The tragicomedy of the “domestic situation.”

Oscarina went back home to help on the farm, and Carol had a succession of maids, with gaps between.  The lack of servants was becoming one of the most cramping problems of the prairie town.  Increasingly the farmers’ daughters rebelled against village dullness, and against the unchanged attitude of the Juanitas toward “hired girls.”  They went off to city kitchens, or to city shops and factories, that they might be free and even human after hours.

The Jolly Seventeen were delighted at Carol’s desertion by the loyal Oscarina.  They reminded her that she had said, “I don’t have any trouble with maids; see how Oscarina stays on.”

Between incumbencies of Finn maids from the North Woods, Germans from the prairies, occasional Swedes and Norwegians and Icelanders, Carol did her own work—­and endured Aunt Bessie’s skittering in to tell her how to dampen a broom for fluffy dust, how to sugar doughnuts, how to stuff a goose.  Carol was deft, and won shy praise from Kennicott, but as her shoulder blades began to sting, she wondered how many millions of women had lied to themselves during the death-rimmed years through which they had pretended to enjoy the puerile methods persisting in housework.

She doubted the convenience and, as a natural sequent, the sanctity of the monogamous and separate home which she had regarded as the basis of all decent life.

She considered her doubts vicious.  She refused to remember how many of the women of the Jolly Seventeen nagged their husbands and were nagged by them.

She energetically did not whine to Kennicott.  But her eyes ached; she was not the girl in breeches and a flannel shirt who had cooked over a camp-fire in the Colorado mountains five years ago.  Her ambition was to get to bed at nine; her strongest emotion was resentment over rising at half-past six to care for Hugh.  The back of her neck ached as she got out of bed.  She was cynical about the joys of a simple laborious life.  She understood why workmen and workmen’s wives are not grateful to their kind employers.

At mid-morning, when she was momentarily free from the ache in her neck and back, she was glad of the reality of work.  The hours were living and nimble.  But she had no desire to read the eloquent little newspaper essays in praise of labor which are daily written by the white-browed journalistic prophets.  She felt independent and (though she hid it) a bit surly.

In cleaning the house she pondered upon the maid’s-room.  It was a slant-roofed, small-windowed hole above the kitchen, oppressive in summer, frigid in winter.  She saw that while she had been considering herself an unusually good mistress, she had been permitting her friends Bea and Oscarina to live in a sty.  She complained to Kennicott.  “What’s the matter with it?” he growled, as they stood on the perilous stairs dodging up from the kitchen.  She commented upon the sloping roof of unplastered boards stained in brown rings by the rain, the uneven floor, the cot and its tumbled discouraged-looking quilts, the broken rocker, the distorting mirror.