Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [58]
“Oh yes, Gopher Prairie isn’t so much behind the times,” gibed Mrs. Howard. Some one giggled.
Their rebuffs made her haughty; her haughtiness irritated them to franker rebuffs; they were working up to a state of painfully righteous war when they were saved by the coming of food.
Though Juanita Haydock was highly advanced in the matters of finger-bowls, doilies, and bath-mats, her “refreshments” were typical of all the afternoon-coffees. Juanita’s best friends, Mrs. Dyer and Mrs. Dashaway, passed large dinner plates, each with a spoon, a fork, and a coffee cup without saucer. They apologized and discussed the afternoon’s game as they passed through the thicket of women’s feet. Then they distributed hot buttered rolls, coffee poured from an enamel-ware pot, stuffed olives, potato salad, and angel‘s-food cake. There was, even in the most strictly conforming Gopher Prairie circles, a certain option as to collations. The olives need not be stuffed. Doughnuts were in some houses well thought of as a substitute for the hot buttered rolls. But there was in all the town no heretic save Carol who omitted angel’s-food.
They ate enormously. Carol had a suspicion that the thriftier housewives made the afternoon treat do for evening supper.
She tried to get back into the current. She edged over to Mrs. McGanum. Chunky, amiable, young Mrs. McGanum, with her breast and arms of a milkmaid, and her loud delayed laugh which burst startlingly from a sober face, was the daughter of old Dr. Westlake, and the wife of Westlake’s partner, Dr. McGanum. Kennicott asserted that Westlake and McGanum and their contaminated families were tricky, but Carol had found them gracious. She asked for friendliness by crying to Mrs. McGanum, “How is the baby’s throat now?” and she was attentive while Mrs. McGanum rocked and knitted and placidly described symptoms.
Vida Sherwin came in after school, with Miss Ethel Villets, the town librarian. Miss Sherwin’s optimistic presence gave Carol more confidence. She talked. She informed the circle, “I drove almost down to Wahkeenyan with Will, a few days ago. Isn’t the country lovely! And I do admire the Scandinavian farmers down there so: their big red barns and silos and milking-machines and everything. Do you all know that lonely Lutheran church, with the tin-covered spire, that stands out alone on a hill? It’s so bleak; somehow it seems so brave. I do think the Scandinavians are the hardiest and best people—”
“Oh, do you think so?” protested Mrs. Jackson Elder. “My husband says the Svenskas that work in the planing-mill are perfectly terrible—so silent and cranky, and so selfish, the way they keep demanding raises. If they had their way they’d simply ruin the business.”
“Yes, and they’re simply ghastly hired girls!” wailed Mrs. Dave Dyer. “I swear, I work myself to skin and bone trying to please my hired girls—when I can get them! I do everything in the world for them. They can have their gentleman friends call on them in the kitchen any time, and they get just the same to eat as we do, if there’s any left over, and I practically never jump on them.”
Juanita Haydock rattled, “They’re ungrateful, all that class of people. I do think the domestic problem is simply becoming awful. I don’t know what the country’s coming to, with these Scandahoofian clodhoppers demanding every cent you can save, and so ignorant and impertinent, and on my word, demanding bath-tubs and everything—as if they weren’t mighty good and lucky at home if they got a bath in the wash-tub.”
They were off, riding hard. Carol thought