She fancied that his even grayness might reveal a
thousand tints of lavender and blue and silver.
At supper he hinted his love for Sir Thomas Browne,
Thoreau, Agnes Repplier, Arthur Symons, Claude Washburn,
Charles Flandrau. He presented his idols diffidently,
but he expanded in Carol’s bookishness, in Miss
Sherwin’s voluminous praise, in Kennicott’s
tolerance of any one who amused his wife.
Carol wondered why Guy Pollock went on digging at
routine law-cases; why he remained in Gopher Prairie.
She had no one whom she could ask. Neither Kennicott
nor Vida Sherwin would understand that there might
be reasons why a Pollock should not remain in Gopher
Prairie. She enjoyed the faint mystery.
She felt triumphant and rather literary. She already
had a Group. It would be only a while now before
she provided the town with fanlights and a knowledge
of Galsworthy. She was doing things! As
she served the emergency dessert of cocoanut and sliced
oranges, she cried to Pollock, “Don’t
you think we ought to get up a dramatic club?”
When the first dubious November snow had filtered
down, shading with white the bare clods in the plowed
fields, when the first small fire had been started
in the furnace, which is the shrine of a Gopher Prairie
home, Carol began to make the house her own. She
dismissed the parlor furniture—the golden
oak table with brass knobs, the moldy brocade chairs,
the picture of “The Doctor.” She went
to Minneapolis, to scamper through department stores
and small Tenth Street shops devoted to ceramics and
high thought. She had to ship her treasures, but
she wanted to bring them back in her arms.
Carpenters had torn out the partition between front
parlor and back parlor, thrown it into a long room
on which she lavished yellow and deep blue; a Japanese
obi with an intricacy of gold thread on stiff ultramarine
tissue, which she hung as a panel against the maize
wall; a couch with pillows of sapphire velvet and
gold bands; chairs which, in Gopher Prairie, seemed
flippant. She hid the sacred family phonograph
in the dining-room, and replaced its stand with a
square cabinet on which was a squat blue jar between
yellow candles.
Kennicott decided against a fireplace. “We’ll
have a new house in a couple of years, anyway.”
She decorated only one room. The rest, Kennicott
hinted, she’d better leave till he “made
a ten-strike.”
The brown cube of a house stirred and awakened; it
seemed to be in motion; it welcomed her back from
shopping; it lost its mildewed repression.
The supreme verdict was Kennicott’s “Well,
by golly, I was afraid the new junk wouldn’t
be so comfortable, but I must say this divan, or whatever
you call it, is a lot better than that bumpy old sofa
we had, and when I look around——Well,
it’s worth all it cost, I guess.”
