Here the matrons forgot social jealousies, and sat gossiping in gingham; or, in old bathing-suits, surrounded by hysterical children, they paddled for hours.  Carol joined them; she ducked shrieking small boys, and helped babies construct sand-basins for unfortunate minnows.  She liked Juanita Haydock and Maud Dyer when she helped them make picnic-supper for the men, who came motoring out from town each evening.  She was easier and more natural with them.  In the debate as to whether there should be veal loaf or poached egg on hash, she had no chance to be heretical and oversensitive.

They danced sometimes, in the evening; they had a minstrel show, with Kennicott surprisingly good as end-man; always they were encircled by children wise in the lore of woodchucks and gophers and rafts and willow whistles.

If they could have continued this normal barbaric life Carol would have been the most enthusiastic citizen of Gopher Prairie.  She was relieved to be assured that she did not want bookish conversation alone; that she did not expect the town to become a Bohemia.  She was content now.  She did not criticize.

But in September, when the year was at its richest, custom dictated that it was time to return to town; to remove the children from the waste occupation of learning the earth, and send them back to lessons about the number of potatoes which (in a delightful world untroubled by commission-houses or shortages in freight-cars) William sold to John.  The women who had cheerfully gone bathing all summer looked doubtful when Carol begged, “Let’s keep up an outdoor life this winter, let’s slide and skate.”  Their hearts shut again till spring, and the nine months of cliques and radiators and dainty refreshments began all over.

III

Carol had started a salon.

Since Kennicott, Vida Sherwin, and Guy Pollock were her only lions, and since Kennicott would have preferred Sam Clark to all the poets and radicals in the entire world, her private and self-defensive clique did not get beyond one evening dinner for Vida and Guy, on her first wedding anniversary; and that dinner did not get beyond a controversy regarding Raymie Wutherspoon’s yearnings.

Guy Pollock was the gentlest person she had found here.  He spoke of her new jade and cream frock naturally, not jocosely; he held her chair for her as they sat down to dinner; and he did not, like Kennicott, interrupt her to shout, “Oh say, speaking of that, I heard a good story today.”  But Guy was incurably hermit.  He sat late and talked hard, and did not come again.

Then she met Champ Perry in the post-office—­and decided that in the history of the pioneers was the panacea for Gopher Prairie, for all of America.  We have lost their sturdiness, she told herself.  We must restore the last of the veterans to power and follow them on the backward path to the integrity of Lincoln, to the gaiety of settlers dancing in a saw-mill.