Carol used to sigh over the impossibility of having a beau night. She
said that she had often heard that husbands couldn't be sweethearts,
but she had never believed it before. Pinned down to facts, however,
she admitted she preferred the husband.

Mornings Carol was busy with housework, talking to herself without
intermission as she worked. And David spent long hours in his study,
poring over enormous books that Carol insisted made her head ache from
the outside and would probably give her infantile paralysis if she
dared to peep between the covers. Afternoons were the aid societies,
missionary societies, and all the rest of them, and then the endless
calls,--calls on the sick, calls on the healthy, calls on the pillars,
calls on the backsliders, calls on the very sad, calls on the very
happy,--every varying phase of life in a church community merits a call
from the minister and his wife.

The heavy yoke,--the yoke of dead routine,--dogs the footsteps of every
minister, and even more, of every minister's wife. But Carol thought
of the folks that fitted into the cogs of the routine to drive it round
and round,--the teachers, the doctors' wives, the free-thinkers, the
mothers, the professional women, the cynics, the pillars of the
church,--and thinking of the folks, she forgot the routine. And so to
her, routine could never prove a clog, stagnation. Every meeting
brought her a fresh revelation, they amused her, those people, they
puzzled her, sometimes they made her sad and frightened her, as they
taught her facts of life they had gleaned from wide experience and
often in bitter tears. Still, they were folks, and Carol had always
had a passion for people.