural course. Cy could not have returned the bottle; 
 he came staggering toward her taking time to make himself 
 offensive to every girl on the way and to dance a jig. She 
 insisted on their returning. Cy went with her, chuckling and 
 jigging. He kissed her, outside the door. . . . "And 
 to think I used to think it was interesting to have men kiss 
 you at a dance! "... She ignored the kiss, in the need 
 of getting him home before he started a fight. A farmer helped 
 her harness the buggy, while Cy snored in the seat. He awoke 
 before they set out; all the way home he alternately slept and 
 tried to make love to her. 
 
 " I'm almost as strong as he is. I managed to keep him 
 
MAIN STREET 385 
 
 away while I drove such a rickety buggy. I didn't feel like 
 a girl; I felt like a scrubwoman no, I guess I was too scared 
 to have any feelings at all. It was terribly dark. I got home, 
 somehow. But it was hard, the time I had to get out, and it 
 was quite muddy, to read a sign-post I lit matches that I 
 took from Cy's coat pocket, and he followed me he fell off the 
 buggy step into the mud, and got up and tried to make love 
 
 to me, and I was scared. But I hit him. Quite hard. 
 
 And got in, and so he ran after the buggy, crying like a baby, 
 
 and I let him in again, and right away again he was trying 
 
 But no matter. I got him home. Up on the porch. Mrs. 
 Bogart was waiting up. . 
 
 " You know, it was funny ; all the time she was oh, talking 
 to me and Cy was being terribly sick I just kept thinking, 
 1 IVe still got to drive the buggy down to the livery stable. 
 I wonder if the livery man will be awake? ' But I got through 
 somehow. I took the tuggy down to the stable, and got to 
 my room. I locked my door, but Mrs. Bogart kept saying 
 things, outside the door. Stood out there saying things about 
 me, dreadful things, and rattling the knob. And all the while 
 I could hear Cy in the back yard being sick. I don't think 
 I'll ever marry any man. And then today 
 
 " She drove me right out of the house. She wouldn't listen 
 to me, all morning. Just to Cy. I suppose he's over his 
 headache now. Even at breakfast he thought the whole thing 
 was a grand joke. I suppose right this minute he's going 
 around town boasting about his c conquest. 7 You understand- 
 on, don't you understand? I did keep him away! But I don't 
 see how I can face my school. They say country towns are 
 
 fine for bringing up boys in, but I can't believe this is 
 
 me, lying here and saying this. I don't believe what happened 
 last night. 
 
 " Oh. This was curious: When I took off my dress last 
 night it was a darling dress, I loved it so, but of course the 
 
 mud had spoiled it. I cried over it and No matter. But 
 
 my white silk stockings were all torn, and the strange thing is, 
 I don't know whether I caught my legs in the briers when I got 
 out to look at the sign-post, or whether Cy scratched me when 
 I was fighting him off." 
 
386 MAIN STREET 
 
 rv 
 
 Sam Clark was president of the school-board. When Carol 
 told him Fern's story Sam looked sympathetic and neighborly, 
 and Mrs. Clark sat by cooing, " Oh, isn't that too bad." Carol 
 was interrupted only when Mrs. Clark begged, " Dear, don't 
 speak so bitter about ' pious ' people. There's lots of sincere 
 practising Christians that are real tolerant. Like the Champ 
 Perrys." 
 
 " Yes. I know. Unfortunately there are enough kindly 
 people in the churches to keep them going." 
 
 When Carol had finished, Mrs. Clark breathed, " Poor girl; 
 I don't doubt her story a bit," and Sam rumbled, " Yuh, sure. 
 Miss Mullins is young and reckless, but everybody in town, 
 except Ma Bogart, knows what Cy is. But Miss Mullins was 
 a fool to go with him." 
 
 " But not wicked enough to pay for it with disgrace? " 
 
 " N-no, but Sam avoided verdicts, clung to the en- 
 trancing horrors of the story. " Ma Bogart cussed her out all 
 morning, did she? Jumped her neck, eh? Ma certainly is 
 one hell-cat." 
 
 " Yes, you know how she is; so vicious." 
 
 " Oh no, her best style ain't her viciousness. What she pulls 
 in our store is to come in smiling with Christian Fortitude and 
 keep a clerk busy for one hour while she picks out half a dozen 
 fourpenny nails. I remember one time " 
 
 " Sam! " Carol was uneasy. " You'll fight for Fern, won't 
 you? When Mrs. Bogart came to see you did she make definite 
 charges? " 
 
 " Well, yes, you might say she did." 
 
 " But the school-board won't act on them? " 
 
 " Guess we'll more or less have to." 
 
 " But you'll exonerate Fern? " 
 
 " I'll do what I can for the girl personally, but you know 
 what the board is. There's Reverend Zitterel; Sister Bogart 
 about half runs his church, so of course he'll take her say-so; 
 and Ezra Stowbody, as a banker he has to be all hell for 
 morality and purity. Might 's well admit it, Carrie; I'm afraid 
 there'll be a majority of the board against her. Not that any 
 of us would believe a word Cy said, not if he swore it on a 
 stack of Bibles, but still, after all this gossip, Miss Mullins 
 wouldn't hardly be the party to chaperon our basket-ball team 
 
MAIN STREET 387 
 
 when it went out of town to play other high schools, would 
 she! " 
 
 " Perhaps not, but couldn't some one else? " 
 
 " Why, that's one of the things she was hired for." Sam 
 sounded stubborn. 
 
 " Do you realize that this isn't just a matter of a job, and 
 hiring and firing; that it's actually sending a splendid girl out 
 with a beastly stain on her, giving all the other Bogarts in the 
 world a chance at her? That's what will happen if you dis- 
 charge her." 
 
 Sam moved uncomfortably, looked at his wife, scratched his 
 head, sighed, said nothing. 
 
 " Won't you fight for her on the board? If you lose, won't 
 you, and whoever agrees with you, make a minority report? " 
 
 " No reports made in a case like this. Our rule is to just 
 decide the thing and announce the final decision, whether it's 
 unanimous or not." 
 
 " Rules! Against a girl's future! Dear God! Rules of a 
 school-board! Sam! Won't you stand by Fern, and threaten 
 to resign from the board if they try to discharge her? " 
 
 Rather testy, tired of so many subtleties, he complained, 
 " Well, I'll do what I can, but I'll have to wait till the board 
 meets." 
 
 And " I'll do what I can," together with the secret admission 
 " Of course you and I know what Ma Bogart is," was all Carol 
 could get from Superintendent George Edwin Mott, Ezra Stow- 
 body, the Reverend Mr. Zitterel or any other member of the 
 school-board. 
 
 Afterward she wondered whether Mr. Zitterel could have 
 been referring to herself when he observed, " There's too much 
 license in high places in this town, though, and the wages of 
 sin is death or anyway, bein' fired." The holy leer with which 
 the priest said it remained in her mind. 
 
 She was at the hotel before eight next morning. Fern longed 
 to go to school, to face the tittering, but she was too shaky. 
 Carol read to her all day and, by reassuring her, convinced her 
 own self that the school-board would be just. She was less 
 sure of it that evening when, at the motion pictures, she heard 
 Mrs. Gougerling exclaim to Mrs. Rowland, " She may be so 
 innocent and all, and I suppose she probably is, but still, if she 
 drank a whole bottle of whisky at that dance, the way every- 
 body says she did, she may have forgotten she was so innocent 1 
 
3 88 MAIN STREET 
 
 Hee, hee, hee! " Maud Dyer, leaning back from her seat, put 
 in, " That's what I've said all along. I don't want to roast 
 anybody, but have you noticed the way she looks at men? " 
 
 " When will they have me on the scaffold? " Carol speculated. 
 
 Nat Hicks stopped the Kennicotts on their way home. Carol 
 hated him for his manner of assuming that they two had a 
 mysterious understanding. Without quite winking he seemed 
 to wink at her as he gurgled, " What do you folks think about 
 this Mullins woman? I'm not strait-laced, but I tell you we 
 got to have decent women in our schools. D' you know what 
 I heard? They say whatever she may of done afterwards, this 
 Mullins dame took two quarts of whisky to the dance with 
 her, and got stewed before Cy did! Some tank, that wren! 
 Ha, ha, ha! " 
 
 " Rats, I don't believe it," Kennicott muttered. 
 
 He got Carol away before she was able to speak. 
 
 She saw Erik passing the house, late, alone, and she stared 
 after him, longing for the lively bitterness of the things he 
 would say about the town. Kennicott had nothing for her but 
 " Oh, course, ev'body likes a juicy story, but they don't intend 
 to be mean." 
 
 She went up to bed proving to herself that the members of 
 the school-board were superior men. 
 
 It was Tuesday afternoon before she learned that the board 
 had met at ten in the morning and voted to " accept Miss 
 Fern Mullins's resignation." Sam Clark telephoned the news 
 to her. " We're not making any charges. We're just letting 
 her resign. Would you like to drop over to the hotel and ask 
 her to write the resignation, now we've accepted it? Glad I 
 could get the board to put it that way. It's thanks to you." 
 
 " But can't you see that the town will take this as proof 
 of the charges? " 
 
 "We're not making no charges whatever! " Sam was 
 obviously finding it hard to be patient. 
 
 Fern left town that evening. 
 
 Carol went with her to the train. The two girls elbowed 
 through a silent lip-licking crowd. Carol tried to stare them 
 down but in face of the impishness of the boys and the bovine 
 gaping of the men, she was embarrassed. Fern did not glance 
 at them. Carol felt her arm tremble, though she was tearless, 
 listless, plodding. She squeezed Carol's hand, said something 
 unintelligible, stumbled up into the vestibule. 
 
MAIN STREET 389 
 
 Carol remembered that Miles Bjornstam had also taken a 
 train. What would be the scene at the station when she 
 herself took departure? 
 
 She walked up-town behind two strangers. 
 
 One of them was giggling, " See that good-looking wench 
 that got on here? The swell kid with the small black hat? 
 She's some charmer ! I was here yesterday, before my jump to 
 Ojibway Falls, and I heard all about her. Seems she was a 
 teacher, but she certainly was a high-roller O boy! high, 
 wide, and fancy! Her and couple of other skirts bought a 
 whole case of whisky and went on a tear, and one night, darned 
 if this bunch of cradle-robbers didn't get hold of some young 
 kids, just small boys, and they all got lit up like a White Way, 
 and went out to a roughneck dance, and they say " 
 
 The narrator turned, saw a woman near and, not being a 
 common person nor a coarse workman but a clever salesman 
 and a householder, lowered his voice for the rest of the tale. 
 During it the other man laughed hoarsely. 
 
 Carol turned off on a side-street. 
 
 She passed Cy Bogart. He was humorously narrating some 
 achievement to a group which included Nat Hicks, Del Snafflin, 
 Bert Tybee the bartender, and A. Tennyson O'Hearn the 
 shyster lawyer. They were men far older than Cy but they 
 accepted him as one of their own, and encouraged him to 
 go on. 
 
 It was a week before she received from Fern a letter of 
 which this was a part: 
 
 ... & of course my family did not really believe the story but 
 as they were sure I must have done something wrong they just 
 lectured me generally, in fact jawed me till I have gone to live at 
 a boarding house. The teachers' agencies must know the story, 
 man at one almost slammed the door in my face when I went to 
 ask about a job, & at another the woman in charge was beastly. 
 Don't know what I will do. Don't seem to feel very well. May 
 marry a fellow that's in love with me but he's so stupid that he 
 makes me scream. 
 
 Dear Mrs. Kennicott you were the only one that believed me. 
 I guess it's a joke on me, I was such a simp, I felt quite heroic 
 while I was driving the buggy back that night & keeping Cy away 
 from me. I guess I expected the people in Gopher Prairie to admire 
 me. I did use to be admired for my athletics at the U. just five 
 months ago. 
 
CHAPTER XXXIII 
 
 FOR a month which was one suspended moment of doubt she 
 saw Erik only casually, at an Eastern Star dance, at the shop, 
 where, in the presence of Nat Hicks, they conferred with im- 
 mense particularity on the significance of having one or two 
 buttons on the cuff of Kennicott's New Suit. For the benefit 
 of beholders they were respectably vacuous. 
 
 Thus barred from him, depressed in the thought of Fern, 
 Carol was suddenly and for the first time convinced that she 
 loved Erik. 
 
 She told herself a thousand inspiriting things which he would 
 say if he had the opportunity; for them she admired him, 
 loved him. But she was afraid to summon him. He under- 
 stood, he did not come. She forgot her every doubt of him, 
 and her discomfort in his background. Each day it seemed 
 impossible to get through the desolation of not seeing him. 
 Each morning, each afternoon, each evening was a compartment 
 divided from all other units of time, distinguished by a sudden 
 "Oh! I want to see Erik! " which was as devastating as 
 though she had never said it before. 
 
 There were wretched periods when she could not picture 
 him. Usually he stood out in her mind in some little moment 
 glancing up from his preposterous pressing-iron, or running on 
 the beach with Dave Dyer. But sometimes he had vanished; 
 he was only an opinion. She worried then about his appear- 
 ance: Weren't his wrists too large and red? Wasn't his nose 
 a snub, like so many Scandinavians? Was he at all the grace- 
 ful thing she had fancied? When she encountered him on the 
 street she was as much reassuring herself as rejoicing in his 
 presence. More disturbing than being unable to visualize him 
 was the darting remembrance of some intimate aspect: his 
 face as they had walked to the boat together at the picnic; 
 the ruddy light on his temples, neck-cords, flat cheeks. 
 
 On a November evening when Kennicott was in the country 
 she answered the bell and was confused to find Erik at the 
 
 390 
 
MAIN STREET 391 
 
 door, stooped, imploring, his hands in the pockets of his top- 
 coat. As though he had been rehearsing his speech he instantly 
 besought: 
 
 " Saw your husband driving away. I've got to see you. I 
 can't stand it. Come for a walk. I know! People might 
 see us. But they won't if we hike into the country. I'll wait 
 for you by the elevator. Take as long as you want to oh, 
 come quick! " 
 
 " In a few minutes," she promised. 
 
 She murmured, " I'll just talk to him for a quarter of an 
 hour and come home." She put on her tweed coat and rubber 
 overshoes, considering how honest and hopeless are rubbers, 
 how clearly their chaperonage proved that she wasn't going 
 to a lovers' tryst. 
 
 She found him in the shadow of the grain-elevator, sulkily 
 kicking at a rail of the side-track. As she came toward him 
 she fancied that his whole body expanded. But he said nothing, 
 nor she; he patted her sleeve, she returned the pat, and they 
 crossed the railroad tracks, found a road, clumped toward 
 open country. 
 
 " Chilly night, but I like this melancholy gray," he said. 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 They passed a moaning clump of trees and splashed along 
 the wet road. He tucked her hand into the side-pocket of his 
 overcoat. She caught his thumb and, sighing, held it exactly 
 as Hugh held hers when they went walking. She thought 
 about Hugh. The current maid was in for the evening, but 
 was it safe to leave the baby with her? The thought was 
 distant and elusive. 
 
 Erik began to talk, slowly, revealingly. He made for her a 
 picture of his work in a large tailor shop in Minneapolis: the 
 steam and heat, and the drudgery; the men in darned vests 
 and crumpled trousers, men who " rushed growlers of beer " 
 and were cynical about women, who laughed at him and played 
 jokes on him. " But I didn't mind, because I could keep away 
 from them outside. I used to go to the Art Institute and the 
 Walker Gallery, and tramp clear around Lake Harriet, or hike 
 out to the Gates house and imagine it was a chateau in Italy 
 and I lived in it. I was a marquis and collected tapestries 
 that was after I was wounded in Padua. The only really bad 
 time was when a tailor named Finkelfarb found a diary I was 
 trying to keep and he read it aloud in the shop it was a 
 
392 MAIN STREET 
 
 bad fight." He laughed. " I got fined five dollars. But that's 
 all gone now. Seems as though you stand between me and 
 the gas stoves the long flames with mauve edges, licking up 
 around the irons and making that sneering sound all day 
 aaaaah! " 
 
 Her fingers tightened about his thumb as she perceived the 
 hot low room, the pounding of pressing-irons, the reek of 
 scorched cloth, and Erik among giggling gnomes. His finger- 
 tip crept through the opening of her glove and smoothed her 
 palm. She snatched her hand away, stripped off her glove, 
 tucked her hand back into his. 
 
 He was saying something about a " wonderful person." In 
 her tranquillity she let the words blow by and heeded only the 
 beating wings of his voice. 
 
 She was conscious that he was fumbling for impressive 
 speech. 
 
 " Say, uh Carol, I've written a poem about you." 
 
 " That's nice. Let's hear it." 
 
 " Damn it, don't be so casual about it! Can't you take me 
 seriously? " 
 
 " My dear boy, if I took you seriously ! I don't want 
 
 us to be hurt more than more than we will be. Tell me the 
 poem. I've never had a poem written about me! " 
 
 " It isn't really a poem. It's just some words that I love 
 because it seems to me they catch what you are. Of course 
 
 probably they won't seem so to anybody else, but 
 
 Well 
 
 Little and tender and merry and wise 
 With eyes that meet my eyes. 
 
 Do you get the idea the way I do? " 
 
 "Yes! I'm terribly grateful! " And she was grateful 
 while she impersonally noted how bad a verse it was. 
 
