“But, dear, the trouble with that film—it
wasn’t that it got in so many legs, but that
it giggled coyly and promised 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 ‘a good deal, ten plunks
more per acre.’ I won’t! I won’t
succumb!
“How? I’ve failed at everything:
the Thanatopsis, parties, pioneers, city hall, Guy
and Vida. But——It doesn’t
matter! 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.”
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 independence.
She was like the revolutionist at fifty: not
afraid 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
summoned 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.
