Miss Villets emphatically stamped a date in the front of “Frank on the Lower Mississippi” for a small flaxen boy, glowered at him as though she were stamping a warning on his brain, and sighed: 

“I wouldn’t put myself forward or criticize any one for the world, and Vida is one of my best friends, and such a splendid teacher, and there is no one in town more advanced and interested in all movements, but I must say that no matter who the president or the committees are, Vida Sherwin seems to be behind them all the time, and though she is always telling me about what she is pleased to call my ’fine work in the library,’ I notice that I’m not often called on for papers, though Mrs. Lyman Cass once volunteered and told me that she thought my paper on ‘The Cathedrals of England’ was the most interesting paper we had, the year we took up English and French travel and architecture.  But——­And of course Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Warren are very important in the club, as you might expect of the wives of the superintendent of schools and the Congregational pastor, and indeed they are both very cultured, but——­No, you may regard me as entirely unimportant.  I’m sure what I say doesn’t matter a bit!”

“You’re much too modest, and I’m going to tell Vida so, and, uh, I wonder if you can give me just a teeny bit of your time and show me where the magazine files are kept?”

She had won.  She was profusely escorted to a room like a grandmother’s attic, where she discovered periodicals devoted to house-decoration and town-planning, with a six-year file of the National Geographic.  Miss Villets blessedly left her alone.  Humming, fluttering pages with delighted fingers, Carol sat cross-legged on the floor, the magazines in heaps about her.

She found pictures of New England streets:  the dignity of Falmouth, the charm of Concord, Stockbridge and Farmington and Hillhouse Avenue.  The fairy-book suburb of Forest Hills on Long Island.  Devonshire cottages and Essex manors and a Yorkshire High Street and Port Sunlight.  The Arab village of Djeddah—­an intricately chased jewel-box.  A town in California which had changed itself from the barren brick fronts and slatternly frame sheds of a Main Street to a way which led the eye down a vista of arcades and gardens.

Assured that she was not quite mad in her belief that a small American town might be lovely, as well as useful in buying wheat and selling plows, she sat brooding, her thin fingers playing a tattoo on her cheeks.  She saw in Gopher Prairie a Georgian city hall:  warm brick walls with white shutters, a fanlight, a wide hall and curving stair.  She saw it the common home and inspiration not only of the town but of the country about.  It should contain the court-room (she couldn’t get herself to put in a jail), public library, a collection of excellent prints, rest-room and model kitchen for farmwives, theater, lecture room, free community ballroom, farm-bureau, gymnasium.  Forming about it and influenced by it, as mediaeval villages gathered about the castle, she saw a new Georgian town as graceful and beloved as Annapolis or that bowery Alexandria to which Washington rode.