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 distinctions,” 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 herself 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 mining-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 confiding 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

I

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 expanse 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.