"I'll admit they aren't comfy like Gopher Prairie. But give 'em time."

"What's the use of giving them time unless some one has desire and
training enough to plan them? Hundreds of factories trying to make
attractive motor cars, but these towns--left to chance. No! That can't
be true. It must have taken genius to make them so scrawny!"

"Oh, they're not so bad," was all he answered. He pretended that his
hand was the cat and hers the mouse. For the first time she tolerated
him rather than encouraged him. She was staring out at Schoenstrom, a
hamlet of perhaps a hundred and fifty inhabitants, at which the train
was stopping.

A bearded German and his pucker-mouthed wife tugged their enormous
imitation-leather satchel from under a seat and waddled out. The station
agent hoisted a dead calf aboard the baggage-car. There were no other
visible activities in Schoenstrom. In the quiet of the halt, Carol could
hear a horse kicking his stall, a carpenter shingling a roof.

The business-center of Schoenstrom took up one side of one block, facing
the railroad. It was a row of one-story shops covered with galvanized
iron, or with clapboards painted red and bilious yellow. The buildings
were as ill-assorted, as temporary-looking, as a mining-camp street in
the motion-pictures. The railroad station was a one-room frame box, a
mirey cattle-pen on one side and a crimson wheat-elevator on the other.
The elevator, with its cupola on the ridge of a shingled roof, resembled
a broad-shouldered man with a small, vicious, pointed head. The only
habitable structures to be seen were the florid red-brick Catholic
church and rectory at the end of Main Street.