Except Dave Dyer, Sam Clark, and Raymie Wutherspoon, there were no merchants of whose welcome Carol was certain.  She knew that she read mockery into greetings but she could not control her suspicion, could not rise from her psychic collapse.  She alternately raged and flinched at the superiority of the merchants.  They did not know that they were being rude, but they meant to have it understood that they were prosperous and “not scared of no doctor’s wife.”  They often said, “One man’s as good as another—­and a darn sight better.”  This motto, however, they did not commend to farmer customers who had had crop failures.  The Yankee merchants were crabbed; and Ole Jenson, Ludelmeyer, and Gus Dahl, from the “Old Country,” wished to be taken for Yankees.  James Madison Howland, born in New Hampshire, and Ole Jenson, born in Sweden, both proved that they were free American citizens by grunting, “I don’t know whether I got any or not,” or “Well, you can’t expect me to get it delivered by noon.”

It was good form for the customers to fight back.  Juanita Haydock cheerfully jabbered, “You have it there by twelve or I’ll snatch that fresh delivery-boy bald-headed.”  But Carol had never been able to play the game of friendly rudeness; and now she was certain that she never would learn it.  She formed the cowardly habit of going to Axel Egge’s.

Axel was not respectable and rude.  He was still a foreigner, and he expected to remain one.  His manner was heavy and uninterrogative.  His establishment was more fantastic than any cross-roads store.  No one save Axel himself could find anything.  A part of the assortment of children’s stockings was under a blanket on a shelf, a part in a tin ginger-snap box, the rest heaped like a nest of black-cotton snakes upon a flour-barrel which was surrounded by brooms, Norwegian Bibles, dried cod for ludfisk, boxes of apricots, and a pair and a half of lumbermen’s rubber-footed boots.  The place was crowded with Scandinavian farmwives, standing aloof in shawls and ancient fawn-colored leg o’ mutton jackets, awaiting the return of their lords.  They spoke Norwegian or Swedish, and looked at Carol uncomprehendingly.  They were a relief to her—­they were not whispering that she was a poseur.

But what she told herself was that Axel Egge’s was “so picturesque and romantic.”

It was in the matter of clothes that she was most self-conscious.

When she dared to go shopping in her new checked suit with the black-embroidered sulphur collar, she had as good as invited all of Gopher Prairie (which interested itself in nothing so intimately as in new clothes and the cost thereof) to investigate her.  It was a smart suit with lines unfamiliar to the dragging yellow and pink frocks of the town.  The Widow Bogart’s stare, from her porch, indicated, “Well I never saw anything like that before!” Mrs. McGanum stopped Carol at the notions shop to hint, “My, that’s a nice suit—­wasn’t it terribly expensive?” The gang of boys in front of the drug store commented, “Hey, Pudgie, play you a game of checkers on that dress.”  Carol could not endure it.  She drew her fur coat over the suit and hastily fastened the buttons, while the boys snickered.