 She was aware of the haggard beauty in the lowering night. 
 Monstrous tattered clouds sprawled round a forlorn moon; 
 puddles and rocks glistened with inner light. They were pass- 
 ing a grove of scrub poplars, feeble by day but looming now 
 like a menacing wall. She stopped. They heard the branches 
 dripping, the wet leaves sullenly plumping on the soggy earth. 
 
 " Waiting waiting everything is waiting," she whispered. 
 She drew her hand from his, pressed her clenched fingers 
 
MAIN STREET 393 
 
 against her lips. She was lost in the somberness. "I am 
 happy so we must go home, before we have time to become 
 unhappy. But can't we sit on a log for a minute and just 
 listen? " 
 
 " No. Too wet. But I wish we could build a fire, and you 
 could sit on my overcoat beside it. I'm a grand fire-builder! 
 My cousin Lars and me spent a week one time in a cabin 
 way up in the Big Woods, snowed in. The fireplace was filled 
 with a dome of ice when we got there, but we chopped it out, 
 and jammed the thing full of pine-boughs. Couldn't we build 
 a fire back here in the woods and sit by it for a while? " 
 
 She pondered, half-way between yielding and refusal. Her 
 head ached faintly. She was in abeyance. Everything, the 
 night, his silhouette, the cautious-treading future, was as un- 
 distinguishable as though she were drifting bodiless in a Fourth 
 Dimension. While her mind groped, the lights of a motor car 
 swooped round a bend in the road, and they stood farther 
 
 apart. " What ought I to do? " she mused. " I think 
 
 Oh, I won't be robbed! I am good! If I'm so enslaved that 
 I can't sit by the fire with a man and talk, then I'd better 
 be dead! " 
 
 The lights of the thrumming car grew magically; were upon 
 them ; abruptly stopped. From behind the dimness of the wind- 
 shield a voice, annoyed, sharp: " Hello there! " 
 
 She realized that it was Kennicott. 
 
 The irritation in his voice smoothed out. " Having a walk? " 
 
 They made schoolboyish sounds of assent. 
 
 " Pretty wet, isn't it? Better ride back. Jump up in front 
 here, Valborg." 
 
 His manner of swinging open the door was a command. 
 Carol was conscious that Erik was climbing in, that she was 
 apparently to sit in the back, and that she had been left to 
 open the rear door for herself. Instantly the wonder which 
 had flamed to the gusty skies was quenched, and she was 
 Mrs. W. P. Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, riding in a squeaking 
 old car, and likely to be lectured by her husband. 
 
 She feared what Kennicott would say to Erik. She bent 
 toward them. Kennicott was observing, " Going to have some 
 rain before the night 's over, all right." 
 
 " Yes," said Erik. 
 
 " Been funny season this year, anyway. Never saw it with 
 such a cold October and such a nice November. 'Member 
 
394 MAIN STREET 
 
 we had a snow way back on October ninth! But it certainly 
 was nice up to the twenty-first, this month as I remember it, 
 not a flake of snow in November so far, has there been? But 
 I shouldn't wonder if we'd be having some snow 'most any 
 time now." 
 
 " Yes, good chance of it," said Erik. 
 
 "Wish I'd had more time to go after the ducks this fall. 
 By golly, what do you think? " Kennicott sounded appealing. 
 " Fellow wrote me from Man Trap Lake that he shot seven 
 mallards and couple of canvas-back in one hour! " 
 
 " That must have been fine," said Erik. 
 
 Carol was ignored. But Kennicott was blustrously cheerful. 
 He shouted to a farmer, as he slowed up to pass the frightened 
 team, " There we are schon gut! " She sat back, neglected, 
 frozen, unheroic heroine in a drama insanely undramatic. She 
 made a decision resolute and enduring. She would tell Kenni- 
 cott What would she tell him? She could not say that 
 
 she loved Erik. Did she love him? But she would have it 
 out. She was not sure whether it was pity for Kennicott's 
 blindness, or irritation at his assumption that he was enough 
 to fill any woman's life, which prompted her, but she knew 
 that she was out of the trap, that she could be frank; and she 
 was exhilarated with the adventure of it . . . while in 
 front he was entertaining Erik: 
 
 " Nothing like an hour on a duck-pass to make you relish 
 
 your victuals and Gosh, this machine hasn't got the 
 
 power of a fountain pen. Guess the cylinders are jam-cram-full 
 of carbon again. Don't know but what maybe I'll have to 
 put in another set of piston-rings." 
 
 He stopped on Main Street and clucked hospitably, " There, 
 that'll give you just a block to walk. G' night." 
 
 Carol was in suspense. Would Erik sneak away? 
 
 He stolidly moved to the back of the car, thrust in his hand, 
 muttered, " Good night Carol. I'm glad we had our walk." 
 She pressed his hand. The car was flapping on. He was 
 hidden from her by a corner drug store on Main Street! 
 
 Kennicott did not recognize her till he drew up before the 
 house. Then he condescended, " Better jump out here and 
 I'll take the boat around back. Say, see if the back door is 
 unlocked, will you? " She unlatched the door for him. She 
 realized that she still carried the damp glove she had stripped 
 off for Erik. She drew it on. She stood in the center of the 
 
MAIN STREET 395 
 
 living-room, unmoving, in damp coat and muddy rubbers. 
 Kennicott was as opaque as ever. Her task wouldn't be any- 
 thing so lively as having to endure a scolding, but only an 
 exasperating effort to command his attention so that he would 
 understand the nebulous things she had to tell him, instead 
 of interrupting her by yawning, winding the clock, and going 
 up to bed. She heard him shoveling coal into the furnace. He 
 came through the kitchen energetically, but before he spoke 
 to her he did stop in the hall, did wind the clock. 
 
 He sauntered into the living-room and his glance passed 
 from her drenched hat to her smeared rubbers. She could 
 hear she could hear, see, taste, smell, touch his " Better 
 take your coat off, Carrie; looks kind of wet." Yes, there it 
 was: 
 
 " Well, Carrie, you better " He chucked his own coat 
 
 on a chair, stalked to her, went on with a rising tingling voice, 
 " you better cut it out now. I'm not going to do the out- 
 raged husband stunt. I like you and I respect you, and I'd 
 probably look like a boob if I tried to be dramatic. But I think 
 it's about time for you and Valborg to call a halt before you get 
 in Dutch, like Fern Mullins did." 
 
 Do you " 
 
 " Course. I know all about it. What d' you expect in a 
 town that's as filled with busybodies, that have plenty of time 
 to stick their noses into other folks' business, as this is? Not 
 that they've had the nerve to do much tattling to me, but 
 they've hinted around a lot, and anyway, I could see for myself 
 that you liked him. But of course I knew how cold you were, 
 I knew you wouldn't stand it even if Valborg did try to hold 
 your hand or kiss you, so I didn't worry. But same time, I 
 hope you don't suppose this husky young Swede farmer is as 
 innocent and Platonic and all that stuff as you are! Wait 
 now, don't get sore! I'm not knocking him. He isn't a bad 
 sort. And he's young and likes to gas about books. Course 
 you like him. That isn't the real rub. But haven't you just 
 seen what this town can do, once it goes and gets moral on 
 you, like it did with Fern? You probably think that two 
 young folks making love are alone if anybody ever is, but 
 there's nothing in this town that you don't do in company 
 with a whole lot of uninvited but awful interested guests. 
 Don't you realize that if Ma Westlake and a few others got 
 started they'd drive you up a tree, and you'd find yourself so 
 
396 MAIN STREET 
 
 well advertised as being in love with this Valborg fellow that 
 you'd have to be, just to spite 'em! " 
 
 " Let me sit down," was all Carol could say. She drooped 
 on the couch, wearily, without elasticity. 
 
 He yawned, " Gimme your coat and rubbers," and while 
 she stripped them off he twiddled his watch-chain, felt the 
 radiator, peered at the thermometer. He shook out her wraps 
 in the hall, hung them up with exactly his usual care. He 
 pushed a chair near to her and sat bolt up. He looked like 
 a physician about to give sound and undesired advice. 
 
 Before he could launch into his heavy discourse she des- 
 perately got in, " Please! I want you to know that I was 
 going to tell you everything, tonight." 
 
 " Well, I don't suppose there's really much to tell." 
 
 " But there is. I'm fond of Erik. He appeals to something 
 in here." She touched her breast. " And I admire him. He 
 isn't just a ' young Swede farmer.' He's an artist " 
 
 " Wait now! He's had a chance all evening to tell you 
 what a whale of a fine fellow he is. Now it's my turn. I can't 
 
 talk artistic, but Carrie, do you understand my work? " 
 
 He leaned forward, thick capable hands on thick sturdy thighs, 
 mature and slow, yet beseeching. " No matter even if j'ou are 
 cold, I like you better than anybody in the world. One time 
 I said that you were my soul. And that still goes. You're 
 all the things that I see in a sunset when I'm driving in from 
 the country, the things that I like but can't make poetry of. 
 Do you realize what my job is? I go round twenty- four hours 
 a day, in mud and blizzard, trying my damnedest to heal 
 everybody, rich or poor. You that 're always spieling about 
 how scientists ought to rule the world, instead of a bunch 
 of spread-eagle politicians can't you see that I'm all the sci- 
 ence there is here? And I can stand the cold and the bumpy 
 roads and the lonely rides at night. All I need is to have you 
 here at home to welcome me. I don't expect you to be pas- 
 sionate not any more I don't but I do expect you to ap- 
 preciate my work. I bring babies into the world, and save 
 lives, arid make cranky husbands quit being mean to their 
 wives. And then you go and moon over a Swede tailor because 
 he can talk about how to put ruchings on a skirt! Hell of a 
 thing for a man to fuss over! " 
 
 She flew out at him: " You make your side clear. Let me 
 give mine. I admit all you say except about Erik. But is 
 
MAIN STREET 397 
 
 it only you, and the baby, that want me to back you up, that 
 demand things from me? They're all on me, the whole town! 
 I can feel their hot breaths on my neck! Aunt Bessie and 
 that horrible slavering old Uncle Whittier and Juanita and 
 Mrs. Westlake and Mrs. Bogart and all of them. And you 
 welcome them, you encourage them to drag me down into their 
 cave! I won't stand it! Do you hear? Now, right now, I'm 
 done. And it's Erik who gives me the courage. You say he 
 just thinks about ruches (which do not usually go on skirts, 
 by the way ! ) . I tell you he thinks about God, the God that 
 Mrs. Bogart covers up with greasy gingham wrappers! Erik 
 will be a great man some day, and if I could contribute one 
 tiny bit to his success " 
 
 "Wait, wait, wait now! Hold up! You're assuming that 
 your Erik will make good. As a matter of fact, at my age he'll 
 be running a one-man tailor shop in some burg about the size 
 of Schoenstrom." 
 
 " He will not! " 
 
 " That's what he's headed for now all right, and he's twenty- 
 five or -six and What's he done to make you think he'll 
 
 ever be anything but a pants-presser? " 
 
 " He has sensitiveness and talent " 
 
 "Wait now! What has he actually done in the art line? 
 Has he done one first-class picture or sketch, d' you call it? 
 Or one poem, or played the piano, or anything except gas 
 about what he's going to do? " 
 
 She looked thoughtful. 
 
 " Then it's a hundred to one shot that he never will. Way 
 I understand it, even these fellows that do something pretty 
 good at home and get to go to art school, there ain't more 
 than one out of ten of 'em, maybe one out of a hundred, that 
 ever get above grinding out a bum living about as artistic 
 as plumbing. And when it comes down to this tailor, why, 
 can't you see you that take on so about psychology can't 
 you see that it's just by contrast with folks like Doc McGanum 
 or Lym Cass that this fellow seems artistic? Suppose you'd 
 met up with him first in one of these reg'lar New York studios! 
 You wouldn't notice him any more 'n a rabbit! " 
 
 She huddled over folded hands like a temple virgin shivering 
 on her knees before the thin warmth of a brazier. She could 
 not answer. 
 
 Kennicott rose quickly, sat on the couch, took both her 
 
MAIN STREET 
 
 hands. " Suppose he fails as he will ! Suppose he goes back 
 to tailoring, and you're his wife. Is that going to be this 
 artistic life youVe been thinking about? He's in some bum 
 shack, pressing pants all day, or stooped over sewing, and 
 having to be polite to any grouch that blows in and jams a 
 dirty stinking old suit in his face and says, 'Here you, fix 
 this, and be blame quick about it.' He won't even have enough 
 savvy to get him a big shop. He'll pike along doing his own 
 work unless you, his wife, go help him, go help him in the 
 shop, and stand over a table all day, pushing a big heavy iron. 
 iYour complexion will look fine after about fifteen years of 
 baking that way, won't it! And you'll be humped over like 
 an old hag. And probably you'll live in one room back of 
 the shop. And then at night oh, you'll have your artist 
 sure! He'll come in stinking of gasoline, and cranky from 
 hard work, and hinting around that if it hadn't been for you, 
 he'd of gone East and been a great artist. Sure! And you'll 
 
 be entertaining his relatives Talk about Uncle Whit! 
 
 You'll be having some old Axel Axelberg coming in with manure 
 on his boots and sitting down to supper in his socks and yelling 
 at you, * Hurry up now, you vimmin make me sick! ' Yes, 
 and you'll have a squalling brat every year, tugging at you 
 while you press clothes, and you won't love 'em like you do 
 Hugh up-stairs, all downy and asleep " 
 
 " Please! Not any more! " 
 
 Her face was on his knee. 
 
 He bent to kiss her neck. " I don't want to be unfair. I 
 guess love is a great thing, all right. But think it would stand 
 much of that kind of stuff? Oh, honey, am I so bad? Can't 
 you like me at all? I've I've been so fond of you! " 
 
 She snatched up his hand, she kissed it. Presently she 
 sobbed, " I won't ever see him again. I can't, now. The 
 
 hot living-room behind the tailor shop I don't love him 
 
 enough for that. And you are Even if I were sure of 
 
 him, sure he was the real thing, I don't think I could actually 
 leave you. This marriage, it weaves people together. It's 
 not easy to break, 'even when it ought to be broken." 
 
 " And do you want to break it? " 
 
 "No! " 
 
 He lifted her, carried her up-stairs, laid her on her bed, 
 turned to the door. 
 
 " Come kiss me," she whimpered. 
 
MAIN STREET 399 
 
 He kissed her lightly and slipped away. For an hour she 
 heard him moving about his room, lighting a cigar, drumming 
 with his knuckles on a chair. She felt that he was a bulwark 
 between her and the darkness that grew thicker as the delayed 
 storm came down in sleet. 
 
 n 
 
 He was cheery and more casual than ever at breakfast. All 
 day she tried to devise a way of giving Erik up. Telephone? 
 The village central would unquestionably " listen in." A 
 letter? It might be found. Go to see him? Impossible. 
 That evening Kennicott gave her, without comment, an en- 
 velope. The letter was signed " E. V." 
 
 I know I can't do anything but make trouble for you, I think. 
 I am going to Minneapolis tonight and from there as soon as I can 
 either to New York or Chicago. I will do as big things as I can. 
 I I can't write I love you too much God keep you. 
 
 Until she heard the whistle which told her that the Minne- 
 apolis train was leaving town, she kept herself from thinking, 
 from moving. Then it was all over. She had no plan nor 
 desire for anything. 
 
 When she caught Kennicott looking at her over his news- 
 paper she fled to his arms, thrusting the paper aside, and for 
 the first time in years they were lovers. But she knew that she 
 still had no plan in life, save always to go along the same 
 streets, past the same people, to the same shops. 
 
 in 
 
 A week after Erik's going the maid startled her by an- 
 nouncing, " There's a Mr. Valborg down-stairs say he vant to 
 see you." 
 
 She was conscious of the maid's interested stare, angry at 
 this shattering of the calm in which she had hidden. She 
 crept down, peeped into the living-room. It was not Erik 
 Valborg who stood there ; it was a small, gray-bearded, yellow- 
 faced man in mucky boots, canvas jacket, and red mittens. 
 He glowered at her with shrewd red eyes. 
 
 " You de doc's wife? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
400 MAIN STREET 
 
 " I'm Adolph Valborg, from up by Jefferson. I'm Erik's 
 father." 
 
 " Oh ! " He was a monkey- faced little man, and not gentle. 
 
 " What you done wit' my son? " 
 
 " I don't think I understand you." 
 
 " I t'ink you're going to understand before I get t'rough! 
 Where is he? " 
 
 " Why, really I presume that he's in Minneapolis." 
 
 "You presume!" He looked through her with a con- 
 temptuousness such as she could not have imagined. Only an 
 insane contortion of spelling could portray his lyric whine, his 
 mangled consonants. He clamored, "Presume! Dot's a fine 
 word! I don't want no fine words and I don't want no more 
 lies! I want to know what you know! " 
 
 " See here, Mr. Valborg, you may stop this bullying right 
 now. I'm not one of your farmwomen. I don't know where 
 your son is, and there's no reason why I should know." Her 
 defiance ran out in face of his immense flaxen stolidity. He 
 raised his fist, worked up his anger with the gesture, and 
 sneered: 
 
 " You dirty city women wit* your fine ways and fine dresses! 
 A father come here trying to save his boy from wickedness, 
 and you call him a bully! By God, I don't have to take 
 no thin' off you nor your husband! I ain't one of your hired 
 men. For one time a woman like you is going to hear de trut' 
 about what you are, and no fine city words to it, needer." 
 
