(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 Howland & Gould’s more as she does here, what
you done with the poster for Fluffed Oats?”)
When Carol had walked for thirty-two minutes she had
completely 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 sparrows, 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.
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.
