Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [160]
His large hands, sensual lips, easy voice supported his self-confidence. He made her feel young and soft—as Kennicott had once made her feel. She had nothing to say when he bent his powerful head and experimented, “My dear, I’m sorry I’m going away from this town. You’d be a darling child to play with. You are pretty! Some day in Boston I’ll show you how we buy a lunch. Well, hang it, got to be starting back.”
The only answer to his gospel of beef which she could find, when she was home, was a wail of “But just the same—”
She did not see him again before he departed for Washington.
His eyes remained. His glances at her lips and hair and shoulders had revealed to her that she was not a wife-and-mother alone, but a girl; that there still were men in the world, as there had been in college days.
That admiration led her to study Kennicott, to tear at the shroud of intimacy, to perceive the strangeness of the most familiar.
CHAPTER 24
All that midsummer month Carol was sensitive to Kennicott. She recalled a hundred grotesqueries: her comic dismay at his having chewed tobacco, the evening when she had tried to read poetry to him; matters which had seemed to vanish with no trace or sequence. Always she repeated that he had been heroically patient in his desire to join the army. She made much of her consoling affection for him in little things. She liked the homeliness of his tinkering about the house; his strength and handiness as he tightened the hinges of a shutter; his boyishness when he ran to her to be comforted because he had found rust in the barrel of his pump-gun. But at the highest he was to her another Hugh, without the glamor of Hugh’s unknown future.
There was, late in June, a day of heat-lightning.
Because of the work imposed by the absence of the other doctors the Kennicotts had not moved to the lake cottage but remained in town, dusty and irritable. In the afternoon, when she went to Oleson & McGuire’s (formerly Dahl & Oleson’s), Carol was vexed by the assumption of the youthful clerk, recently come from the farm, that he had to be neighborly and rude. He was no more brusquely familiar than a dozen other clerks of the town, but her nerves were heat-scorched.
When she asked for codfish, for supper, he grunted, “What d’you want that darned old dry stuff for?”
“I like it!”
“Punk! Guess the doc can afford something better than that. Try some of the new wienies we got in. Swell. The Haydocks use ’em.”
She exploded. “My dear young man, it is not your duty to instruct me in housekeeping, and it doesn’t particularly concern me what the Haydocks condescend to approve!”
He was hurt. He hastily wrapped up the leprous fragment of fish; he gaped as she trailed out. She lamented, “I shouldn’t have spoken so. He didn’t mean anything. He doesn’t know when he is being rude.”
Her repentance was not proof against Uncle Whittier when she stopped in at his grocery for salt and a package of safety matches. Uncle Whittier, in a shirt collarless and soaked with sweat in a brown streak down his back, was whining at a clerk, “Come on now, get a hustle on and lug that pound cake up to Mis’ Cass’s. Some folks in this town think a storekeeper ain’t got nothing to do but chase out ‘phone-orders.... Hello, Carrie. That dress you got on looks kind of low in the neck to me. May be decent and modest—I suppose I’m old-fashioned—but I never thought much of showing the whole town a woman’s bust! Hee, hee, hee! ... Afternoon, Mrs. Hicks. Sage? Just out of it. Lemme sell you some other spices. Heh?” Uncle Whittier was nasally indignant. “Certainly! Got plenty