 " Really, Mr. Valborg " 
 
 " What you done wit' him? Heh? I'll yoost tell you what 
 you done! He was a good boy, even if he was a damn fool. 
 I want him back on de farm. He don't make enough money 
 tailoring. And I can't get me no hired man! I want to take 
 him back on de farm. And you butt in and fool wit' him and 
 make love wit' him, and get him to run away! " 
 
 " You are lying! It's not true that It's not true, and 
 
 if it were, you would have no right to speak like this." 
 
 " Don't talk foolish. I know. Ain't I heard from a fellow 
 dot live right here in town how you been acting wit' de boy? 
 I know what you done! Walking wit' him in de country! 
 Hiding in de woods wit' him! Yes and I guess you talk about 
 religion in de woods! Sure! Women like you you're worse 
 dan street- walkers! Rich women like you, wit' fine husbands 
 and no decent work to do and me, look at my hands, look 
 
MAIN STREET 401 
 
 how I work, look at those hands! But you, oh God no, you 
 mustn't work, you're too fine to do decent work. You got 
 to play wit 7 young fellows, younger as you are, laughing and 
 rolling around and acting like de animals! You let my son 
 alone, d' you hear? " He was shaking his fist in her face. She 
 could smell the manure and sweat. " It ain't no use talkin' to 
 women like you. Get no trut' out of you. But next time I 
 go by your husband! " 
 
 He was marching into the hall. Carol flung herself on him, 
 her clenching hand on his hayseed-dusty shoulder. " You 
 horrible old man, you've always tried to turn Erik into a slave, 
 to fatten your pocketbook! You've sneered at him, and over- 
 worked him, and probably youVe succeeded in preventing his 
 ever rising above your muck-heap! And now because you can't 
 drag him back, you come here to vent Go tell my hus- 
 band, go tell him, and don't blame me when he kills you, when 
 my husband kills you he will kill you " 
 
 The man grunted, looked at her impassively, said one word, 
 and walked out. 
 
 She heard the word very plainly. 
 
 She did not quite reach the couch. Her knees gave way, 
 she pitched forward. She heard her mind saying, " You 
 haven't fainted. This is ridiculous. You're simply drama- 
 tizing yourself. Get up." But she could not move. When 
 Kennicott arrived she was lying on the couch. His step 
 quickened. " What's happened, Carrie? You haven't got a 
 bit of blood in your face." 
 
 She clutched his arm. " YouVe got to be sweet to me, and 
 kind! I'm going to California mountains, sea. Please don't 
 argue about it, because I'm going." 
 
 Quietly, " All right. We'll go. You and I. Leave the kid 
 here with Aunt Bessie." 
 
 "Now! " 
 
 "Well yes, just as soon as we can get away. Now don't 
 talk any more. Just imagine you've already started." He 
 smoothed her hair, and not till after supper did he continue: 
 "I meant it about California. But I think we better wait 
 three weeks or so, till I get hold of some young fellow released 
 from the medical corps to take my practice. And if people 
 are gossiping, you don't want to give them a chance by running 
 away. Can you stand it and face 'em for three weeks or so? " 
 
 " Yes," she said emptily. 
 
402 MAIN STREET 
 
 IV 
 
 People covertly stared at her on the street. Aunt Bessie 
 tried to catechize her about Erik's disappearance, and it was 
 Kennicott who silenced the woman with a savage, " Say, are 
 you hinting that Carrie had anything to do with that fellow's 
 beating it? Then let me tell you, and you can go right out 
 and tell the whole bloomin' town, that Carrie and I took Val 
 took Erik riding, and he asked me about getting a better job 
 in Minneapolis, and I advised him to go to it. ... 
 Getting much sugar in at the store now? " 
 
 Guy Pollock crossed the street to be pleasant apropos of 
 California and new novels. Vida Sherwin dragged her to the 
 Jolly Seventeen. There, with every one rigidly listening, Maud 
 Dyer shot at Carol, " I hear Erik has left town." 
 
 Carol was amiable. " Yes, so I hear. In fact, he called 
 me up told me he had been offered a lovely job in the city. 
 So sorry he's gone. He would have been valuable if we'd 
 tried to start the dramatic association again. Still, I wouldn't 
 be here for the association myself, because Will is all in from 
 work, and I'm thinking of taking him to California. Juanita 
 you know the Coast so well tell me: would you start in at 
 Los Angeles or San Francisco, and what are the best hotels? " 
 
 The Jolly Seventeen looked disappointed, but the Jolly 
 Seventeen liked to give advice, the Jolly Seventeen liked to 
 mention the expensive hotels at which they had stayed. (A 
 meal counted as a stay.) Before they could question her 
 again Carol escorted in with drum and fife the topic of Raymie 
 Wutherspoon. Vida had news from her husband. He had 
 been gassed in the trenches, had been in a hospital for two 
 weeks, had been promoted to major, was learning French. 
 
 She left Hugh with Aunt Bessie. 
 
 But for Kennicott she would have taken him. She hoped 
 that in some miraculous way yet unrevealed she might find 
 it possible to remain in California. She did not want to see 
 Gopher Prairie again. 
 
 The Smails were to occupy the Kennicott house, and quite 
 the hardest thing to endure in the month of waiting was the 
 series of conferences between Kennicott and Uncle Whittier 
 
MAIN STREET 403 
 
 in regard to heating the garage and having the furnace flues 
 cleaned. 
 
 Did Carol, Kennicott inquired, wish to stop in Minneapolis 
 to buy new clothes? 
 
 "No! I want to get as far away as I can as soon as I can. 
 Let's wait till Los Angeles." 
 
 " Sure, sure! Just as you like. Cheer up! We're going 
 to have a large wide time, and everything '11 be different when 
 we come back." 
 
 VI 
 
 Dusk on a snowy December afternoon. The sleeper which 
 would connect at Kansas City with the California train rolled 
 out of St. Paul with a chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick, chick-a- 
 chick as it crossed the other tracks. It bumped through the 
 factory belt, gained speed. Carol could see nothing but gray 
 fields, which had closed in on her all the way from Gopher 
 Prairie. Ahead was darkness. 
 
 " For an hour, in Minneapolis, I must have been near Erik. 
 He's still there, somewhere. He'll be gone when I come back. 
 I'll never know where he has gone." 
 
 As Kennicott switched on the seat-light she turned drearily 
 to the illustrations in a motion-picture magazine. 
 
CHAPTER XXXIV 
 
 THEY journeyed for three and a half months. They saw the 
 Grand Canyon, the adobe walls of Sante Fe and, in a drive 
 from El Paso into Mexico, their first foreign land. They jogged 
 from San Diego and La Jolla to Los Angeles, Pasadena, River- 
 side, through towns with bell-towered missions and orange- 
 groves; they viewed Monterey and San Francisco and a 
 forest of sequoias. They bathed in the surf and climbed foot- 
 hills and danced, they saw a polo game and the making of 
 motion-pictures, they sent one hundred and seventeen souvenir 
 post-cards to Gopher Prairie, and once, on a dune by a foggy 
 sea when she was walking alone, Carol found an artist, and he 
 looked up at her and said, " Too damned wet to paint ; sit 
 down and talk," and so for ten minutes she lived in a romantic 
 novel. 
 
 Her only struggle was in coaxing Kennicott not to spend 
 all his time with the tourists from the ten thousand other 
 Gopher Prairies. In winter, California is full of people from 
 Iowa and Nebraska, Ohio and Oklahoma, who, having traveled 
 thousands of miles from their familiar villages, hasten to secure 
 an illusion of not having left them. They hunt for people from 
 their own states to stand between them and the shame of naked 
 mountains; they talk steadily, in Pullmans, on hotel porches, 
 at cafeterias and motion-picture shows, about the motors and 
 crops and county politics back home. Kennicott discussed 
 land-prices with them, he went into the merits of the several 
 sorts of motor cars with them, he was intimate with train 
 porters, and he insisted on seeing the Luke Dawsons at their 
 flimsy bungalow in Pasadena, where Luke sat and yearned to 
 go back and make some more money. But Kennicott gave 
 promise of learning to play. He shouted in the pool at the 
 Coronado, and he spoke of (though he did nothing more radical 
 than speak of) buying evening-clothes. Carol was touched 
 by his efforts to enjoy picture galleries, and the dogged way in 
 
 404 
 
MAIN STREET 405 
 
 which he accumulated dates and dimensions when they fol- 
 lowed monkish guides through missions. 
 
 She felt strong. Whenever she was restless she dodged her 
 thoughts by the familiar vagabond fallacy of running away 
 from them, of moving on to a new place, and thus she per- 
 suaded herself that she was tranquil. In March she willingly 
 agreed with Kennicott that it was time to go home. She was 
 longing for Hugh. 
 
 They left Monterey on April first, on a day of high blue 
 skies and poppies and a summer sea. 
 
 As the train struck in among the hills she resolved, "I'm 
 going to love the fine Will Kennicott quality that there is in 
 Gopher Prairie. The nobility of good sense. It will be sweet 
 to see Vida and Guy and the Clarks. And I'm going to see 
 my baby! All the words he'll be able to say now! It's a 
 new start. Everything will be different! " 
 
 Thus on April first, among dappled hills and the bronze of 
 scrub oaks, while Kennicott seesawed on his toes and chuckled, 
 " Wonder what Hugh '11 say when he sees us? " 
 
 Three days later they reached Gopher Prairie in a sleet 
 storm. 
 
 n 
 
 No one knew that they were coming; no one met them; 
 and because of the icy roads, the only conveyance at the sta- 
 tion was the hotel 'bus, which they missed while Kennicott 
 was giving his trunk-check to the station agent the only 
 person to welcome them. Carol waited for him in the station, 
 among huddled German women with shawls and umbrellas, and 
 ragged-bearded farmers in corduroy coats; peasants mute as 
 oxen, in a room thick with the steam of wet coats, the reek 
 of the red-hot stove, the stench of sawdust boxes which served 
 as cuspidors. The afternoon light was as reluctant as a winter 
 dawn. 
 
 " This is a useful market-center, an interesting pioneer post, 
 but it is not a home for me," meditated the stranger Carol. 
 
 Kennicott suggested, " I'd 'phone for a flivver but it'd take 
 quite a while for it to get here. Let's walk." 
 
 They stepped uncomfortably from the safety of the plank 
 platform and, balancing on their toes, taking cautious strides, 
 ventured along the road. The sleety rain was turning to snow. 
 
4 o6 MAIN STREET 
 
 The air was stealthily cold. Beneath an inch of water was a 
 layer of ice, so that as they wavered with their suit-cases they 
 slid and almost fell. The wet snow drenched their gloves; the 
 water underfoot splashed their itching ankles. They scuffled 
 inch by inch for three blocks. In front of Harry Haydock's 
 Kennicott sighed: 
 
 " We better stop in here and 'phone for a machine." 
 
 She followed him like a wet kitten. 
 
 The Haydocks saw them laboring up the slippery concrete 
 walk, up the perilous front steps, and came to the door 
 chanting: 
 
 " Well, well, well, back again, eh? Say, this is fine! Have 
 a fine trip? My, you look like a rose, Carol. How did you 
 like the coast, doc? Well, well, well! Where-all did you 
 go?" 
 
 But as Kennicott began to proclaim the list of places 
 achieved, Harry interrupted with an account of how much 
 he himself had seen, two years ago. When Kennicott boasted, 
 " We went through the mission at Santa Barbara," Harry 
 broke in, "Yeh, that's an interesting old mission. Say, I'll 
 never forget that hotel there, doc. It was swell. Why, the 
 rooms were made just like these old monasteries. Juanita 
 and I went from Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo. You folks 
 go to San Luis Obispo? " 
 
 " No, but " 
 
 "Well you ought to gone to San Luis Obispo. And then 
 we went from there to a ranch, least they called it a ranch " 
 
 Kennicott got in only one considerable narrative, which 
 began: 
 
 " Say, I never knew did you, Harry? that in the Chicago 
 district the Kutz Kar sells as well as the Overland? I never 
 thought much of the Kutz. But I met a gentleman on the 
 train it was when we were pulling out of Albuquerque, and 
 I was sitting on the back platform of the observation car, 
 and this man was next to me and he asked me for a light, 
 and we got to talking, and come to find out, he came from 
 Aurora, and when he found out I came from Minnesota he 
 asked me if I knew Dr. Clemworth of Red Wing, and of course, 
 while I've never met him, I've heard of Clemworth lots of 
 times, and seems he's this man's brother! Quite a coincidence! 
 Well, we got to talking, and we called the porter that was a 
 pretty good porter on that car and we had a couple bottles 
 
MAIN STREET 407 
 
 of ginger ale, and I happened to mention the Kutz Kar, and 
 this man seems he's driven a lot of different kinds of cars 
 he's got a Franklin now and he said that he'd tried the Kutz 
 and liked it first-rate. Well, when we got into a station 
 I don't remember the name of it Carrie, what the deuce 
 was the name of that first stop we made the other side of 
 Albuquerque? well, anyway, I guess we must have stopped 
 there to take on water, and this man and I got out to stretch 
 our legs, and darned if there wasn't a Kutz drawn right up 
 at the depot platform, and he pointed out something I'd never 
 noticed, and I was glad to learn about it: seems that the gear 
 lever in the Kutz is an inch longer " 
 
 Even this chronicle of voyages Harry interrupted, with re- 
 marks on the advantages of the ball-gear-shift. 
 
 Kennicott gave up hope of adequate credit for being a 
 traveled man, and telephoned to a garage for a Ford taxicab, 
 while Juanita kissed Carol and made sure of being the first 
 to tell the latest, which included seven distinct and proven 
 scandals about Mrs. Swiftwaite, and one considerable doubt as 
 to the chastity of Cy Bogart. 
 
 They saw the Ford sedan making its way over the water- 
 lined ice, through the snow-storm, like a tug-boat in a fog. 
 The driver stopped at a corner. The car skidded, it turned 
 about with comic reluctance, crashed into a tree, and stood 
 tilted on a broken wheel. 
 
 The Kennicotts refused Harry Haydock's not too urgent 
 offer to take them home in his car " if I can manage to get 
 it out of the garage terrible day stayed home from the 
 store but if you say so, I'll take a shot at it." Carol gurgled, 
 " No, I think we'd better walk; probably make better time, and 
 I'm just crazy to see my baby." With their suit-cases they 
 waddled on. Their coats were soaked through. 
 
 Carol had forgotten her facile hopes. She looked about 
 with impersonal eyes. But Kennicott, through rain-blurred 
 lashes, caught the glory that was Back Home. 
 
 She noted bare tree-trunks, black branches, the spongy 
 brown earth between patches of decayed snow on the lawns. 
 The vacant lots were full of tall dead weeds. Stripped of 
 summer leaves the houses were hopeless temporary shelters. 
 
 Kennicott chuckled, " By golly, look down there! Jack Elder 
 must have painted his garage. And look! Martin Mahoney 
 has put up a new fence around his chicken yard. Say, that's 
 
4 o8 MAIN STREET 
 
 a good fence, eh? Chicken-tight and dog-tight. That's cer- 
 tainly a dandy fence. Wonder how much it cost a yard? 
 Yes, sir, they been building right along, even in winter. Got 
 more enterprise than these Californians. Pretty good to be 
 home, eh? " 
 
 She noted that all winter long the citizens had been throwing 
 garbage into their back yards, to be cleaned up in spring. The 
 recent thaw had disclosed heaps of ashes, dog-bones, torn 
 bedding, clotted paint-cans, all half covered by the icy pools 
 which filled the hollows of the yards. The refuse had stained 
 the water to vile colors of waste: thin red, sour yellow, streaky 
 brown. 
 
 Kennicott chuckled, " Look over there on Main Street ! 
 They got the feed store all fixed up, and a new sign on it, 
 black and gold. That'll improve the appearance of the block 
 a lot." 
 
 She noted that the few people whom they passed wore their 
 raggedest coats for the evil day. They were scarecrows in a 
 shanty town. . . . " To think," she marveled, " of coming 
 two thousand miles, past mountains and cities, to get off here, 
 and to plan to stay here! What conceivable reason for 
 choosing this particular place? " 
 
 She noted a figure in a rusty coat and a cloth cap. 
 
 Kennicott chuckled, " Look who's coming! It's Sam Clark! 
 Gosh, all rigged out for the weather." 
 
 The two men shook hands a dozen times and, in the 
 Western fashion, bumbled, "Well, well, well, well, you old 
 hell-hound, you old devil, how are you, anyway? You old 
 horse- thief, maybe it ain't good to see you again! " While Sam 
 nodded at her over Kennicott's shoulder, she was embarrassed. 
 
 " Perhaps I should never have gone away. I'm out of 
 practise in lying. I wish they would get it over! Just a 
 block more and my baby! " 
 
 They were home. She brushed past the welcoming Aunt 
 Bessie and knelt by Hugh. As he stammered, " O mummy, 
 mummy, don't go away! Stay with me, mummy! " she cried, 
 "No, I'll never leave you again! " 
 
 He volunteered, " That's daddy." 
 
 " By golly, he knows us just as if we'd never been away! " 
 said Kennicott. " You don't find any of these California kids 
 as bright as he is, at his age! " 
 
 When the trunk came they piled about Hugh the bewhiskered 
 
MAIN STREET 409 
 
 little wooden men fitting one inside another, the miniature junk, 
 and the Oriental drum, from San Francisco Chinatown; the 
 blocks carved by the old Frenchman in San Diego; the lariat 
 from San Antonio. 
 
 " Will you forgive mummy for going away? Will you? " 
 she whispered. 
 
