in childish tea-parties, and, with the mystic bond between them
forgotten, was healthily vexed by Carol's assumption that she was a
sociological messiah come to save Gopher Prairie. This last facet of
Vida's thought was the one which, after a year, was most often turned to
the light. In a testy way she brooded, "These people that want to change
everything all of a sudden without doing any work, make me tired! Here I
have to go and work for four years, picking out the pupils for
debates, and drilling them, and nagging at them to get them to look up
references, and begging them to choose their own subjects--four years,
to get up a couple of good debates! And she comes rushing in, and
expects in one year to change the whole town into a lollypop paradise
with everybody stopping everything else to grow tulips and drink tea.
And it's a comfy homey old town, too!"

She had such an outburst after each of Carol's campaigns--for better
Thanatopsis programs, for Shavian plays, for more human schools--but she
never betrayed herself, and always she was penitent.

Vida was, and always would be, a reformer, a liberal. She believed that
details could excitingly be altered, but that things-in-general were
comely and kind and immutable. Carol was, without understanding or
accepting it, a revolutionist, a radical, and therefore possessed of
"constructive ideas," which only the destroyer can have, since the
reformer believes that all the essential constructing has already been
done. After years of intimacy it was this unexpressed opposition more
than the fancied loss of Kennicott's love which held Vida irritably
fascinated.

But the birth of Hugh revived the transcendental emotion. She was
indignant that Carol should not be utterly fulfilled in having borne