Her defiance, her enjoyment of the role, ran out.
She was sobbing against his overcoat, “How can
you shame me so?” and he was blubbering, “Dog-gone
it, I meant to give you some, and I forgot it.
I swear I won’t again. By golly I won’t!”
He pressed fifty dollars upon her, and after that
he remembered to give her money regularly . . . sometimes.
Daily she determined, “But I must have a stated
amount—be business-like. System.
I must do something about it.” And daily
she didn’t do anything about it.
Mrs. Bogart had, by the simpering viciousness of her
comments on the new furniture, stirred Carol to economy.
She spoke judiciously to Bea about left-overs.
She read the cookbook again and, like a child with
a picture-book, she studied the diagram of the beef
which gallantly continues to browse though it is divided
into cuts.
But she was a deliberate and joyous spendthrift in
her preparations for her first party, the housewarming.
She made lists on every envelope and laundry-slip
in her desk. She sent orders to Minneapolis “fancy
grocers.” She pinned patterns and sewed.
She was irritated when Kennicott was jocular about
“these frightful big doings that are going on.”
She regarded the affair as an attack on Gopher Prairie’s
timidity in pleasure. “I’ll make
’em lively, if nothing else. I’ll
make ’em stop regarding parties as committee-meetings.”
Kennicott usually considered himself the master of
the house. At his desire, she went hunting, which
was his symbol of happiness, and she ordered porridge
for breakfast, which was his symbol of morality.
But when he came home on the afternoon before the
housewarming he found himself a slave, an intruder,
a blunderer. Carol wailed, “Fix the furnace
so you won’t have to touch it after supper.
And for heaven’s sake take that horrible old
door-mat off the porch. And put on your nice
brown and white shirt. Why did you come home so
late? Would you mind hurrying? Here it is
almost suppertime, and those fiends are just as likely
as not to come at seven instead of eight. Please
hurry!”
She was as unreasonable as an amateur leading woman
on a first night, and he was reduced to humility.
When she came down to supper, when she stood in the
doorway, he gasped. She was in a silver sheath,
the calyx of a lily, her piled hair like black glass;
she had the fragility and costliness of a Viennese
goblet; and her eyes were intense. He was stirred
to rise from the table and to hold the chair for her;
and all through supper he ate his bread dry because
he felt that she would think him common if he said
“Will you hand me the butter?”
She had reached the calmness of not caring whether
her guests liked the party or not, and a state of
satisfied suspense in regard to Bea’s technique
in serving, before Kennicott cried from the bay-window
in the living-room, “Here comes somebody!”
and Mr. and Mrs. Luke Dawson faltered in, at a quarter
to eight. Then in a shy avalanche arrived the
entire aristocracy of Gopher Prairie: all persons
engaged in a profession, or earning more than twenty-five
hundred dollars a year, or possessed of grandparents
born in America.
