seen on drives with Kennicott. In her fluid thought certain convictions
appeared, jaggedly, a fragment of an impression at a time, while she was
going to sleep, or manicuring her nails, or waiting for Kennicott.

These convictions she presented to Vida Sherwin--Vida
Wutherspoon--beside a radiator, over a bowl of not very good walnuts and
pecans from Uncle Whittier's grocery, on an evening when both Kennicott
and Raymie had gone out of town with the other officers of the Ancient
and Affiliated Order of Spartans, to inaugurate a new chapter at
Wakamin. Vida had come to the house for the night. She helped in putting
Hugh to bed, sputtering the while about his soft skin. Then they talked
till midnight.

What Carol said that evening, what she was passionately thinking, was
also emerging in the minds of women in ten thousand Gopher Prairies. Her
formulations were not pat solutions but visions of a tragic futility.
She did not utter them so compactly that they can be given in her words;
they were roughened with "Well, you see" and "if you get what I mean"
and "I don't know that I'm making myself clear." But they were definite
enough, and indignant enough.


III


In reading popular stories and seeing plays, asserted Carol, she
had found only two traditions of the American small town. The first
tradition, repeated in scores of magazines every month, is that the
American village remains the one sure abode of friendship, honesty,
and clean sweet marriageable girls. Therefore all men who succeed in