A year Carol spent in Chicago. Her study of library-cataloguing,
recording, books of reference, was easy and not too
somniferous. She reveled in the Art Institute,
in symphonies and violin recitals and chamber music,
in the theater and classic dancing. She almost
gave up library work to become one of the young women
who dance in cheese-cloth in the moonlight. She
was taken to a certified Studio Party, with beer,
cigarettes, bobbed hair, and a Russian Jewess who sang
the Internationale. It cannot be reported that
Carol had anything significant to say to the Bohemians.
She was awkward with them, and felt ignorant, and
she was shocked by the free manners which she had for
years desired. But she heard and remembered discussions
of Freud, Romain Rolland, syndicalism, the Confederation
Generale du Travail, feminism vs. haremism, Chinese
lyrics, nationalization of mines, Christian Science,
and fishing in Ontario.
She went home, and that was the beginning and end
of her Bohemian life.
The second cousin of Carol’s sister’s
husband lived in Winnetka, and once invited her out
to Sunday dinner. She walked back through Wilmette
and Evanston, discovered new forms of suburban architecture,
and remembered her desire to recreate villages.
She decided that she would give up library work and,
by a miracle whose nature was not very clearly revealed
to her, turn a prairie town into Georgian houses and
Japanese bungalows.
The next day in library class she had to read a theme
on the use of the Cumulative Index, and she was taken
so seriously in the discussion that she put off her
career of town-planning—and in the autumn
she was in the public library of St. Paul.
Carol was not unhappy and she was not exhilarated,
in the St. Paul Library. She slowly confessed
that she was not visibly affecting lives. She
did, at first, put into her contact with the patrons
a willingness which should have moved worlds.
But so few of these stolid worlds wanted to be moved.
When she was in charge of the magazine room the readers
did not ask for suggestions about elevated essays.
They grunted, “Wanta find the Leather Goods
Gazette for last February.” When she was
giving out books the principal query was, “Can
you tell me of a good, light, exciting love story
to read? My husband’s going away for a week.”
She was fond of the other librarians; proud of their
aspirations. And by the chance of propinquity
she read scores of books unnatural to her gay white
littleness: volumes of anthropology with ditches
of foot-notes filled with heaps of small dusty type,
Parisian imagistes, Hindu recipes for curry, voyages
to the Solomon Isles, theosophy with modern American
improvements, treatises upon success in the real-estate
business. She took walks, and was sensible about
shoes and diet. And never did she feel that she
was living.
She went to dances and suppers at the houses of college
acquaintances. Sometimes she one-stepped demurely;
sometimes, in dread of life’s slipping past,
she turned into a bacchanal, her tender eyes excited,
her throat tense, as she slid down the room.
