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.
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.
