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“I know, but the poor souls———Well, I’m sure you will agree with me in one thing: The chief task of a librarian is to get people to read.”

“You feel so? My feeling, Mrs. Kennicott, and I am merely quoting the librarian of a very large college, is that the first duty of the conscientious librarian is to preserve the books.”

“Oh!” Carol repented her “Oh.” Miss Villets stiffened, and attacked:

“It may be all very well in cities, where they have unlimited funds, to let nasty children ruin books and just deliberately tear them up, and fresh young men take more books out than they are entitled to by the regulations, but I’m never going to permit it in this library!”

“What if some children are destructive? They learn to read. Books are cheaper than minds.”

“Nothing is cheaper than the minds of some of these children that come in and bother me simply because their mothers don’t keep them home where they belong. Some librarians may choose to be so wishy-washy and turn their libraries into nursing-homes and kindergartens, but as long as I’m in charge, the Gopher Prairie library is going to be quiet and decent, and the books well kept!”

Carol saw that the others were listening, waiting for her to be objectionable. She flinched before their dislike. She hastened to smile in agreement with Miss Villets, to glance publicly at her wrist-watch, to warble that it was “so late—have to hurry home—husband—such nice party—maybe you were right about maids, prejudiced because Bea so nice—such perfectly divine angel’s-food, Mrs. Haydock must give me the recipe—good-by, such happy party——”

She walked home. She reflected, “It was my fault. I was touchy. And I opposed them so much. Only——I can’t! I can’t be one of them if I must damn all the maids toiling in filthy kitchens, all the ragged hungry children. And these women are to be my arbiters, the rest of my life!”

She ignored Bea’s call from the kitchen; she ran upstairs to the unfrequented guest-room; she wept in terror, her body a pale arc as she knelt beside a cumbrous black-walnut bed, beside a puffy mattress covered with a red quilt, in a shuttered and airless room.

CHAPTER 8

Don’t I, in looking for things to do, show that I’m not attentive enough to Will? Am I impressed enough by his work? I will be. Oh, I will be. If I can’t be one of the town, if I must be an outcast———”

When Kennicott came home she bustled, “Dear, you must tell me a lot more about your cases. I want to know. I want to understand.”

“Sure. You bet.” And he went down to fix the furnace.

At supper she asked, “For instance, what did you do today?”

“Do today? How do you mean?”

“Medically. I want to understand———”

“Today? Oh, there wasn’t much of anything: couple chumps with bellyaches, and a sprained wrist, and a fool woman that thinks she wants to kill herself because her husband doesn’t like her and———Just routine work.”

“But the unhappy woman doesn’t sound routine!”

“Her? Just case of nerves. You can’t do much with these marriage mix-ups.”

“But dear, please, will you tell me about the next case that you do think is interesting?”

“Sure. You bet. Tell you about anything that——Say, that’s pretty good salmon. Get it at Howland’s?”

II

Four days after the Jolly Seventeen débâcle Vida Sherwin called and casually blew Carol’s world to pieces.

“May I come in and gossip a while?” she said, with such excess of bright innocence that Carol was uneasy. Vida took off her furs with a bounce, she sat down as though it was a gymnasium exercise, she flung out:

“Feel disgracefully good, this weather! Raymond Wutherspoon says if he had my energy he’d be a grand opera singer. I always think this climate is the finest in the world, and my friends are the dearest people in the world, and my work is the most essential thing in the world. Probably I fool myself. But I know one thing for certain: You’re the pluckiest little idiot in the world.”

“And so you are about to flay me alive.” Carol was cheerful about it.

“Am I? Perhaps.