But Carol could not yet take her in.  She resented this outsider’s knowledge of her shame.  Vida was not too long tolerant.  She hinted, “You’re a great brooder, child.  Buck up now.  The town’s quit criticizing you, almost entirely.  Come with me to the Thanatopsis Club.  They have some of the best papers, and current-events discussions—­so interesting.”

In Vida’s demands Carol felt a compulsion, but she was too listless to obey.

It was Bea Sorenson who was really her confidante.

However charitable toward the Lower Classes she may have thought herself, Carol had been reared to assume that servants belong to a distinct and inferior species.  But she discovered that Bea was extraordinarily like girls she had loved in college, and as a companion altogether superior to the young matrons of the Jolly Seventeen.  Daily they became more frankly two girls playing at housework.  Bea artlessly considered Carol the most beautiful and accomplished lady in the country; she was always shrieking, “My, dot’s a swell hat!” or, “Ay t’ink all dese ladies yoost die when dey see how elegant you do your hair!” But it was not the humbleness of a servant, nor the hypocrisy of a slave; it was the admiration of Freshman for Junior.

They made out the day’s menus together.  Though they began with propriety, Carol sitting by the kitchen table and Bea at the sink or blacking the stove, the conference was likely to end with both of them by the table, while Bea gurgled over the ice-man’s attempt to kiss her, or Carol admitted, “Everybody knows that the doctor is lots more clever than Dr. McGanum.”  When Carol came in from marketing, Bea plunged into the hall to take off her coat, rub her frostied hands, and ask, “Vos dere lots of folks up-town today?”

This was the welcome upon which Carol depended.

VI

Through her weeks of cowering there was no change in her surface life.  No one save Vida was aware of her agonizing.  On her most despairing days she chatted to women on the street, in stores.  But without the protection of Kennicott’s presence she did not go to the Jolly Seventeen; she delivered herself to the judgment of the town only when she went shopping and on the ritualistic occasions of formal afternoon calls, when Mrs. Lyman Cass or Mrs. George Edwin Mott, with clean gloves and minute handkerchiefs and sealskin card-cases and countenances of frozen approbation, sat on the edges of chairs and inquired, “Do you find Gopher Prairie pleasing?” When they spent evenings of social profit-and-loss at the Haydocks’ or the Dyers’ she hid behind Kennicott, playing the simple bride.

Now she was unprotected.  Kennicott had taken a patient to Rochester for an operation.  He would be away for two or three days.  She had not minded; she would loosen the matrimonial tension and be a fanciful girl for a time.  But now that he was gone the house was listeningly empty.  Bea was out this afternoon—­presumably drinking coffee and talking about “fellows” with her cousin Tina.  It was the day for the monthly supper and evening-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, but Carol dared not go.