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More interestedly, “I went to the U.” Fern meant the University of Minnesota.

“You must have had a splendid time. Blodgett was a bit dull.”

“Where were you a librarian?” challengingly.

“St. Paul—the main library.”

“Honest? Oh dear, I wish I was back in the Cities! This is my first year of teaching, and I’m scared stiff. I did have the best time in college: dramatics and basketball and fussing and dancing—I’m simply crazy about dancing. And here, except when I have the kids in gymnasium class, or when I’m chaperoning the basketball team on a trip out-of-town, I won’t dare to move above a whisper. I guess they don’t care much if you put any pep into teaching or not, as long as you look like a Good Influence out of school-hours—and that means never doing anything you want to. This normal course is bad enough, but the regular school will be fierce! If it wasn’t too late to get a job in the Cities, I swear I’d resign here. I bet I won’t dare to go to a single dance all winter. If I cut loose and danced the way I like to, they’d think I was a perfect hellion—poor harmless me! Oh, I oughtn’t to be talking like this. Fern, you never could be cagey!”

“Don’t be frightened, my dear! ... Doesn’t that sound atrociously old and kind! I’m talking to you the way Mrs. Westlake talks to me! That’s having a husband and a kitchen range, I suppose. But I feel young, and I want to dance like a—like a hellion?—too. So I sympathize.”

Fern made a sound of gratitude. Carol inquired, “What experience did you have with college dramatics? I tried to start a kind of Little Theater here. It was dreadful. I must tell you about it—”

Two hours later, when Kennicott came over to greet Fern and to yawn, “Look here, Carrie, don’t you suppose you better be thinking about turning in? I’ve got a hard day tomorrow,” the two were talking so intimately that they constantly interrupted each other.

As she went respectably home, convoyed by a husband, and decorously holding up her skirts, Carol rejoiced, “Everything has changed! I have two friends, Fern and—But who’s the other? That’s queer; I thought there was—Oh, how absurd!”

V

She often passed Erik Valborg on the street; the brown jersey coat became unremarkable. When she was driving with Kennicott, in early evening, she saw him on the lake shore, reading a thin book which might easily have been poetry. She noted that he was the only person in the motorized town who still took long walks.

She told herself that she was the daughter of a judge, the wife of a doctor, and that she did not care to know a capering tailor. She told herself that she was not responsive to men ... not even to Percy Bresnahan. She told herself that a woman of thirty who heeded a boy of twenty-five was ridiculous. And on Friday, when she had convinced herself that the errand was necessary, she went to Nat Hicks’s shop, bearing the not very romantic burden of a pair of her husband’s trousers. Hicks was in the back room. She faced the Greek god who, in a somewhat ungodlike way, was stitching a coat on a scaley sewing-machine, in a room of smutted plaster walls.

She saw that his hands were not in keeping with a Hellenic face. They were thick, roughened with needle and hot iron and plow-handle. Even in the shop he persisted in his finery. He wore a silk shirt, a topaz scarf, thin tan shoes.

This she absorbed while she was saying curtly, “Can I get these pressed, please?”

Not rising from the sewing-machine he stuck out his hand, mumbled, “When do you want them?”

“Oh, Monday.”

The adventure was over. She was marching out.

“What name?” he called after her.

He had risen and, despite the farcicality of Dr. Will Kennicott’s bulgy trousers draped over his arm, he had the grace of a cat.

“Kennicott.”

“Kennicott. Oh! Oh say, you’re Mrs. Dr. Kennicott then, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” She stood at the door. Now that she had carried out her preposterous impulse to see what he was like, she was cold, she was as ready to detect familiarities as the virtuous Miss Ella Stowbody.

“I’ve heard about you. Myrtle Cass was saying you got up a dramatic