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 prosperity.
In all the town not one building save the Ionic bank
which gave pleasure to Carol’s eyes; not a dozen
buildings which suggested 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 planlessness, 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 building beside it was crowned with
battlements and pyramids of brick capped with blocks
of red sandstone.
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.”
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.