 Absorbed in Hugh, asking a hundred questions about him 
 had he had any colds? did he still dawdle over his oatmeal? 
 what about unfortunate morning incidents? she viewed Aunt 
 Bessie only as a source of information, and was able to ignore 
 her hint, pointed by a coyly shaken finger, " Now that you've 
 had such a fine long trip and spent so much money and all, 
 I hope you're going to settle down and be satisfied and 
 not " 
 
 " Does he like carrots yet? " replied Carol. 
 
 She was cheerful as the snow began to conceal the slatternly 
 yards. She assured herself that the streets of New York and 
 Chicago were as ugly as Gopher Prairie in such weather; she 
 dismissed the thought, " But they do have charming interiors 
 for refuge.' 7 She sang as she energetically looked over Hugh's 
 clothes. 
 
 The afternoon grew old and dark. Aunt Bessie went home. 
 Carol took the baby into her own room. The maid came in 
 complaining, " I can't get no extra milk to make chipped beef 
 for supper." Hugh was sleepy, and he had been spoiled by 
 Aunt Bessie. Even to a returned mother, his whining and 
 his trick of seven times snatching her silver brush were fa- 
 tiguing. As a background, behind the noises of Hugh and the 
 kitchen, the house reeked with a colorless stillness. 
 
 From the window she heard Kennicott greeting the Widow 
 Bogart as he had always done, always, every snowy evening: 
 " Guess this '11 keep up all night." She waited. There they 
 were, the furnace sounds, unalterable, eternal: removing ashes, 
 shoveling coal. 
 
 Yes. She was back home! Nothing had changed. She 
 had never been away. California? Had she seen it? Had she 
 for one minute left this scraping sound of the small shovel in 
 the ash-pit of the furnace? But Kennicott preposterously sup- 
 posed that she had. Never had she been quite so far from 
 going away as now when he believed she had just come back. 
 She felt oozing through the walls the spirit of small houses and 
 righteous people. At that instant she knew that in running 
 
4 io MAIN STREET 
 
 away she had merely hidden her doubts behind the officious 
 stir of travel. 
 
 " Dear God, don't let me begin agonizing again! " she sobbed. 
 Hugh wept with her. 
 
 "Wait for mummy a second! " She hastened down to the 
 cellar, to Kennicott. 
 
 He was standing before the furnace. However inadequate 
 the rest of the house, he had seen to it that the fundamental 
 cellar should be large and clean, the square pillars whitewashed, 
 and the bins for coal and potatoes and trunks convenient. A 
 glow from the drafts fell on the smooth gray cement floor at 
 his feet. He was whistling tenderly, staring at the furnace 
 with eyes which saw the black-domed monster as a symbol 
 of home and of the beloved routine to which he had returned 
 his gipsying decently accomplished, his duty of viewing 
 " sights " and " curios " performed with thoroughness. Un- 
 conscious of her, he stooped and peered in at the blue flames 
 among the coals. He closed the door briskly, and made a 
 whirling gesture with his right hand, out of pure bliss. 
 
 He saw her. "Why, hello, old lady! Pretty darn good to 
 be back, eh? " 
 
 " Yes," she lied, while she quaked, " Not now. I can't face 
 the job of explaining now. He's been so good. He trusts 
 me. And I'm going to break his heart! " 
 
 She smiled at him. She tidied his sacred cellar by throwing 
 an empty bluing bottle into the trash bin. She mourned, " It's 
 only the baby that holds me. If Hugh died " She fled up- 
 stairs in panic and made sure that nothing had happened to 
 Hugh in these four minutes. 
 
 She saw a pencil-mark on a window-sill. She had made it 
 on a September day when she had been planning a picnic for 
 Fern Mullins and Erik. Fern and she had been hysterical with 
 nonsense, had invented mad parties for all the coming winter. 
 She glanced across the alley at the room which Fern had oc- 
 cupied. A rag of a gray curtain masked the still window. 
 
 She tried to think of some one to whom she wanted to 
 telephone. There was no one. 
 
 The Sam Clarks called that evening and encouraged her to 
 describe the missions. A dozen times they told her how glad 
 they were to have her back. 
 
 " It is good to be wanted," she thought. " It will drug me. 
 But Oh, is all life, always, an unresolved But? " 
 
CHAPTER XXXV 
 
 SHE tried to be content, which was a contradiction in terms. 
 She fanatically cleaned house all April. She knitted a sweater 
 for Hugh. She was diligent at Red Cross work. She was 
 silent when Vida raved that though America hated war as much 
 as ever, we must invade Germany and wipe out every man, 
 because it was now proven that there was no soldier in the 
 German army who was not crucifying prisoners and cutting off 
 babies' hands. 
 
 Carol was volunteer nurse when Mrs. Champ Perry suddenly 
 died of pneumonia. 
 
 In her funeral procession were the eleven people left out 
 of the Grand Army and the Territorial Pioneers, old men and 
 women, very old and weak, who a few decades ago had been 
 boys and girls of the frontier, riding broncos through the rank 
 windy grass of this prairie. They hobbled behind a band made 
 up of business men and high-school boys, who straggled along 
 without uniforms or ranks or leader, trying to play Chopin's 
 Funeral March a shabby group of neighbors with grave eyes, 
 stumbling through the slush under a solemnity of faltering 
 music. 
 
 Champ was broken. His rheumatism was worse. The rooms 
 over the store were silent. He could not do his work as buyer 
 at the elevator. Farmers coming in with sled-loads of wheat 
 complained that Champ could not read the scale, that he 
 seemed always to be watching some one back in the darkness 
 of the bins. He was seen slipping through alleys, talking 
 to himself, trying to avoid observation, creeping at last to the 
 cemetery. Once Carol followed him and found the coarse, 
 tobacco-stained, unimaginative old man lying on the snow of 
 the grave, his thick arms spread out across the raw mound 
 as if to protect her from the cold, her whom he had carefully 
 covered up every night for sixty years, who was alone there 
 now, uncared for. 
 
 The elevator company, Ezra Stowbody president, let him go. 
 
 411 
 
412 MAIN STREET 
 
 The company, Ezra explained to Carol, had no funds for 
 giving pensions. 
 
 She tried to have him appointed to the postmastership, which, 
 since all the work was done by assistants, was the one sinecure 
 in town, the one reward for political purity. But it proved 
 that Mr. Bert Tybee, the former bartender, desired the post- 
 mastership. 
 
 At her solicitation Lyman Cass gave Champ a warm berth 
 as night watchman. Small boys played a good many tricks 
 on Champ when he fell asleep at the mill. 
 
 She had vicarious happiness in the return of Major Raymond 
 Wutherspoon. He was well, but still weak from having been 
 gassed; he had been discharged and he came home as the 
 first of the war veterans. It was rumored that he surprised 
 Vida by coming unannounced, that Vida fainted when she saw 
 him, and for a night and day would not share him with the 
 town. When Carol saw them Vida was hazy about everything 
 except Raymie, and never went so far from him that she 
 could not slip her hand under his. Without understanding 
 why, Carol was troubled by this intensity. And Raymie 
 surely this was not Raymie, but a sterner brother of his, this 
 man with the tight blouse, the shoulder emblems, the trim legs 
 in boots. His face seemed different, his lips more tight. He 
 was not Raymie; he was Major Wutherspoon; and Kennicott 
 and Carol were grateful when he divulged that Paris wasn't half 
 as pretty as Minneapolis, that all of the American soldiers had 
 been distinguished by their morality when on leave. Kennicott 
 was respectful as he inquired whether the Germans had good 
 aeroplanes, and what a salient was, and a cootie, and Going 
 West. 
 
 In a week Major Wutherspoon was made full manager of the 
 Bon Ton. Harry Haydock was going to devote himself to the 
 half-dozen branch stores which he was establishing at cross- 
 roads hamlets. Harry would be the town's rich man in the 
 coming generation, and Major Wutherspoon would rise with 
 him, and Vida was jubilant, though she was regretful at having 
 to give up most of her Red Cross work. Ray still needed 
 nursing, she explained. 
 
 When Carol saw him with his uniform oft , in a pepper-and- 
 
MAIN STREET 413 
 
 salt suit and a new gray felt hat, she was disappointed. He 
 was not Major Wutherspoon; he was Raymie. 
 
 For a month small boys followed him down the street, and 
 everybody called him Major, but that was presently shortened 
 to Maje, and the small boys did not look up from their marbles 
 as he went by. 
 
 in 
 
 The town was booming, as a result of the war price of wheat. 
 
 The wheat money did not remain in the pockets of the 
 farmers; the towns existed to take care of all that. Iowa 
 farmers were selling their land at four hundred dollars an acre 
 and coming into Minnesota. But whoever bought or sold 
 or mortgaged, the townsmen invited themselves to the feast 
 millers, real-estate men, lawyers, merchants, and Dr. Will 
 Kennicott. They bought land at a hundred and fifty, sold it 
 next day at a hundred and seventy, and bought again. In 
 three months Kennicott made seven thousand dollars, which 
 was rather more than four times as much as society paid him 
 for healing the sick. 
 
 In early summer began a "campaign of boosting." The- 
 Commercial Club decided that Gopher Prairie was not only a 
 wheat-center but also the perfect site for factories, summer 
 cottages, and state institutions. In charge of the compaign was 
 Mr. James Blausser, who had recently come to town to 
 speculate in land. Mr. Blausser was known as a Hustler. He 
 liked to be called Honest Jim. He was a bulky, gauche, noisy, 
 humorous man, with narrow eyes, a rustic complexion, large 
 red hands, and brilliant clothes. He was attentive to all 
 women. He was the first man in town who had not been 
 sensitive enough to feel Carol's aloofness. He put his arm 
 about her shoulder while he condescended to Kennicott, " Nice 
 HI wifey, I'll say, doc," and when she answered, not warmly, 
 " Thank you very much for the imprimatur" he blew on her 
 neck, and did not know that he had been insulted. 
 
 He was a layer-on of hands. He never came to the house 
 without trying to paw her. He touched her arm, let his fist 
 brush her side. She hated the man, and she was afraid of 
 him. She wondered if he had heard of Erik, and was taking 
 advantage. She spoke ill of him at home and in public places, 
 but Kennicott and the other powers insisted, " Maybe he is 
 
4H MAIN STREET 
 
 kind of a roughneck, but you got to hand it to him; he's got 
 more git-up-and-git than any fellow that ever hit this burg. 
 And he's pretty cute, too. Hear what he said to old Ezra? 
 Chucked him in the ribs and said, ' Say, boy, what do you 
 want to go to Denver for? Wait '11 I get time and I'll move 
 the mountains here. Any mountain will be tickled to death 
 to locate here once we get the White Way in! ' " 
 
 The town welcomed Mr. Blausser as fully as Carol snubbed 
 him. He was the guest of honor at the Commercial Club 
 Banquet at the Minniemashie House, an occasion for menus 
 printed in gold (but injudiciously proof-read), for free cigars, 
 soft damp slabs of Lake Superior whitefish served as fillet of 
 sole, drenched cigar-ashes gradually filling the saucers of coffee 
 cups, and oratorical references to Pep, Punch, Go, Vigor, Enter- 
 prise, Red Blood, He-Men, Fair Women, God's Country, James 
 J. Hill, the Blue Sky, the Green Fields, the Bountiful Harvest, 
 Increasing Population, Fair Return on Investments, Alien 
 Agitators Who Threaten the Security of Our Institutions, the 
 Hearthstone the Foundation of the State, Senator Knute 
 Nelson, One Hundred Per Cent. Americanism, and Pointing 
 with Pride. 
 
 Harry Haydock, as chairman, introduced Honest Jim 
 Blausser. " And I am proud to say, my fellow citizens, that 
 in his brief stay here Mr. Blausser has become my warm 
 personal friend as well as my fellow booster, and I advise you 
 all to very carefully attend to the hints of a man who knows 
 how to achieve." 
 
 Mr. Blausser reared up like an elephant with a camel's neck 
 red faced, red eyed, heavy fisted, slightly belching a born 
 leader, divinely intended to be a congressman but deflected to 
 the more lucrative honors of real-estate. He smiled on his 
 warm personal friends and fellow boosters, and boomed: 
 
 " I certainly was astonished in the streets of our lovely little 
 city, the other day. I met the meanest kind of critter that 
 God ever made meaner than the horned toad or the Texas 
 lallapaluza! (Laughter.) And do you know what the animile 
 was? He was a knocker! (Laughter and applause.) 
 
 " I want to tell you good people, and it's just as sure as 
 God made little apples, the thing that distinguishes our Amer- 
 ican commonwealth from the pikers and tin-horns in other 
 countries is our Punch. You take a genuwine, honest-to-God 
 homo Americanibus and there ain't anything he's afraid to 
 
MAIN STREET 415 
 
 tackle. Snap and speed are his middle name! He'll put her 
 across if he has to ride from hell to breakfast, and believe me, 
 I'm mighty good and sorry for the boob that's so unlucky as to 
 get in his way, because that poor slob is going to wonder where 
 he was at when Old Mr. Cyclone hit town! (Laughter.) 
 
 " Now, frien's, there's some folks so yellow and small and 
 so few in the pod that they go to work and claim that those 
 of us that have the big vision are off our trolleys. They say 
 we can't make Gopher Prairie, God bless her! just as big as 
 Minneapolis or St. Paul or Duluth. But lemme tell you right 
 here and now that there ain't a town under the blue canopy 
 of heaven that's got a better chance to take a running jump 
 and go scooting right up into the two-hundred-thousand class 
 than little old G. P.! And if there's anybody that's got such 
 cold kismets that he's afraid to tag after Jim Blausser on the 
 Big Going Up, then we don't want him here! Way I figger it, 
 you folks are just patriotic enough so that you ain't going to 
 stand for any guy sneering and knocking his own town, no 
 matter how much of a smart Aleck he is and just on the side 
 I want to add that this Farmers' Nonpartisan League and the 
 whole bunch of socialists are right in the same category, or, 
 as the fellow says, in the same scategory, meaning This Way 
 Out, Exit, Beat It While the Going's Good, This Means You, 
 for all knockers of prosperity and the rights of property! 
 
 " Fellow citizens, there's a lot of folks, even right here in this 
 fair state, fairest and richest of all the glorious union, that 
 stand up on their hind legs and claim that the East and Europe 
 put it all over the golden Northwestland. Now let me nail 
 that lie right here and now. ' Ah-ha/ says they, ' so Jim 
 Blausser is claiming that Gopher Prairie is as good a place 
 to live in as London and Rome and and all the rest of the Big 
 Burgs, is he? How does the poor fish know? ' says they. Well, 
 I'll tell you how I know! I've seen 'em! I've done Europe 
 from soup to nuts! They can't spring that stuff on Jim 
 Blausser and get away with it! And let me tell you that the 
 only live thing in Europe is our boys that are fighting there 
 now! London I spent three days, sixteen straight hours a 
 day, giving London the once-over, and let me tell you that it's 
 nothing but a bunch of fog and out-of-date buildings that no 
 live American burg would stand for one minute. You may 
 not believe it, but there ain't one first-class skyscraper in the 
 whole works. And the same thing goes for that crowd of crabs 
 
416 MAIN STREET 
 
 and snobs Down East, and next time you hear some zob 
 from Yahooville-on-the-Hudson chewing the rag and bulling 
 and trying to get your goat, you tell him that no two-fisted 
 enterprising Westerner would have New York for a gift! 
 
 " Now the point of this is: I'm not only insisting that Gopher 
 Prairie is going to be Minnesota's pride, the brightest ray in the 
 glory of the North Star State, but also and furthermore that 
 it is right now, and still more shall be, as good a place to live 
 in, and love in, and bring up the Little Ones in, and it's got 
 as much refinement and culture, as any burg on the whole 
 bloomin' expanse of God's Green Footstool, and that goes, get 
 me, that goes! " 
 
 Half an hour later Chairman Haydock moved a vote of 
 thanks to Mr. Blausser. 
 
 The boosters' campaign was on. 
 
 The town sought that efficient and modern variety of fame 
 which is known as " publicity." The band was reorganized, 
 and provided by the Commercial Club with uniforms of purple 
 and gold. The amateur baseball-team hired a semi-professional 
 pitcher from Des Moines, and made a schedule of games with 
 every town for fifty miles about. The citizens accompanied 
 it as " rooters," in a special car, with banners lettered " Watch 
 Gopher Prairie Grow," and with the band playing " Smile, 
 Smile, Smile." Whether the team won or lost the Dauntless 
 loyally shrieked, "Boost, Boys, and Boost Together Put 
 Gopher Prairie on the Map Brilliant Record of Our Matchless 
 Team." 
 
 Then, glory of glories, the town put in a White Way. White 
 Ways were in fashion in the Middlewest. They were composed 
 of ornamented posts with clusters of high-powered electric 
 lights along two or three blocks on Main Street. The Dauntless 
 confessed: "White Way Is Installed Town Lit Up Like 
 Broadway Speech by Hon. James Blausser Come On You 
 Twin Cities Our Hat Is In the Ring." 
 
