Here the matrons forgot social jealousies, and sat
gossiping in gingham; or, in old bathing-suits, surrounded
by hysterical children, they paddled for hours.
Carol 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 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 refreshments
began all over.
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 anniversary; 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.
