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III

The Little Theaters,3 which were to give piquancy to American drama three or four years later, were only in embryo. But of this fast-coming revolt Carol had premonitions. She knew from some lost magazine article that in Dublin were innovators called The Irish Players.ck She knew confusedly that a man named Gordon Craigcl had painted scenery—or had he written plays? She felt that in the turbulence of the drama she was discovering a history more important than the commonplace chronicles which dealt with senators and their pompous puerilities. She had a sensation of familiarity; a dream of sitting in a Brussels café and going afterward to a tiny gay theater under a cathedral wall.

The advertisement in the Minneapolis paper leaped from the page to her eyes:

The Cosmos School of Music, Oratory, and Dramatic Art announces a program of four one-act plays by Schnitzler, Shaw, Yeats, and Lord Dunsany.cm

She had to be there! She begged Kennicott to “run down to the Cities” with her.

“Well, I don’t know. Be fun to take in a show, but why the deuce do you want to see those darn foreign plays, given by a lot of amateurs? Why don’t you wait for a regular play, later on? There’s going to be some corkers coming: ‘Lottie of Two-Gun Rancho,’ and ‘Cops and Crooks’—real Broadway stuff, with the New York casts. What’s this junk you want to see? Hm. ‘How He Lied to Her Husband.’cn That doesn’t listen so bad. Sounds racy. And, uh, well, I could go to the motor show, I suppose. I’d like to see this new Hup roadster. Well—”

She never knew which attraction made him decide.

She had four days of delightful worry—over the hole in her one good silk petticoat, the loss of a string of beads from her chiffon and brown velvet frock, the catsup stain on her best georgette crepe blouse. She wailed, “I haven’t a single solitary thing that’s fit to be seen in,” and enjoyed herself very much indeed.

Kennicott sent about casually letting people know that he was “going to run down to the Cities and see some shows.”

As the train plodded through the gray prairie, on a windless day with the smoke from the engine clinging to the fields in giant cotton-rolls, in a low and writhing wall which shut off the snowy fields, she did not look out of the window. She closed her eyes and hummed, and did not know that she was humming.

She was the young poet attacking fame and Paris.

In the Minneapolis station the crowd of lumberjacks, farmers, and Swedish families with innumerous children and grandparents and paper parcels, their foggy crowding and their clamor confused her. She felt rustic in this once familiar city, after a year and a half of Gopher Prairie. She was certain that Kennicott was taking the wrong trolley-car. By dusk, the liquor warehouses, Hebraic clothing-shops, and lodging-houses on lower Hennepin Avenue were smoky, hideous, ill-tempered. She was battered by the noise and shuttling of the rush-hour traffic. When a clerk in an overcoat too closely fitted at the waist stared at her, she moved nearer to Kennicott’s arm. The clerk was flippant and urban. He was a superior person, used to this tumult. Was he laughing at her?

For a moment she wanted the secure quiet of Gopher Prairie.

In the hotel-lobby she was self-conscious. She was not used to hotels; she remembered with jealousy how often Juanita Haydock talked of the famous hotels in Chicago. She could not face the traveling salesmen, baronial in large leather chairs. She wanted people to believe that her husband and she were accustomed to luxury and chill elegance; she was faintly angry at him for the vulgar way in which, after signing the register “Dr. W. P. Kennicott & wife,” he bellowed at the clerk, “Got a nice room with bath for us, old man?” She gazed about haughtily, but as she discovered that no one was interested in her she felt foolish, and ashamed of her irritation.

She asserted, “This silly lobby is too florid,” and simultaneously she admired it: the onyx columns with gilt capitals, the crown-embroidered velvet curtains at the restaurant