 The Commercial Club issued a booklet prepared by a great 
 and expensive literary person from a Minneapolis advertising 
 agency, a red-headed young man who smoked cigarettes in a 
 long amber holder. Carol read the booklet with a certain 
 wonder. She learned that Plover and Minniemashie Lakes 
 were world-famed for their beauteous wooded shores and gamey 
 pike and bass not to be equalled elsewhere in the entire coun- 
 try; that the residences of Gopher Prairie were models of 
 
MAIN STREET 417 
 
 dignity, comfort, and culture, with lawns and gardens known 
 far and wide; that the Gopher Prairie schools and public 
 library, in its neat and commodious building, were celebrated 
 throughout the state; that the Gopher Prairie mills made the 
 best flour in the country; that the surrounding farm lands were 
 renowned, where'er men ate bread and butter, for their in- 
 comparable No. i Hard Wheat and Holstein-Friesian cattle; 
 and that the stores in Gopher Prairie compared favorably with 
 Minneapolis and Chicago in their abundance of luxuries and 
 necessities and the ever-courteous attention of the skilled 
 clerks. She learned, in brief, that this was the one Logical 
 Location for factories and wholesale houses. 
 
 " There's where I want to go; to that model town Gopher 
 Prairie," said Carol. 
 
 Kennicott was triumphant when the Commercial Club did 
 capture one small shy factory which planned to make wooden 
 automobile-wheels, but when Carol saw the promoter she could 
 not feel that his coming much mattered and a year after, 
 when he failed, she could not be very sorrowful. 
 
 Retired farmers were moving into town. The price of lots 
 had increased a third. But Carol could discover no more 
 pictures nor interesting food nor gracious voices nor amusing 
 conversation nor questing minds. She could, she asserted, 
 endure a shabby but modest town; the town shabby and 
 egomaniac she could not endure. She could nurse Champ 
 Perry, and warm to the neighborliness of Sam Clark, but she 
 could not sit applauding Honest Jim Blausser. Kennicott had 
 begged her, in courtship days, to convert the town to beauty. 
 If it was now as beautiful as Mr. Blausser and the Dauntless 
 said, then her work was over, and she could go. 
 
CHAPTER XXXVI 
 
 KENNICOTT was not so inhumanly patient that he could con- 
 tinue to forgive Carol's heresies, to woo her as he had on the 
 venture to California. She tried to be inconspicuous, but she 
 was betrayed by her failure to glow over the boosting. 
 Kennicott believed in it; demanded that she say patriotic 
 things about the White Way and the new factory. He snorted, 
 " By golly, I've done all I could, and now I expect you to 
 play the game. Here you been complaining for years about 
 us being so poky, and now when Blausser comes along and does 
 stir up excitement and beautify the town like youVe always 
 wanted somebody to, why, you say he's a roughneck, and you 
 won't jump on the band-wagon." 
 
 Once, when Kennicott announced at noon-dinner, " What do 
 you know about this! They say there's a chance we may 
 get another factory cream-separator works! " he added, " You 
 might try to look interested, even if you ain't! " The baby 
 was frightened by the Jovian roar; ran wailing to hide his 
 face in Carol's lap; and Kennicott had to make himself humble 
 and court both mother and child. The dim injustice of not 
 being understood even by his son left him irritable. He felt 
 injured. 
 
 An event which did not directly touch them brought down 
 his wrath. 
 
 In the early autumn, news came from Wakamin that the 
 sheriff had forbidden an organizer for the National Non- 
 partisan League to speak anywhere in the county. The or- 
 ganizer had defied the sheriff, and announced that in a few 
 days he would address a farmers' political meeting. That 
 night, the news ran, a mob of a hundred business men led by 
 the sheriff the tame village street and the smug village faces 
 ruddled by the light of bobbing lanterns, the mob flowing be- 
 tween the squatty rows of shops had taken the organizer 
 from his hotel, ridden him on a fence-rail, put him on a 
 freight train, and warned him not to return. 
 
 418 
 
MAIN STREET 419 
 
 The story was threshed out in Dave Dyer's drug store, with 
 Sam Clark, Kennicott, and Carol present. 
 
 " That's the way to treat those fellows only they ought 
 to have lynched him! " declared Sam, and Kennicott and Dave 
 Dyer joined in a proud " You bet! " 
 
 Carol walked out hastily, Kennicott observing her. 
 
 Through supper-time she knew that he was bubbling and 
 would soon boil over. When the baby was abed, and they sat 
 composedly in canvas chairs on the porch, he experimented, 
 " I had a hunch you thought Sam was kind of hard on that 
 fellow they kicked out of Wakamin." 
 
 " Wasn't Sam rather needlessly heroic? " 
 
 " All these organizers, yes, and a whole lot of the German 
 and Squarehead farmers themselves, they're seditious as the 
 devil disloyal, non-patriotic, pro-German pacifists, that's 
 what they are! " 
 
 " Did this organizer say anything pro-German? " 
 
 " Not on your life! They didn't give him a chance! " His 
 laugh was stagey. 
 
 " So the whole thing was illegal and led by the sheriff! 
 Precisely how do you expect these aliens to obey your law if 
 the officer of the law teaches them to break it? Is it a new 
 kind of logic? " 
 
 " Maybe it wasn't exactly regular, but what's the odds? 
 They knew this fellow would try to stir up trouble. When- 
 ever it comes right down to a question of defending American- 
 ism and our constitutional rights, it's justifiable to set aside 
 ordinary procedure." 
 
 " What editorial did he get that from? " she wondered, as 
 she protested, " See here, my beloved, why can't you Tories 
 declare war honestly? You don't oppose this organizer be- 
 cause you think he's seditious but because you're afraid that 
 the farmers he is organizing will deprive you townsmen of the 
 money you make out of mortgages and wheat and shops. 
 Of course, since we're at war with Germany, anything that any 
 one of us doesn't like is l pro-German,' whether it's business 
 competition or bad music. If we were fighting England, 
 you'd call the radicals * pro-English.' When this war is over, 
 I suppose you'll be calling them ' red anarchists.' What an 
 eternal art it is such a glittery delightful art finding hard 
 names for our opponents! How we do sanctify our efforts to 
 keep them from getting the holy dollars we want for ourselves \ 
 
420 MAIN STREET 
 
 The churches have always done it, and the political orators 
 and I suppose I do it when I call Mrs. Bogart a ' Puritan ' and 
 Mr. Stowbody a * capitalist.' But you business men are going 
 to beat all the rest of us at it, with your simple-hearted, 
 energetic, pompous " 
 
 She got so far only because Kennicott was slow in shaking 
 off respect for her. Now he bayed: 
 
 " That'll be about all from you! Fve stood for your sneer- 
 ing at this town, and saying how ugly and dull it is. I've stood 
 for your refusing to appreciate good fellows like Sam. I've 
 even stood for your ridiculing our Watch Gopher Prairie Grow 
 campaign. But one thing I'm not going to stand: I'm not 
 going to stand my own wife being seditious. You can camou- 
 flage all you want to, but you know darn well that these 
 radicals, as you call 'em, are opposed to the war, and let me 
 tell you right here and now, and you and all these long-haired 
 men and short-haired women can beef all you want to, but 
 we're going to take these fellows, and if they ain't patriotic, 
 we're going to make them be patriotic. And Lord knows 
 I never thought I'd have to say this to my own wife but if 
 you go defending these fellows, then the same thing applies to 
 you! Next thing, I suppose you'll be yapping about free 
 speech. Free speech! There's too much free speech and free 
 gas and free beer and free love and all the rest of your damned 
 mouthy freedom, and if I had my way I'd make you folks live 
 up to the established rules of decency even if I had to take 
 you " 
 
 "Will! " She was not timorous now. "Am I pro-German 
 if I fail to throb to Honest Jim Blausser, too? Let's have my 
 whole duty as a wife! " 
 
 He was grumbling, " The whole thing's right in line with 
 the criticism you've always been making. Might have known 
 you'd oppose any decent constructive work for the town or 
 for " 
 
 " You're right. All I've done has been in line. I don't 
 belong to Gopher Prairie. That isn't meant as a con- 
 demnation of Gopher Prairie, and it may be a condemnation 
 of me. All right! I don't care! I don't belong here, and 
 I'm going. I'm not asking permission any more. I'm simply 
 going." 
 
 He grunted. " Do you mind telling me, if it isn't too much 
 trouble, how long you're going for? " 
 
MAIN STREET 421 
 
 "I don't know. Perhaps for a year. Perhaps for a life- 
 time." 
 
 " I see. Well, of course, I'll be tickled to death to sell out 
 my practise and go anywhere you say. Would you like to have 
 me go with you to Paris and study art, maybe, and wear vel- 
 veteen pants and a woman's bonnet, and live on spaghetti? " 
 
 "No, I think we can save you that trouble. You don't 
 quite understand. I am going I really am and alone! I've 
 got to find out what my work is " 
 
 "Work? Work? Sure! That's the whole trouble with 
 you! You haven't got enough work to do. If you had five 
 kids and no hired girl, and had to help with the chores and 
 separate the cream, like these farmers' wives, then you wouldn't 
 be so discontented." 
 
 "I know. That's what most men and women like you 
 would say. That's how they would explain all I am and all 
 I want. And I shouldn't argue with them. These business 
 men, from their crushing labors of sitting in an office seven 
 hours a day, would calmly recommend that I have a dozen 
 children. As it happens, I've done that sort of thing. There've 
 been a good many times when we hadn't a maid, and I did 
 all the housework, and cared for Hugh, and went to Red Cross, 
 and did it all very efficiently. I'm a good cook and a good 
 sweeper, and you don't dare say I'm not! " 
 
 " N-no, you're " 
 
 " But was I more happy when I was drudging? I was not. 
 I was just bedraggled and unhappy. It's work but not my 
 work. I could run an office or a library, or nurse and teach 
 children. But solitary dish-washing isn't enough to satisfy me 
 or many other women. We're going to chuck it. We're 
 going to wash 'em by machinery, and come out and play with 
 you men in the offices and clubs and politics you've cleverly 
 kept for yourselves! Oh, we're hopeless, we dissatisfied 
 women! Then why do you want to have us about the place, 
 to fret you? So it's for your sake that I'm going! " 
 
 " Of course a little thing like Hugh makes no difference! " 
 
 " Yes, all the difference. That's why I'm going to take him 
 with me." 
 
 " Suppose I refuse? " 
 
 " You won't! " 
 
 Forlornly, " Uh Carrie, what the devil is it you want, 
 
 anyway? " 
 
422 MAIN STREET 
 
 " Oh, conversation! No, it's much more than that. I think 
 it's a greatness of life a refusal to be content with even the 
 healthiest mud." 
 
 " Don't you know that nobody ever solved a problem by 
 running away from it? " 
 
 " Perhaps. Only I choose to make my own definition of 
 
 ' running away.' I don't call Do you realize how big a 
 
 world there is beyond this Gopher Prairie where you'd keep 
 me all my life? It may be that some day I'll come back, but 
 not till I can bring something more than I have now. And 
 even if I am cowardly and run away all right, call it cowardly, 
 call me anything you want to! I've been ruled too long by 
 fear of being called things. I'm going away to be quiet and 
 think. I'm I'm going! I have a right to my own life." 
 
 " So have I to mine! " 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 " I have a right to my life and you're it, you're my life! 
 You've made yourself so. I'm damned if I'll agree to all your 
 freak notions, but I will say I've got to depend on you. Never 
 thought of that complication, did you, in this l off to Bohemia, 
 and express yourself, and free love, and live your own life ' 
 stuff! " 
 
 " You have a right to me if you can keep me. Can you? " 
 
 He moved uneasily. 
 
 n 
 
 For a month they discussed it. They hurt each other very 
 much, and sometimes they were close to weeping, and invariably 
 he used banal phrases about her duties and she used phrases 
 quite as banal about freedom, and through it all, her discovery 
 that she really could get away from Main Street was as sweet 
 as the discovery of love. Kennicott never consented definitely. 
 At most he agreed to a public theory that she was " going to 
 take a short trip and see what the East was like in war- 
 time." 
 
 She set out for Washington in October just before the 
 war ended. 
 
 She had determined on Washington because it was less in- 
 timidating than the obvious New York, because she hoped to 
 find streets in which Hugh could play, and because in the stress 
 of war-work, with its demand for thousands of temporary 
 clerks, she could be initiated into the world of offices. 
 
MAIN STREET 423 
 
 Hugh was to go with her, despite the wails and rather ex- 
 tensive comments of Aunt Bessie. 
 
 She wondered if she might not encounter Erik in the East, 
 but it was a chance thought, soon forgotten. 
 
 ni 
 
 The last thing she saw on the station platform was Kenni- 
 cott, faithfully waving his hand, his face so full of uncompre- 
 hending loneliness that he could not smile but only twitch up 
 his lips. She waved to him as long as she could, and when 
 he was lost she wanted to leap from the vestibule and run 
 back to him. She thought of a hundred tendernesses she had 
 neglected. 
 
 She had her freedom, and it was empty. The moment was 
 not the highest of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, 
 which was altogether excellent, for instead of slipping down- 
 ward she began to climb. 
 
 She sighed, " I couldn't do this if it weren't for Will's kind- 
 ness, his giving me money." But a second after: " I wonder 
 how many women would always stay home if they had the 
 money? " 
 
 Hugh complained, "Notice me, mummy! " He was beside 
 her on the red plush seat of the day-coach; a boy of three 
 and a half. " I'm tired of playing train. Let's play something 
 else. Let's go see Auntie Bogart." 
 
 " Oh, no! Do you really like Mrs. Bogart? " 
 
 " Yes. She gives me cookies and she tells me about the 
 Dear Lord. You never tell me about the Dear Lord. Why 
 don't you tell me about the Dear Lord? Auntie Bogart says 
 I'm going to be a preacher. Can I be a preacher? Can 
 I preach about the Dear Lord? " 
 
 " Oh, please wait till my generation has stopped rebelling 
 before yours starts in! " 
 
 " What's a generation? " 
 
 " It's a ray in the illumination of the spirit." 
 
 " That's foolish." He was a serious and literal person, and 
 rather humorless. She kissed his frown, and marveled: 
 
 " I am running away from my husband, after liking a 
 Swedish ne'er-do-well and expressing immoral opinions, just 
 as in a romantic story. And my own son reproves me because 
 I haven't given him religious instruction. But the story 
 
424 MAIN STREET 
 
 doesn't go right. I'm neither groaning nor being dramatically 
 saved. I keep on running away, and I enjoy it. I'm mad 
 with joy over it. Gopher Prairie is lost back there in the 
 dust and stubble, and I look forward " 
 
 She continued it to Hugh: " Darling, do you know what 
 mother and you are going to find beyond the blue horizon 
 rim? " 
 
 " What? " flatly. 
 
 " We're going to find elephants with golden howdahs from 
 which peep young maharanees with necklaces of rubies, and a 
 dawn sea colored like the breast of a dove, and a white and 
 green house filled with books and silver tea-sets." 
 
 " And cookies? " 
 
 " Cookies? Oh, most decidedly cookies. We've had enough 
 of bread and porridge. We'd get sick on too many cookies, 
 but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all." 
 
 " That's foolish." 
 
 " It is, O male Kennicott! " 
 
 " Huh! " said Kennicott II, and went to sleep on her 
 shoulder. 
 
 IV 
 
 The theory of the Dauntless regarding Carol's absence: 
 
 Mrs. Will Kennicott and son Hugh left on No. 24 on Saturday 
 last for a stay of some months in Minneapolis, Chicago, New 
 York, and Washington. Mrs. Kennicott confided to Ye Scribe 
 that she will be connected with one of the multifarious war activities 
 now centering in the Nation's Capital for a brief period before 
 returning. Her countless friends who appreciate her splendid labors 
 with the local Red Cross realize how valuable she will be to any 
 war board with which she chooses to become connected. Gopher 
 Prairie thus adds another shining star to its service flag, and 
 without wishing to knock any neighboring communities, we would 
 like to know any town of anywheres near our size in the state 
 that has such a sterling war record. Another reason why you'd 
 better Watch Gopher Prairie Grow. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. David Dyer, Mrs. Dyer's sister, Mrs. Jennie Day- 
 born of Jackrabbit, and Dr. Will Kennicott drove to Minniemashie 
 on Tuesday for a delightful picnic. 
 
CHAPTER XXXVII 
 
 SHE found employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. 
 Though the armistice with Germany was signed a few weeks 
 after her coming to Washington, the work of the bureau con- 
 tinued. She filed correspondence all day; then she dictated 
 answers to letters of inquiry. It was an endurance of monot- 
 onous details, yet she asserted that she had found " real work." 
 
 Disillusions she did have. She discovered that in the after- 
 noon, office routine stretches to the grave. She discovered that 
 an office is as full of cliques and scandals as a Gopher Prairie. 
 She discovered that most of the women in the government 
 bureaus lived unhealthfully, dining on snatches in their 
 crammed apartments. But she also discovered that business 
 women may have friendships and enmities as frankly as men, 
 and may revel in a bliss which no housewife attains a free 
 Sunday. It did not appear that the Great World needed her 
 inspiration, but she felt that her letters, her contact with 
 the anxieties of men and women all over the country, were 
 a part of vast affairs, not confined to Main Street and a kitchen, 
 but linked with Paris, Bangkok, Madrid. 
 
 She perceived that she could do office work without losing 
 any of the putative feminine virtue of domesticity; that cook- 
 ing and cleaning, when divested of the fussing of an Aunt 
 Bessie, take but a tenth of the time which, in a Gopher 
 Prairie, it is but decent to devote to them. 
 
