No group angered her quite so much as these staring
young roues.
She had tried to convince herself that the village,
with its fresh air, its lakes for fishing and swimming,
was healthier than the artificial city. But she
was sickened by glimpses of the gang of boys from fourteen
to twenty who loafed before Dyer’s Drug Store,
smoking cigarettes, displaying “fancy”
shoes and purple ties and coats of diamond-shaped
buttons, whistling the Hoochi-Koochi and catcalling,
“Oh, you baby-doll” at every passing girl.
She saw them playing pool in the stinking room behind
Del Snafflin’s barber shop, and shaking dice
in “The Smoke House,” and gathered in
a snickering knot to listen to the “juicy stories”
of Bert Tybee, the bartender of the Minniemashie House.
She heard them smacking moist lips over every love-scene
at the Rosebud Movie Palace. At the counter of
the Greek Confectionery Parlor, while they ate dreadful
messes of decayed bananas, acid cherries, whipped
cream, and gelatinous ice-cream, they screamed to
one another, “Hey, lemme ’lone,”
“Quit dog-gone you, looka what you went and
done, you almost spilled my glass swater,” “Like
hell I did,” “Hey, gol darn your hide,
don’t you go sticking your coffin nail in my
i-scream,” “Oh you Batty, how juh like
dancing with Tillie McGuire, last night? Some
squeezing, heh, kid?”
By diligent consultation of American fiction she discovered
that this was the only virile and amusing manner in
which boys could function; that boys who were not
compounded of the gutter and the mining-camp were
mollycoddles and unhappy. She had taken this for
granted. She had studied the boys pityingly,
but impersonally. It had not occurred to her
that they might touch her.
Now she was aware that they knew all about her; that
they were waiting for some affectation over which
they could guffaw. No schoolgirl passed their
observation-posts more flushingly than did Mrs. Dr.
Kennicott. In shame she knew that they glanced
appraisingly at her snowy overshoes, speculating about
her legs. Theirs were not young eyes—there
was no youth in all the town, she agonized. They
were born old, grim and old and spying and censorious.
She cried again that their youth was senile and cruel
on the day when she overheard Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock.
Cyrus N. Bogart, son of the righteous widow who lived
across the alley, was at this time a boy of fourteen
or fifteen. Carol had already seen quite enough
of Cy Bogart. On her first evening in Gopher Prairie
Cy had appeared at the head of a “charivari,”
banging immensely upon a discarded automobile fender.
His companions were yelping in imitation of coyotes.
Kennicott had felt rather complimented; had gone out
and distributed a dollar. But Cy was a capitalist
in charivaris. He returned with an entirely new
group, and this time there were three automobile fenders
and a carnival rattle. When Kennicott again interrupted
