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There was, it seemed, no person in town who was not living a life of shame except Mrs. Bogart, and naturally she resented it.

She knew. She had always happened to be there. Once, she whispered, she was going by when an indiscreet window-shade had been left up a couple of inches. Once she had noticed a man and woman holding hands, and right at a Methodist sociable!

“Another thing—Heaven knows I never want to start trouble, but I can’t help what I see from my back steps, and I notice your hired girl Bea carrying on with the grocery boys and all—”

“Mrs. Bogart! I’d trust Bea as I would myself!”

“Oh, dearie, you don’t understand me! I’m sure she’s a good girl. I mean she’s green, and I hope that none of these horrid young men that there are around town will get her into trouble! It’s their parents’ fault, letting them run wild and hear evil things. If I had my way there wouldn’t be none of them, not boys nor girls neither, allowed to know anything about—about things till they was married. It’s terrible the bald way that some folks talk. It just shows and gives away what awful thoughts they got inside them, and there’s nothing can cure them except coming right to God and kneeling down like I do at prayer-meeting every Wednesday evening, and saying, ‘O God, I would be a miserable sinner except for thy grace.’

“I’d make every last one of these brats go to Sunday School and learn to think about nice things ’stead of about cigarettes and goings-on—and these dances they have at the lodges are the worst thing that ever happened to this town, lot of young men squeezing girls and finding out—Oh, it’s dreadful. I’ve told the mayor he ought to put a stop to them and—There was one boy in this town, I don’t want to be suspicious or uncharitable but—”

It was half an hour before Carol escaped.

She stopped on her own porch and thought viciously:

“If that woman is on the side of the angels, then I have no choice; I must be on the side of the devil. But—isn’t she like me? She too wants to ‘reform the town’! She too criticizes everybody! She too thinks the men are vulgar and limited! Am I like her? This is ghastly!”

That evening she did not merely consent to play cribbage with Kennicott; she urged him to play; and she worked up a hectic interest in land-deals and Sam Clark.

VIII

In courtship days Kennicott had shown her a photograph of Nels Erdstrom’s baby and log cabin, but she had never seen the Erdstroms. They had become merely “patients of the doctor.” Kennicott telephoned her on a mid-December afternoon, “Want to throw your coat on and drive out to Erdstrom’s with me? Fairly warm. Nels got the jaundice.”

“Oh yes!” She hastened to put on woolen stockings, high boots, sweater, muffler, cap, mittens.

The snow was too thick and the ruts frozen too hard for the motor. They drove out in a clumsy high carriage. Tucked over them was a blue woolen cover, prickly to her wrists, and outside of it a buffalo robe, humble and moth-eaten now, used ever since the bison herds had streaked the prairie a few miles to the west.

The scattered houses between which they passed in town were small and desolate in contrast to the expanse of huge snowy yards and wide street. They crossed the railroad tracks, and instantly were in the farm country. The big piebald horses snorted clouds of steam, and started to trot. The carriage squeaked in rhythm. Kennicott drove with clucks of “There boy, take it easy!” He was thinking. He paid no attention to Carol. Yet it was he who commented, “Pretty nice, over there,” as they approached an oak-grove where shifty winter sunlight quivered in the hollow between two snow-drifts.

They drove from the natural prairie to a cleared district which twenty years ago had been forest. The country seemed to stretch unchanging to the North Pole: low hill, brush-scraggly bottom, reedy creek, muskrat mound, fields with frozen brown clods thrust up through the snow.

Her ears and nose were pinched; her breath frosted her collar; her fingers ached.