But a week later, though the snow was everywhere in slushy heaps, the promise was unmistakable.  By the invisible hints in air and sky and earth which had aroused her every year through ten thousand generations she knew that spring was coming.  It was not a scorching, hard, dusty day like the treacherous intruder of a week before, but soaked with languor, softened with a milky light.  Rivulets were hurrying in each alley; a calling robin appeared by magic on the crab-apple tree in the Howlands’ yard.  Everybody chuckled, “Looks like winter is going,” and “This ’ll bring the frost out of the roads—­have the autos out pretty soon now—­wonder what kind of bass-fishing we’ll get this summer—­ought to be good crops this year.”

Each evening Kennicott repeated, “We better not take off our Heavy Underwear or the storm windows too soon—­might be ’nother spell of cold—­got to be careful ’bout catching cold—­wonder if the coal will last through?”

The expanding forces of life within her choked the desire for reforming.  She trotted through the house, planning the spring cleaning with Bea.  When she attended her second meeting of the Thanatopsis she said nothing about remaking the town.  She listened respectably to statistics on Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Scott, Hardy, Lamb, De Quincey, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, who, it seemed, constituted the writers of English Fiction and Essays.

Not till she inspected the rest-room did she again become a fanatic.  She had often glanced at the store-building which had been turned into a refuge in which farmwives could wait while their husbands transacted business.  She had heard Vida Sherwin and Mrs. Warren caress the virtue of the Thanatopsis in establishing the rest-room and in sharing with the city council the expense of maintaining it.  But she had never entered it till this March day.

She went in impulsively; nodded at the matron, a plump worthy widow named Nodelquist, and at a couple of farm-women who were meekly rocking.  The rest-room resembled a second-hand store.  It was furnished with discarded patent rockers, lopsided reed chairs, a scratched pine table, a gritty straw mat, old steel engravings of milkmaids being morally amorous under willow-trees, faded chromos of roses and fish, and a kerosene stove for warming lunches.  The front window was darkened by torn net curtains and by a mound of geraniums and rubber-plants.

While she was listening to Mrs. Nodelquist’s account of how many thousands of farmers’ wives used the rest-room every year, and how much they “appreciated the kindness of the ladies in providing them with this lovely place, and all free,” she thought, “Kindness nothing!  The kind-ladies’ husbands get the farmers’ trade.  This is mere commercial accommodation.  And it’s horrible.  It ought to be the most charming room in town, to comfort women sick of prairie kitchens.  Certainly it ought to have a clear window, so that they can see the metropolitan life go by.  Some day I’m going to make a better rest-room—­a club-room.  Why!  I’ve already planned that as part of my Georgian town hall!”