and of distance would emphasize the types she was now seeing, and that by the
middle of the winter, when once more in her New York apartment, her present
experiences and observations would have the right perspective, and their salient
features would stand out more plainly. So she won the hearts of her hostess, and
of the dozen or more children of the house, with small gifts, and overjoyed with
this she set about making the whole community happier. Little presents, smiles,
and kind words meant so much to the overworked, hopeless women, and her cheery
manner was so pleasant to men and children, that all worshipped her--clumsily
and mutely, but whole-heartedly. She was a fairy lady to them.

The truth was that, in her eagerness to secure the most vivid kind of local
color, she had gone a step too far. Clarence, with its decayed sidewalks and
rotting buildings, was not typical of middle Iowa any more than a stagnant pool
lift by a receded river after a flood is typical of the river itself. Before the
days of railroads Clarence had been a lively little town, but it was on the top
of a hill, and, when the engineer of the Jefferson Western Railroad had laid his
ruler on the map and had drawn a straight line across Iowa to represent the
course of the road, Clarence had been left ten or twelve miles to one side, and,
as the town was not important enough to justify spoiling the beauty of the
straight line by putting a curve in it, a station was marked on the road at the
point nearest Clarence, and called Kilo. For a while the new station was merely
a sidetrack on the level prairie, a convenience for the men of Clarence, but
before Clarence knew how it had happened Kilo was a flourishing town, and the
older town on the hill had begun to decay. Even while Clarence was still
sneering at Kilo as a sidetrack village, Kilo had begun to sneer at Clarence as
a played-out crossroads settlement. Clarence, when Mrs. Tarbro-Smith visited
it, was no more typical of middle Iowa than a sunfish really resembles the sun.

In Clarence Mrs. Smith's best loved and best loving admirer was Susan, daughter
of her hostess, and, to Mrs. Smith, Susan was the long sought and impossible--a