 Not to have to apologize for her thoughts to the Jolly Seven- 
 teen, not to have to report to Kennicott at the end of the 
 day all that she had done or might do, was a relief which made 
 up for the office weariness. She felt that she was no longer 
 one-half of a marriage but the whole of a human being. 
 
 n 
 
 Washington gave her all the graciousness in which she had 
 had faith: white columns seen across leafy parks, spacious 
 
 425 
 
426 MAIN STREET 
 
 avenues, twisty alleys. Daily she passed a dark square house 
 with a hint of magnolias and a courtyard behind it, and a tall 
 curtained second-story window through which a woman was 
 always peering. The woman was mystery, romance, a story 
 which told itself differently every day; now she was a mur- 
 deress, now the neglected wife of an ambassador. It was mys- 
 tery which Carol had most lacked in Gopher Prairie, where 
 every house was open to view, where every person was but 
 too easy to meet, where there were no secret gates opening 
 upon moors over which one might walk by moss-deadened 
 paths to strange high adventures in an ancient garden. 
 
 As she flitted up Sixteenth Street after a Kreisler recital, 
 given late in the afternoon for the government clerks, as the 
 lamps kindled in spheres of soft fire, as the breeze flowed into 
 the street, fresh as prairie winds and kindlier, as she glanced 
 up the elm alley of Massachusetts Avenue, as she was rested 
 by the integrity of the Scottish Rite Temple, she loved the 
 city as she loved no one save Hugh. She encountered negro 
 shanties turned into studios, with orange curtains and pots of 
 mignonette; marble houses on New Hampshire Avenue, with 
 butlers and limousines; and men who looked like fictional ex- 
 plorers and aviators. Her days were swift, and she knew that 
 in her folly of running away she had found the courage to 
 be wise. 
 
 She had a dispiriting first month of hunting lodgings in the 
 crowded city. She had to roost in a hall-room in a moldy 
 mansion conducted by an indignant decayed gentlewoman, 
 and leave Hugh to the care of a doubtful nurse. But later 
 she made a home. 
 
 in 
 
 Her first acquaintances were the members of the Tincomb 
 Methodist Church, a vast red-brick tabernacle. Vida Sherwin 
 had given her a letter to an earnest woman with eye-glasses, 
 plaid silk waist, and a belief in Bible Classes, who introduced 
 her to the Pastor and the Nicer Members of Tincomb. Carol 
 recognized in Washington as she had in California a trans- 
 planted and guarded Main Street. Two-thirds of the church- 
 members had come from Gopher Prairies. The church was 
 their society and their standard ; they went to Sunday service, 
 Sunday School, Christian Endeavor, missionary lectures, church 
 
MAIN STREET 427 
 
 suppers, precisely as they had at home; they agreed that am- 
 bassadors and flippant newspapermen and infidel scientists of 
 the bureaus were equally wicked and to be avoided; and by 
 cleaving to Tincomb Church they kept their ideals from all 
 contamination. 
 
 They welcomed Carol, asked about her husband, gave her 
 advice regarding colic in babies, passed her the gingerbread 
 and scalloped potatoes at church suppers, and in general made 
 her very unhappy and lonely, so that she wondered if she 
 might not enlist in the militant suffrage organization and be 
 allowed to go to jail. 
 
 Always she was to perceive in Washington (as doubtless she 
 would have perceived in New York or London) a thick streak 
 of Main Street. The cautious dullness of a Gopher Prairie 
 appeared in boarding-houses where ladylike bureau-clerks gos- 
 siped to polite young army officers about the movies; a thou- 
 sand Sam Clarks and a few Widow Bogarts were to be iden- 
 tified in the Sunday motor procession, in theater parties, and 
 at the dinners of State Societies, to which the emigres from 
 Texas or Michigan surged that they might confirm themselves 
 in the faith that their several Gopher Prairies were notoriously 
 " a whole lot peppier and chummier than this stuck-up East." 
 
 But she found a Washington which did not cleave to Main 
 Street. 
 
 Guy Pollock wrote to a cousin, a temporary army captain, a 
 confiding and buoyant lad who took Carol to tea-dances, and 
 laughed, as she had always wanted some one to laugh, about 
 nothing in particular. The captain introduced her to the secre- 
 tary of a congressman, a cynical young widow with many ac- 
 quaintances in the navy. Through her Carol met commanders 
 and majors, newspapermen, chemists and geographers and fiscal 
 experts from the bureaus, and a teacher who was a familiar 
 of the militant suffrage headquarters. The teacher took her 
 to headquarters. Carol never became a prominent suffragist. 
 Indeed her only recognized position was as an able addresser 
 of envelopes. But she was casually adopted by this family 
 of friendly women who, when they were not being mobbed or 
 arrested, took dancing lessons or went picnicking up the Chesa- 
 peake Canal or talked about the politics of the American 
 Federation of Labor. 
 
 With the congressman's secretary and the teacher Carol 
 leased a small flat. Here she found home, her own place and 
 
428 MAIN STREET 
 
 her own people. She had, though it absorbed most of her 
 salary, an excellent nurse for Hugh. She herself put him to 
 bed and played with him on holidays. There were walks with 
 him, there were motionless evenings of reading, but chiefly 
 Washington was associated with people, scores of them, sitting 
 about the flat, talking, talking, talking, not always wisely but 
 always excitedly. It was not at all the " artist's studio " of 
 which, because of its persistence in fiction, she had dreamed. 
 Most of them were in offices all day, and thought more in 
 card-catalogues or statistics than in mass and color. But they 
 played, very simply, and they saw no reason why anything 
 which exists cannot also be acknowledged. 
 
 She was sometimes shocked quite as she had shocked Gopher 
 Prairie by these girls with their cigarettes and elfish knowledge. 
 When they were most eager about Soviets or canoeing, she 
 listened, longed to have some special learning which would 
 distinguish her, and sighed that her adventure had come so 
 late. Kennicott and Main Street had drained her self-reliance; 
 the presence of Hugh made her feel temporary. Some day 
 oh, she'd have to take him back to open fields and the right 
 to climb about hay-lofts. 
 
 But the fact that she could never be eminent among these 
 scoffing enthusiasts did not keep her from being proud of 
 them, from defending them in imaginary conversations with 
 Kennicott, who grunted (she could hear his voice), "They're 
 simply a bunch of wild impractical theorists sittin' round 
 chewing the rag," and " I haven't got the time to chase after 
 a lot of these fool fads; I'm too busy putting aside a stake for 
 our old age." 
 
 Most of the men who came to the flat, whether they were 
 army officers or radicals who hated the army, had the easy 
 gentleness, the acceptance of women without embarrassed 
 banter, for which she had longed in Gopher Prairie. Yet they 
 seemed to be as efficient as the Sam Clarks. She concluded 
 that it was because they were of secure reputation, not hemmed 
 in by the fire of provincial jealousies. Kennicott had asserted 
 that the villager's lack of courtesy is due to his poverty. 
 "We're no millionaire dudes," he boasted. Yet these army 
 and navy men, these bureau experts, and organizers of mul- 
 titudinous leagues, were cheerful on three or four thousand a 
 year, while Kennicott had, outside of his land speculations, 
 six thousand or more, and Sam had eight. 
 
MAIN STREET 429 
 
 Nor could she upon inquiry learn that many of this reckless 
 race died in the poorhouse. That institution is reserved for 
 men like Kennicott who, after devoting fifty years to " putting 
 aside a stake," incontinently invest the stake in spurious oil- 
 stocks. 
 
 IV 
 
 She was encouraged to believe that she had not been ab- 
 normal in viewing Gopher Prairie as unduly tedious and slat- 
 ternly. She found the same faith not only in girls escaped 
 from domesticity but also in demure old ladies who, tragically 
 deprived of esteemed husbands and huge old houses, yet 
 managed to make a very comfortable thing of it by living in 
 small flats and having time to read. 
 
 But she also learned that by comparison Gopher Prairie 
 was a model of daring color, clever planning, and frenzied 
 intellectuality. From her teacher-housemate she had a sardonic 
 description of a Middlewestern railroad-division town, of the 
 same size as Gopher Prairie but devoid of lawns and trees, a 
 town where the tracks sprawled along the cinder-scabbed 
 Main Street, and the railroad shops, dripping soot from eaves 
 and doorway, rolled out smoke in greasy coils. 
 
 Other towns she came to know by anecdote: a prairie village 
 where the wind blew all day long, and the mud was two feet 
 thick in spring, and in summer the flying sand scarred new- 
 painted houses and dust covered the few flowers set out in 
 pots. New England mill- towns with the hands living in rows 
 of cottages like blocks of lava. A rich farming-center in New 
 Jersey, off the railroad, furiously pious, ruled by old men, 
 unbelievably ignorant old men, sitting about the grocery talking 
 of James G. Elaine. A Southern town, full of the magnolias 
 and white columns which Carol had accepted as proof of 
 romance, but hating the negroes, obsequious to the Old 
 Families. A Western mining-settlement like a tumor. A boom- 
 ing semi-city with parks and clever architects, visited by 
 famous pianists and unctuous lecturers, but irritable from a 
 struggle between union labor and the manufacturers' associa- 
 tion, so that in even the gayest of the new houses there was a 
 ceaseless and intimidating heresy-hunt. 
 
430 MAIN STREET 
 
 The chart which plots Carol's progress is not easy to read. 
 The lines are broken and uncertain of direction; often instead 
 of rising they sink in wavering scrawls; and the colors are 
 watery blue and pink and the dim gray of rubbed pencil 
 marks. A few lines are traceable. 
 
 Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness 
 by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought 
 religions, or by a fog of vagueness. Carol had hidden in none 
 of these refuges from reality, but she, who was tender and 
 merry, had been made timorous by Gopher Prairie. Even her 
 flight had been but the temporary courage of panic. The 
 thing she gained in Washington was not information about 
 office-systems and labor unions but renewed courage } that 
 amiable contempt called poise. Her glimpse of tasks involving 
 millions of people and a score of nations reduced Main Street 
 from bloated importance to its actual pettiness. She could 
 never again be quite so awed by the power with which she 
 herself had endowed the Vidas and Blaussers and Bogarts. 
 
 From her work and from her association with women who 
 had organized suffrage associations in hostile cities, or had 
 defended political prisoners, she caught something of an im- 
 personal attitude; saw that she had been as touchily personal 
 as Maud Dyer. 
 
 And why, she began to ask, did she rage at individuals? Not 
 individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most 
 afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They 
 insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous 
 names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound 
 Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; 
 and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, is unem- 
 bittered laughter. 
 
CHAPTER XXXVIII 
 
 SHE had lived in Washington for a year. She was tired of the 
 office. It was tolerable, far more tolerable than housework, but 
 it was not adventurous. 
 
 She was having tea and cinnamon toast, alone at a small 
 round table on the balcony of Rauscher's Confiserie. Four 
 debutantes clattered in. She had felt young and dissipated, 
 had thought rather well of her black and leaf-green suit, but 
 as she watched them, thin of ankle, soft under the chin, seven- 
 teen or eighteen at most, smoking cigarettes with the correct 
 ennui and talking of " bedroom farces " and their desire to 
 11 run up to New York and see something racy," she became 
 old and rustic and plain, and desirous of retreating from these 
 hard brilliant children to a life easier and more sympathetic. 
 When they flickered out and one child gave orders to a chauf- 
 feur, Carol was not a defiant philosopher but a faded govern- 
 ment clerk from Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. 
 
 She started dejectedly up Connecticut Avenue. She stopped, 
 her heart stopped. Coming toward her were Harry and Juanita 
 Haydock. She ran to them, she kissed Juanita, while Harry 
 confided, "Hadn't expected to come to Washington had to 
 go to New York for some buying didn't have your address 
 along just got in this morning wondered how in the world 
 we could get hold of you." 
 
 She was definitely sorry to hear that they were to leave at 
 nine that evening, and she clung to them as long as she could. 
 She took them to St. Mark's for dinner. Stooped, her elbows 
 on the table, she heard with excitement that " Cy Bogart had 
 the 'flu, but of course he was too gol-darn mean to die of it." 
 
 " Will wrote me that Mr. Blausser has gone away. How did 
 he get on? " 
 
 " Fine! Fine! Great loss to the town. There was a real 
 public-spirited fellow, all right! " 
 
 She discovered that she now had no opinions whatever about 
 
 43i 
 
432 MAIN STREET 
 
 Mr. Blausser, and she said sympathetically, "Will you keep 
 up the town-boosting campaign? " 
 
 Harry fumbled, "Well, we've dropped it just temporarily, 
 but sure you bet! Say, did the doc write you about the 
 luck B. J. Gougerling had hunting ducks down in Texas? " 
 
 When the news had been told and their enthusiasm had 
 slackened she looked about and was proud to be able to point 
 out a senator, to explain the cleverness of the canopied garden. 
 She fancied that a man with dinner-coat and waxed mustache 
 glanced superciliously at Harry's highly form-fitting bright- 
 brown suit and Juanita's tan silk frock, which was doubtful at 
 the seams. She glared back, defending her own, daring the 
 world not to appreciate them. 
 
 Then, waving to them, she lost them down the long train 
 shed. She stood reading the list of stations: Harrisburg, 
 
 Pittsburg, Chicago. Beyond Chicago ? She saw the lakes 
 
 and stubble fields, heard the rhythm of insects and the creak 
 of a buggy, was greeted by Sam Clark's " Well, well, how's 
 the little lady? " 
 
 Nobody in Washington cared enough for her to fret about 
 her sins as Sam did. 
 
 But that night they had at the flat a man just back from 
 Finland. 
 
 n 
 
 She was on the Powhatan roof with the captain. At a table, 
 somewhat vociferously buying improbable " soft drinks " for 
 two fluffy girls, was a man with a large familiar back. 
 " Oh ! I think I know him," she murmured. 
 " Who? There? Oh, Bresnahan, Percy Bresnahan." 
 " Yes. You've met him? What sort of a man is he? " 
 " He's a good-hearted idiot. I rather like him, and I believe 
 that as a salesman of motors he's a wonder. But he's a 
 nuisance in the aeronautic section. Tries so hard to be useful 
 but he doesn't know anything he doesn't know anything. 
 Rather pathetic: rich man poking around and trying to be 
 useful. Do you want to speak to him? " 
 " No no I don't think so." 
 
MAIN STREET 433 
 
 in 
 
 She was at a motion-picture show. The film was a highly 
 advertised and abysmal thing smacking of simpering hair- 
 dressers, cheap perfume, red-plush suites on the back streets 
 of tenderloins, and complacent fat women chewing gum. It 
 pretended to deal with the life of studios. The leading man did 
 a portrait which was a masterpiece. He also saw visions in 
 pipe-smoke, and was very brave and poor and pure. He had 
 ringlets, and his masterpiece was strangely like an enlarged 
 photograph. 
 
 Carol prepared to leave. 
 
 On the screen, in the role of a composer, appeared an actor 
 called Eric Valour. 
 
 She was startled, incredulous, then wretched. Looking 
 straight out at her, wearing a beret and a velvet jacket, was 
 Erik Valborg. 
 
 He had a pale part, which he played neither well nor badly. 
 
 She speculated, "I could have made so much of him ' 
 
 She did not finish her speculation. 
 
 She went home and read Kennicott's letters. They had 
 seemed stiff and undetailed, but now there strode from them 
 a personality, a personality unlike that of the languishing 
 young man in the velvet jacket playing a dummy piano in a 
 canvas room. 
 
 IV 
 
 Kennicott first came to see her in November, thirteen months 
 after her arrival in Washington. When he announced that 
 he was coming she was not at all sure that she wished to 
 see him. She was glad that he had made the decision him- 
 self. 
 
 She had leave from the office for two days. 
 
 She watched him marching from the train, solid, assured, 
 carrying his heavy suit-case, and she was diffident he was 
 such a bulky person to handle. They kissed each other 
 questioningly, and said at the same time, " You're looking fine; 
 how's the baby? " and "You're looking awfully well, dear; 
 how is everything? " 
 
 He grumbled, " I don't want to butt in on any plans you've 
 made or your friends or anything, but if you've got time for 
 
434 MAIN STREET 
 
 it, I'd like to chase around Washington, and take in some 
 restaurants and shows and stuff, and forget work for a while." 
 
 She realized, in the taxicab, that he was wearing a soft 
 gray suit, a soft easy hat, a flippant tie. 
 
 " Like the new outfit? Got 'em in Chicago. Gosh, I hope 
 they're the kind you like." 
 
 They spent half an hour at the flat, with Hugh. She was 
 flustered, but he gave no sign of kissing her again. 
 
 As he moved about the small rooms she realized that he 
 had had his new tan shoes polished to a brassy luster. There 
 was a recent cut on his chin. He must have shaved on the 
 train just before coming into Washington. 
 
 It was pleasant to feel how important she was, how many 
 people she recognized, as she took him to the Capitol, as she 
 told him (he asked and she obligingly guessed) how many 
 feet it was to the top of the dome, as she pointed out Senator 
 LaFollette and the vice-president, and at lunch-time showed 
 herself an habitue by leading him through the catacombs to 
 the senate restaurant. 
 
 She realized that he was slightly more bald. The familiar 
 way in which his hair was parted on the left side agitated 
 her. She looked down at his hands, and the fact that his nails 
 were as ill-treated as ever touched her more than his pleading 
 shoe-shine. 
 
 " You'd like to motor down to Mount Vernon this afternoon, 
 wouldn't you? " she said. 
 
 It was the one thing he had planned. He was delighted that 
 it seemed to be a perfectly well bred and Washingtonian thing 
 to do. 
 
