Her “reforms,” her impulses toward beauty
in raw Main Street, they had become indistinct.
But she would set them going now. She would!
She swore it with soft fist beating the edges of the
radiator. And at the end of all her vows she
had no notion as to when and where the crusade was
to begin.
Become an authentic part of the town? She began
to think with unpleasant lucidity. She reflected
that she did not know whether the people liked her.
She had gone to the women at afternoon-coffees, to
the merchants in their stores, with so many outpouring
comments and whimsies that she hadn’t given
them a chance to betray their opinions of her.
The men smiled—but did they like her?
She was lively among the women—but was
she one of them? She could not recall many times
when she had been admitted to the whispering of scandal
which is the secret chamber of Gopher Prairie conversation.
She was poisoned with doubt, as she drooped up to
bed.
Next day, through her shopping, her mind sat back
and observed. Dave Dyer and Sam Clark were as
cordial as she had been fancying; but wasn’t
there an impersonal abruptness in the “H’
are yuh?” of Chet Dashaway? Howland the
grocer was curt. Was that merely his usual manner?
“It’s infuriating to have to pay attention
to what people think. In St. Paul I didn’t
care. But here I’m spied on. They’re
watching me. I mustn’t let it make me self-conscious,”
she coaxed herself—overstimulated by the
drug of thought, and offensively on the defensive.
A thaw which stripped the snow from the sidewalks;
a ringing iron night when the lakes could be heard
booming; a clear roistering morning. In tam o’shanter
and tweed skirt Carol felt herself a college junior
going out to play hockey. She wanted to whoop,
her legs ached to run. On the way home from shopping
she yielded, as a pup would have yielded. She
galloped down a block and as she jumped from a curb
across a welter of slush, she gave a student “Yippee!”
She saw that in a window three old women were gasping.
Their triple glare was paralyzing. Across the
street, at another window, the curtain had secretively
moved. She stopped, walked on sedately, changed
from the girl Carol into Mrs. Dr. Kennicott.
She never again felt quite young enough and defiant
enough and free enough to run and halloo in the public
streets; and it was as a Nice Married Woman that she
attended the next weekly bridge of the Jolly Seventeen.
The Jolly Seventeen (the membership of which ranged
from fourteen to twenty-six) was the social cornice
of Gopher Prairie. It was the country club, the
diplomatic set, the St. Cecilia, the Ritz oval room,
the Club de Vingt. To belong to it was to be
“in.” Though its membership partly
coincided with that of the Thanatopsis study club,
the Jolly Seventeen as a separate entity guffawed
at the Thanatopsis, and considered it middle-class
and even “highbrow.”