 He shyly held her hand on the way, and told her the news: 
 they were excavating the basement for the new schoolbuilding, 
 Vida " made him tired the way she always looked at the Maje," 
 poor Chet Dashaway had been killed in a motor accident out 
 on the Coast. He did not coax her to like him. At Mount 
 Vernon he admired the paneled library and Washington's 
 dental tools. 
 
 She knew that he would want oysters, that he would have 
 heard of Harvey's apropos of Grant and Elaine, and she took 
 him there. At dinner his hearty voice, his holiday enjoyment 
 of everything, turned into nervousness in his desire to know 
 a number of interesting matters, such as whether they still were 
 married. But he did not ask questions, and be said nothing 
 
MAIN STREET 435 
 
 about her returning. He cleared his throat and observed, " Oh 
 say, been trying out the old camera. Don't you think these 
 are pretty good? " 
 
 He tossed over to her thirty prints of Gopher Prairie and 
 the country about. Without defense, she was thrown into it. 
 She remembered that he had lured her with photographs in 
 courtship days; she made a note of his sameness, his satis- 
 faction with the tactics which had proved good before; but she 
 forgot it in the familiar places. She was seeing the sun- 
 speckled ferns among birches on the shore of Minniemashie, 
 wind-rippled miles of wheat, the porch of their own house where 
 Hugh had played, Main Street where she knew every window 
 and every face. 
 
 She handed them back, with praise for his photography, and 
 he talked of lenses and time-exposures. 
 
 Dinner was over and they were gossiping of her friends at 
 the flat, but an intruder was with them, sitting back, persistent, 
 inescapable. She could not endure it. She stammered: 
 
 " I had you check your bag at the station because I wasn't 
 quite sure where you'd stay. I'm dreadfully sorry we haven't 
 room to put you up at the flat. We ought to have seen about 
 a room for you before. Don't you think you better call up 
 the Willard or the Washington now? " 
 
 He peered at her cloudily. Without words he asked, with- 
 out speech she answered, whether she was also going to the 
 Willard or the Washington. But she tried to look as though 
 she did not know that they were debating anything of the 
 sort. She would have hated him had he been meek about it. 
 But he was neither meek nor angry. However impatient he 
 may have been with her blandness he said readily: 
 
 " Yes, guess I better do that. Excuse me a second. Then 
 how about grabbing a taxi (Gosh, isn't it the limit the way 
 these taxi shuffers skin around a corner? Got more nerve 
 driving than I have! ) and going up to your flat for a while? 
 Like to meet your friends must be fine women and I might 
 take a look and see how Hugh sleeps. Like to know how he 
 breathes. Don't think he has adenoids, but I better make sure, 
 eh? " He patted her shoulder. 
 
 At the flat they found her two housemates and a girl who 
 had been to jail for suffrage. Kennicott fitted in surprisingly. 
 He laughed at the girl's story of the humors of a hunger- 
 strike; he told the secretary what to do when her eyes were 
 
436 MAIN STREET 
 
 tired from typing; and the teacher asked him not as the hus- 
 band of a friend but as a physician whether there was " any- 
 thing to this inoculation for colds." 
 
 His colloquialisms seemed to Carol no more lax than their 
 habitual slang. 
 
 Like an older brother he kissed her good-night in the midst 
 of the company. 
 
 " He's terribly nice," said her housemates, and waited for 
 confidences. They got none, nor did her own heart. She could 
 find nothing definite to agonize about. She felt that she was 
 no longer analyzing and controlling forces, but swept on by 
 them. 
 
 He came to the flat for breakfast, and washed the dishes. 
 That was her only occasion for spite. Back home he never 
 thought of washing dishes! 
 
 She took him to the obvious " sights " the Treasury, the 
 Monument, the Corcoran Gallery, the Pan-American Building, 
 the Lincoln Memorial, with the Potomac beyond it and the 
 Arlington hills and the columns of the Lee Mansion. For all 
 his willingness to play there was over him a melancholy which 
 piqued her. His normally expressionless eyes had depths to 
 them now, and strangeness. As they walked through Lafayette 
 Square, looking past the Jackson statue at the lovely tranquil 
 fagade of the White House, he sighed, " I wish I'd had a shot 
 at places like this. When I was in the U., I had to earn part 
 of my way, and when I wasn't doing that or studying, I guess 
 I was roughhousing. My gang were a great bunch for 
 bumming around and raising Cain. Maybe if I'd been caught 
 
 early and sent to concerts and all that Would I have 
 
 been what you call intelligent? " 
 
 " Oh, my dear, don't be humble! You are intelligent! For 
 instance, you're the most thorough doctor " 
 
 He was edging about something he wished to say. He 
 pounced on it: 
 
 " You did like those pictures of G. P. pretty well, after all, 
 didn't you! " 
 
 " Yes, of course." 
 
 " Wouldn't be so bad to have a glimpse of the old town, 
 would it! " 
 
 11 No, it wouldn't. Just as I was terribly glad to see the 
 Haydocks. But please understand me! That doesn't mean 
 that I withdraw all ray criticisms. The fact that I might like 
 
MAIN STREET 437 
 
 a glimpse of old friends hasn't any particular relation to the 
 
 question of whether Gopher Prairie oughtn't to have festivals 
 
 and lamb chops." 
 
 Hastily, "No, no! Sure not. I und'stand." 
 
 " But I know it must have been pretty tiresome to have to 
 
 live with anybody as perfect as I was." 
 He grinned. She liked his grin. 
 
 He was thrilled by old negro coachmen, admirals, aeroplanes, 
 the building to which his income tax would eventually go, a 
 Rolls-Royce, Lynnhaven oysters, the Supreme Court Room, 
 a New York theatrical manager down for the try-out of a play, 
 the house where Lincoln died, the cloaks of Italian officers, the 
 barrows at which clerks buy their box-lunches at noon, the 
 barges on the Chesapeake Canal, and the fact that District 
 of Columbia cars had both District and Maryland licenses. 
 
 She resolutely took him to her favorite white and green 
 cottages and Georgian houses. He admitted that fanlights, and 
 white shutters against rosy brick, were more homelike than a 
 painty wooden box. He volunteered, " I see how you mean. 
 They make me think of these pictures of an old-fashioned 
 Christmas. Oh, if you keep at it long enough you'll have Sam 
 and me reading poetry and everything. Oh say, d' I tell you 
 about this fierce green Jack Elder's had his machine painted? " 
 
 VI 
 
 They were at dinner. 
 
 He hinted, " Before you showed me those places today, 
 I'd already made up my mind that when I built the new house 
 we used to talk about, I'd fix it the way you wanted it. I'm 
 pretty practical about foundations and radiation and stuff like 
 that, but I guess I don't know a whole lot about architecture." 
 
 " My dear, it occurs to me with a sudden shock that I don't 
 either! " 
 
 " Well anyway you let me plan the garage and the plumb- 
 ing, and you do the rest, if you ever I mean if you ever 
 want to." 
 
 Doubtfully, " That's sweet of you." 
 
 " Look here, Carrie; you think I'm going to ask you to love 
 
438 MAIN STREET 
 
 me. I'm not. And I'm not going to ask you to come back to 
 Gopher Prairie! " 
 
 She gaped. 
 
 " It's been a whale of a fight. But I guess I've got myself 
 to see that you won't ever stand G. P. unless you want to 
 come back to it. I needn't say I'm crazy to have you. But 
 I won't ask you. I just want you to know how I wait for you. 
 Every mail I look for a letter, and when I get one I'm kind of 
 scared to open it, I'm hoping so much that you're coming back. 
 
 Evenings You know I didn't open the cottage down at 
 
 the lake at all, this past summer. Simply couldn't stand all 
 the others laughing and swimming, and you not there. I used 
 to sit on the porch, in town, and I I couldn't get over the 
 feeling that you'd simply run up to the drug store and would 
 be right back, and till after it got dark I'd catch myself 
 watching, looking up the street, and you never came, and the 
 house was so empty and still that I didn't like to go in. 
 And sometimes I fell asleep there, in my chair, and didn't 
 
 wake up till after midnight, and the house Oh, the devil ! 
 
 Please get me, Carrie. I just want you to know how welcome 
 you'll be if you ever do come. But I'm not asking you to." 
 
 You're It's awfully " 
 
 " 'Nother thing. I'm going to be frank. I haven't always 
 been absolutely, uh, absolutely, proper. I've always loved you 
 more than anything else in the world, you and the kid. But 
 sometimes when you were chilly to me I'd get lonely and 
 sore, and pike out and Never intended " 
 
 She rescued him with a pitying, " It's all right. Let's forget 
 it." 
 
 " But before we were married you said if your husband 
 ever did anything wrong, you'd want him to tell you." 
 
 " Did I? I can't remember. And I can't seem to think. Oh, 
 my dear, I do know how generously you're trying to make me 
 
 happy. The only thing is I can't think. I don't know 
 
 what I think." 
 
 " Then listen! Don't think! Here's what I want you to 
 do! Get a two-weeks leave from your office. Weather's 
 beginning to get chilly here. Let's run down to Charleston 
 and Savannah and maybe Florida. 
 
 " A second honeymoon? " indecisively. 
 
 "No. Don't even call it that. Call it a second wooing. 
 I won't ask anything. I just want the chance to chase around 
 
MAIN STREET 439 
 
 with you. I guess I never appreciated how lucky I was to 
 have a girl with imagination and lively feet to play with. 
 
 So Could you maybe run away and see the South with 
 
 me? If you wanted to, you could just you could just pretend 
 
 you were my sister and I'll get an extra nurse for Hugh! 
 
 I'll get the best dog-gone nurse in Washington 1 " 
 
 vn 
 
 It was in the Villa Margherita, by the palms of the 
 Charleston Battery and the metallic harbor, that her aloofness 
 melted. 
 
 When they sat on the upper balcony, enchanted by the 
 moon glitter, she cried, " Shall I go back to Gopher Prairie 
 with you? Decide for me. I'm tired of deciding and un- 
 deciding." 
 
 " No. You've got to do your own deciding. As a matter of 
 fact, in spite of this honeymoon, I don't think I want you to 
 come home. Not yet." 
 
 She could only stare. 
 
 " I want you to be satisfied when you get there. I'll do 
 everything I can to keep you happy, but I'll make lots of 
 breaks, so I want you to take time and think it over." 
 
 She was relieved. She still had a chance to seize splendid 
 indefinite freedoms. She might go oh, she'd see Europe, some- 
 how, before she was recaptured. But she also had a firmer 
 respect for Kennicott. She had fancied that her life might 
 make a story. She knew that there was nothing heroic or ob- 
 viously dramatic in it, no magic of rare hours, nor valiant 
 challenge, but it seemed to her that she was of some sig- 
 nificance because she was commonplaceness, the ordinary life 
 of the age, made articulate and protesting. It had not occurred 
 to her that there was also a story of Will Kennicott, into which 
 she entered only so much as he entered into hers; that he 
 had bewilderments and concealments as intricate as her own, 
 and soft treacherous desires for sympathy. 
 
 Thus she brooded, looking at the amazing sea, holding his 
 hand. 
 
440 MAIN STREET 
 
 vm 
 
 She was in Washington; Kennicott was in Gopher Prairie, 
 writing as dryly as ever about water-pipes and goose-hunting 
 and Mrs. Fageros's mastoid. 
 
 She was talking at dinner to a generalissima of suffrage. 
 Should she return? 
 
 The leader spoke wearily: 
 
 " My dear, I'm perfectly selfish. I can't quite visualize the 
 needs of your husband, and it seems to me that your baby 
 will do quite as well in the schools here as in your barracks at 
 home." 
 
 " Then you think I'd better not go back? " Carol sounded 
 disappointed. 
 
 " It's more difficult than that. When I say that I'm selfish 
 I mean that the only thing I consider about women is whether 
 they're likely to prove useful in building up real political power 
 for women. And you? Shall I be frank? Remember when 
 I say l you ' I don't mean you alone. I'm thinking of thousands 
 of women who come to Washington and New York and Chicago 
 every year, dissatisfied at home and seeking a sign in the 
 heavens women of all sorts, from timid mothers of fifty in 
 cotton gloves, to girls just out of Vassar who organize strikes 
 in their own fathers' factories! All of you are more or less 
 useful to me, but only a few of you can take my place, because 
 I have one virtue (only one): I have given up father and 
 mother and children for the love of God. 
 
 "Here's the test for you: Do you come to 'conquer the 
 East,' as people say, or do you come to conquer yourself? 
 
 " It's so much more complicated than any of you know so 
 much more complicated than I knew when I put on Ground 
 Grippers and started out to reform the world. The final com- 
 plication in ' conquering Washington' or 'conquering New 
 York ' is that the conquerors must beyond all things not con- 
 quer! It must have been so easy in the good old days when 
 authors dreamed only of selling a hundred thousand volumes, 
 and sculptors of being feted in big houses, and even the Up- 
 lifters like me had a simple-hearted ambition to be elected to 
 important offices and invited to go round lecturing. But we 
 meddlers have upset everything. Now the one thing that is 
 disgraceful to any of us is obvious success. The Uplifter who 
 is very popular with wealthy patrons can be pretty sure that 
 
MAIN STREET 441 
 
 he has softened his philosophy to please them, and the author 
 who is making lots of money poor things, I've heard 'em 
 apologizing for it to the shabby bitter-enders; I've seen 'em 
 ashamed of the sleek luggage they got from movie rights. 
 
 " Do you want to sacrifice yourself in such a topsy-turvy 
 world, where popularity makes you unpopular with the people 
 you love, and the only failure is cheap success, and the only 
 individualist is the person who gives up all his individualism 
 to serve a jolly ungrateful proletariat which thumbs its nose at 
 him? " 
 
 Carol smiled ingratiatingly, to indicate that she was indeed 
 one who desired to sacrifice, but she sighed, " I don't know; 
 I'm afraid I'm not heroic. I certainly wasn't out home. Why 
 didn't I do big effective " 
 
 "Not a matter of heroism. Matter of endurance. Your 
 Middlewest is double-Puritan prairie Puritan on top of New 
 England Puritan; bluff frontiersman on the surface, but in its 
 heart it still has the ideal of Plymouth Rock in a sleet-storm. 
 There's one attack you can make on it, perhaps the only kind 
 that accomplishes much anywhere: you can keep on looking 
 at one thing after another in your home and church and bank, 
 and ask why it is, and who first laid down the law that it had 
 to be that way. If enough of us do this impolitely enough, 
 then we'll become civilized in merely twenty thousand years 
 or so, instead of having to wait the two hundred thousand 
 years that my cynical anthropologist friends allow. . 
 Easy, pleasant, lucrative home-work for wives: asking people 
 to define their jobs. That's the most dangerous doctrine I 
 know! " 
 
 Carol was mediating, " I will go back! I will go on asking 
 questions. I've always done it, and always failed at it, and it's 
 all I can do. I'm going to ask Ezra Stowbody why he's op- 
 posed to the nationalization of railroads, and ask Dave Dyer 
 why a druggist always is pleased when he's called ' doctor/ 
 and maybe ask Mrs. Bogart why she wears a widow's veil that 
 looks like a dead crow." 
 
 The woman leader straightened. " And you have one thing. 
 You have a baby to hug. That's my temptation. I dream of 
 babies of a baby and I sneak around parks to see them 
 playing. (The children in Dupont Circle are like a poppy- 
 garden.) And the antis call me l unsexed ' ! " 
 
 Carol was thinking, in panic, " Oughtn't Hugh to have 
 
442 MAIN STREET 
 
 country air? I won't let him become a yokel. I can guide 
 him away from street-corner loafing. ... I think I can." 
 
 On her way home: " Now that I've made a precedent, joined 
 the union and gone out on one strike and learned personal 
 solidarity, I won't be so afraid. Will won't always be resisting 
 my running away. Some day I really will go to Europe with 
 him ... or without him. 
 
 " I've lived with people who are not afraid to go to jail. 
 I could invite a Miles Bjornstam to dinner without being 
 afraid of the Haydocks ... I think I could. 
 
 " I'll take back the sound of Yvette Guilbert's songs and 
 Elman's violin. They'll be only the lovelier against the thrum- 
 ming of crickets in the stubble on an autumn day. 
 
 " I can laugh now and be serene ... I think I can." 
 
 Though she should return, she said, she would not be utterly 
 defeated. She was glad of her rebellion. The prairie was no 
 longer empty land in the sun-glare; it was the living tawny 
 beast which she had fought and made beautiful by fighting; 
 and in the village streets were shadows of her desires and the 
 sound of her marching and the seeds of mystery and greatness. 
 
 Her active hatred of Gopher Pairie had run out. She saw 
 it now as a toiling new settlement. With sympathy she re- 
 membered Kennicott's defense of its citizens as "a lot of 
 pretty good folks, working hard and trying to bring up their 
 families the best they can." She recalled tenderly the young 
 awkwardness of Main Street and the makeshifts of the little 
 brown cottages; she pitied their shabbiness and isolation; had 
 compassion for their assertion of culture, even as expressed in 
 Thanatopsis papers, for their pretense of greatness, even as 
 trumpeted in " boosting." She saw Main Street in the dusty 
 prairie sunset, a line of frontier shanties with solemn lonely 
 people waiting for her, solemn and lonely as an old man who 
 has outlived his friends. She remembered that Kennicott and 
 Sam Clark had listened to her songs, and she wanted to run 
 to them and sing. 
 
 "At last," she rejoiced, "I've come to a fairer attitude 
 toward the town. I can love it, now." 
 
 She was, perhaps, rather proud of herself for having acquired 
 so much tolerance. 
 
MAIN STREET 443 
 
 She awoke at three in the morning, after a dream of being 
 tortured by Ella Stowbody and the Widow Bogart. 
 
 " I've been making the town a myth. This is how people 
 keep up the tradition of the perfect home-town, the happy 
 boyhood, the brilliant college friends. We forget so. I've 
 been forgetting that Main Street doesn't think it's in the least 
 lonely and pitiful. It thinks it's God's Own Country. It isn't 
 waiting for me. It doesn't care." 
 
 But the next evening she again saw Gopher Prairie as her 
 home, waiting for her in the sunset, rimmed round with 
 splendor. 
 
 She did not return for five months more; five months 
 crammed with greedy accumulation of sounds and colors to 
 take back for the long still days. 
 
 She had spent nearly two years in Washington. 
 
 When she departed for Gopher Prairie, in June, her second 
 baby was stirring within her. 
 
CHAPTER XXXIX 
 
 SHE wondered all the way home what her sensations would be. 
 She wondered about it so much that she had every sensation 
 she had imagined. She was excited by each familiar porch, 
 each hearty " Well, well! " and flattered to be, for a day, the 
 most important news of the community. She bustled about, 
 making calls. Juanita Haydock bubbled over their Washington 
 encounter, and took Carol to her social bosom. This ancient 
 opponent seemed likely to be her most intimate friend, for 
 Vida Sherwin, though she was cordial, stood back and watched 
 for imported heresies. 
 
 In the evening Carol went to the mill. The mystical Om- 
 Om-Om of the dynamos in the electric-light plant behind the 
 mill was louder in the darkness. Outside sat the night watch- 
 man, Champ Perry. He held up his stringy hands and 
 squeaked, " We've all missed you terrible." 
 
 Who in Washington would miss her? 
 
 Who in Washington could be depended upon like Guy 
 Pollock? When she saw him on the street, smiling as always, 
 he seemed an eternal thing, a part of her own self. 
 
 After a week she decided that she was neither glad nor 
 sorry to be back. She entered each day with the matter-of-fact 
 attitude with which she had gone to her office in Washington. 
 It was her task; there would be mechanical details and mean- 
 ingless talk; what of it? 
 
 The only problem which she had approached with emotion 
 proved insignificant. She had, on the train, worked herself 
 up to such devotion that she was willing to give up her own 
 room, to try to share all of her life with Kennicott. 
 
 He mumbled, ten minutes after she had entered the house, 
 " Say, I've kept your room for you like it was. I've kind of 
 come round to your way of thinking. Don't see why folks 
 need to get on each other's nerves just because they're friendly. 
 Darned if I haven't got so I like a little privacy and mulling 
 things over by myself." 
 
 444 
 
MAIN STREET 445 
 
 She had left a city which sat up nights to talk of universal 
 transition; of European revolution, guild socialism, free verse. 
 She had fancied that all the world was changing. 
 
 She found that it was not. 
 
 In Gopher Prairie the only ardent new topics were prohibi- 
 tion, the place in Minneapolis where you could get whisky at 
 thirteen dollars a quart, recipes for home-made beer, the " high 
 Cost of living," the presidential election, Clark's new car, and 
 not very novel foibles of Cy Bogart. Their problems were 
 exactly what they had been two years ago, what they had been 
 twenty years ago, and what they would be for twenty years 
 to come. With the world a possible volcano, the husbandmen 
 were plowing at the base of the mountain. A volcano does 
 occasionally drop a river of lava on even the best of agricul- 
 turists, to their astonishment and considerable injury, but their 
 cousins inherit the farms and a year or two later go back to 
 the plowing. 
 
 She was unable to rhapsodize much over the seven new 
 bungalows and the two garages which Kennicott had made to 
 seem so important. Her intensest thought about them was, 
 " Oh yes, they're all right I suppose." The change which she 
 did heed was the erection of the schoolbuilding, with its cheer- 
 ful brick walls, broad windows, gymnasium, classrooms for 
 agriculture and cooking. It indicated Vida's triumph, and it 
 stirred her to activity any activity. She went to Vida with a 
 jaunty, " I think I shall work for you. And I'll begin at the 
 bottom." 
 
 She did. She relieved the attendant at the rest-room for 
 an hour a day. Her only innovation was painting the pine 
 table a black and orange rather shocking to the Thanatopsis. 
 She talked to the farmwives and soothed their babies and was 
 happy. 
 
 Thinking of them she did not think of the ugliness of Main 
 Street as she hurried along it to the chatter of the Jolly 
 Seventeen. 
 
 She wore her eye-glasses on the street now. She was begin- 
 ning to ask Kennicott and Juanita if she didn't look young, 
 much younger than thirty-three. The eye-glasses pinched her 
 nose. She considered spectacles. They would make her seem 
 older, and hopelessly settled. No! She would not wear spec- 
 
446 MAIN STREET 
 
 tacles yet. But she tried on a pair at Kennicott's office. They 
 really were much more comfortable. 
 
 m 
 
 Dr. Westlake, Sam Clark, Nat Hicks, and Del Snafflin were 
 talking in DePs barber shop. 
 
 " Well, I see Kennicott's wife is taking a whirl at the rest- 
 room, now," said Dr. Westlake. He emphasized the " now." 
 
 Del interrupted the shaving of Sam and, with his brush 
 dripping lather, he observed jocularly: 
 
 " What '11 she be up to next? They say she used to claim 
 this burg wasn't swell enough for a city girl like her, and 
 would we please tax ourselves about thirty-seven point nine and 
 fix it all up pretty, with tidies on the hydrants and statoos on 
 the lawns " 
 
 Sam irritably blew the lather from his lips, with milky 
 small bubbles, and snorted, " Be a good thing for most of us 
 roughnecks if we did have a smart woman to tell us how to 
 fix up the town. Just as much to her kicking as there was 
 to Jim Blausser's gassing about factories. And you can bet 
 Mrs. Kennicott is smart, even if she is skittish. Glad to see 
 her back." 
 
 Dr. Westlake hastened to play safe. "So was I! So was I! 
 She's got a nice way about her, and she knows a good deal 
 about books or fiction anyway. Of course she's like all the 
 rest of these women not solidly founded not scholarly 
 doesn't know anything about political economy falls for every 
 new idea that some windjamming crank puts out. But she's 
 a nice woman. She'll probably fix up the rest-room, and the 
 rest-room is a fine thing, brings a lot of business to town. And 
 now that Mrs. Kennicott's been away, maybe she's got over 
 some of her fool ideas. Maybe she realizes that folks simply 
 laugh at her when she tries to tell us how to run everything." 
 
 " Sure. She'll take a tumble to herself," said Nat Hicks, 
 sucking in his lips judicially. " As far as I'm concerned, I'll 
 say she's as nice a looking skirt as there is in town. But yow! " 
 His tone electrified them. " Guess she'll miss that Swede 
 Valborg that used to work for me! They was a pair! Talking 
 poetry and moonshine! If they could of got away with it, 
 they'd of been so darn lovey-dovey " 
 
 Sam Clark interrupted, " Rats, they never even thought 
 
MAIN STREET 447 
 
 about making love. Just talking books and all that junk. 
 I tell you, Carrie Kennicott's a smart woman, and these smart 
 educated women all get funny ideas, but they get over 'em 
 after they've had three or four kids. You'll see her settled 
 down one of these days, and teaching Sunday School and 
 helping at sociables and behaving herself, and not trying to 
 butt into business and politics. Sure! " 
 
 After only fifteen minutes of conference on her stockings, 
 her son, her separate bedroom, her music, her ancient interest 
 in Guy Pollock, her probable salary in Washington, and every 
 remark which she was known to have made since her return, 
 the supreme council decided that they would permit Carol 
 Kennicott to live, and they passed on to a consideration of 
 Nat Hicks 's New One about the traveling salesman and the 
 old maid. 
 
 IV 
 
 For some reason which was totally mysterious to Carol, 
 Maud Dyer seemed to resent her return. At the Jolly Seven- 
 teen Maud giggled nervously, "Well, I suppose you found 
 war-work a good excuse to stay away and have a swell time. 
 Juanita! Don't you think we ought to make Carrie tell us 
 about the officers she met in Washington? " 
 
 They rustled and stared. Carol looked at them. Their 
 curiosity seemed natural and unimportant. 
 
 " Oh yes, yes indeed, have to do that some day," she 
 yawned. 
 
 She no longer took Aunt Bessie Smail seriously enough to 
 struggle for independence. She saw that Aunt Bessie did not 
 mean to intrude; that she wanted to do things for all the 
 Kennicotts. Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which 
 is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not 
 needed by youth; that its love and prosy sageness, so im- 
 portant a few years ago, so gladly offered now, are rejected 
 with laughter. She divined that when Aunt Bessie came in 
 with a jar of wild-grape jelly she was waiting in hope of being 
 asked for the recipe. After that she could be irritated but she 
 could not be depressed by Aunt Bessie's simoom of ques- 
 tioning. 
 
 She wasn't depressed even when she heard Mrs. Bogart 
 observe, " Now we've got prohibition it seems to me that the 
 
448 MAIN STREET 
 
 next problem of the country ain't so much abolishing ciga- 
 rettes as it is to make folks observe the Sabbath and arrest 
 these law-breakers that play baseball and go to the movies 
 and all on the Lord's Day." 
 
 Only one thing bruised Carol's vanity. Few people asked her 
 about Washington. They who had most admiringly begged 
 Percy Bresnahan for his opinions were least interested in her 
 facts. She laughed at herself when she saw that she had 
 expected to be at once a heretic and a returned hero; she was 
 very reasonable and merry about it; and it hurt just as much 
 as ever. 
 
 Her baby, born in August, was a girl. Carol could not 
 decide whether she was to become a feminist leader or marry 
 a scientist or both, but did settle on Vassar and a tricolette 
 suit with a small black hat for her Freshman year. 
 
 VI 
 
 Hugh was loquacious at breakfast. He desired to give his 
 impressions of owls and F Street. 
 
 " Don't make so much noise. You talk too much," growled 
 Kennicott. 
 
 Carol flared. " Don't speak to him that way! Why don't 
 you listen to him? He has some very interesting things to 
 tell." 
 
 " What's the idea? Mean to say you expect me to spend 
 all my time listening to his chatter? " 
 
 " Why not? " 
 
 " For one thing, he's got to learn a little discipline. Time 
 for him to start getting educated." 
 
 "I've learned much more discipline, I've had much more 
 education, from him than he has from me." 
 
 " What's this? Some new-fangled idea of raising kids you 
 got in Washington? " 
 
 " Perhaps. Did you ever realize that children are people? " 
 
 " That's all right. I'm not going to have him monopolizing 
 the conversation." 
 
 " No, of course. We have our rights, too. But I'm going 
 to bring him up as a human being. He has just as many 
 
MAIN STREET 449 
 
 thoughts as we have, and I want him to develop them, not 
 take Gopher Prairie's version of them. That's my biggest 
 work now keeping myself, keeping you, from 'educating' 
 him." 
 
 " Well, let's not scrap about it. But I'm not going to have 
 him spoiled." 
 
 Kennicott had forgotten it in ten minutes; and she forgot 
 it this time. 
 
 yn 
 
 The Kennicotts and the Sam Clarks had driven north to a 
 duck-pass between two lakes, on an autumn day of blue and 
 copper. 
 
 Kennicott had given her a light twenty-gauge shotgun. She 
 had a first lesson in shooting, in keeping her eyes open, not 
 wincing, understanding that the bead at the end of the barrel 
 really had something to do with pointing the gun. She was 
 radiant ; she almost believed Sam when he insisted that it was 
 she who had shot the mallard at which they had fired to- 
 gether. 
 
 She sat on the bank of the reedy lake and found rest in 
 Mrs. Clark's drawling comments on nothing. The brown dusk 
 was still. Behind them were dark marshes. The plowed acres 
 smelled fresh. The lake was garnet and silver. The voices of 
 the men, waiting for the last flight, were clear in the cool 
 air. 
 
 " Mark left! " sang Kennicott, in a long-drawn call. 
 
 Three ducks were swooping down in a swift line. The guns 
 banged, and a duck fluttered. The men pushed their light 
 boat out on the burnished lake, disappeared beyond the reeds. 
 Their cheerful voices and the slow splash and clank of oars 
 came back to Carol from the dimness. In the sky a fiery plain 
 sloped down to a serene harbor. It dissolved; the lake was 
 white marble; and Kennicott was crying, " Well, old lady, how 
 rvbout hiking out for home? Supper taste pretty good, eh? " 
 
 " I'll sit back with Ethel," she said, at the car. 
 
 It was the first time she had called Mrs. Clark by her given 
 name; the first time she had willingly sat back, a woman of 
 Main Street. 
 
 "I'm hungry. It's good to be hungry," she reflected, as 
 they drove away. 
 
450 MAIN STREET 
 
 She looked across the silent fields to the west. She was 
 conscious of an unbroken sweep of land to the Rockies, to 
 Alaska; a dominion which will rise to unexampled greatness 
 when other empires have grown senile. Before that time, she 
 knew, a hundred generations of Carols will aspire and go down 
 in tragedy devoid of palls and solemn chanting, the hum- 
 drum inevitable tragedy of struggle against inertia. 
 
 "Let's all go to the movies tomorrow night. Awfully ex- 
 citing film," said Ethel Clark. 
 
 " Well, I was going to read a new book but All right, 
 
 let's go," said Carol. 
 
 vm 
 
 "They're too much for me," Carol sighed to Kennicott. 
 " I've been thinking about getting up an annual Community 
 Day, when the whole town would forget feuds and go out and 
 have sports and a picnic and a dance. But Bert Tybee (why 
 did you ever elect him mayor?) he's kidnapped my idea. 
 He wants the Community Day, but he wants to have some 
 politician ' give an address.' That's just the stilted sort of 
 thing I've tried to avoid. He asked Vida, and of course she 
 agreed with him." 
 
 Kennicott considered the matter while he wound the clock 
 and they tramped up-stairs. 
 
 "Yes, it would jar you to have Bert butting in," he said 
 amiably. " Are you going to do much fussing over this Com- 
 munity stunt? Don't you ever get tired of fretting and stewing 
 and experimenting? " 
 
 "I haven't even started. Look! " She led him to the 
 nursery door, pointed at the fuzzy brown head of her daughter. 
 " Do you see that object on the pillow? Do you know what 
 it is? It's a bomb to blow up smugness. If you Tories were 
 wise, you wouldn't arrest anarchists; you'd arrest all these 
 children while they're asleep in their cribs. Think what that 
 baby will see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! 
 She may see an industrial union of the whole world, she may 
 see aeroplanes going to Mars." 
 
 " Yump, probably be changes all right," yawned Kennicott. 
 
 She sat on the edge of his bed while he hunted through his 
 bureau for a collar which ought to be there and persistently 
 wasn't. 
 
MAIN STREET 45* 
 
 " I'll go on, always. And I am happy. But this Community 
 Day makes me see how thoroughly I'm beaten." 
 
 " That darn collar certainly is gone for keeps," muttered 
 
 Kennicott and, louder, " Yes, I guess you I didn't quite 
 
 catch what you said, dear." 
 
 She patted his pillows, turned down his sheets, as she re- 
 flected: 
 
 "But I have won in this: I've never excused my failures 
 by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone 
 beyond them. I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful 
 as it should be! I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is 
 greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that 
 dish- washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have 
 fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith." 
 
 " Sure. You bet you have," said Kennicott. " Well, good 
 night. Sort of feels to me like it might snow tomorrow. Have 
 to be thinking about putting up the storm-windows pretty 
 soon. Say, did you notice whether the girl put that screw- 
 driver back? " 
 
 THE END 
 
Church at Copheir Prairie. 
 
 In "Main Street," one of the most 
 talked about of recent American nov- 
 els, SINCLAIB LEWIS provides a pic- 
 ture of a small Western community 
 in such detail that it seems almost 
 of photographic distinctness ; yet those 
 who really know village life, East or 
 West, North or South, realize that 
 something is lacking from the ac- 
 count of Gopher Prairie and its peo- 
 ple as they are portrayed fyy Mr. 
 LEWIS. 
 
 Gradually the knowledge comes that 
 "Main Street" gives but a partial 
 view ; that a great blank exists Which 
 must be filled in ere a complete pic- 
 ture is presented. Intentionally or 
 otherwise, there has been no adequate 
 presentation of a vital element of the 
 .small town the quiet* generous, level 
 headed men and women who uphold 
 and further the highest and best in 
 such life ; who spend time and thought 
 and money in many forms of charity, 
 philanthropy, enlightenment ; who 
 carry on the work of churches and 
 their affiliated organizations. 
 
 Such men and women, unselfish, 
 sincerely devont, sympathetic and 
 helpful -to a degree, undoubtedly form 
 the substantial backbone of commu- 
 nity life in Maine and California, in 
 Florida and Alaska. But the author 
 of "Main Street" seems unaware of 
 their presence in Gopher Prairie, al- 
 though they are there. 
 
 The village church remains the cen- 
 tre of good works. In it gather 
 I earnest men and women, striving as 
 best they may to make their neigh- 
 borhood better, their neighbors and 
 themselves happier, more useful. In 
 thousands of such churches gifts are 
 made cheerfully for medical work, 
 educational work, religious work in 
 foreign lands as well as nearer home. 
 
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