Though the Bogart house was next door she had entered it but three times.  Now she put on her new moleskin cap, which made her face small and innocent, she rubbed off the traces of a lip-stick—­and fled across the alley before her admirable resolution should sneak away.

The age of houses, like the age of men, has small relation to their years.  The dull-green cottage of the good Widow Bogart was twenty years old, but it had the antiquity of Cheops, and the smell of mummy-dust.  Its neatness rebuked the street.  The two stones by the path were painted yellow; the outhouse was so overmodestly masked with vines and lattice that it was not concealed at all; the last iron dog remaining in Gopher Prairie stood among whitewashed conch-shells upon the lawn.  The hallway was dismayingly scrubbed; the kitchen was an exercise in mathematics, with problems worked out in equidistant chairs.

The parlor was kept for visitors.  Carol suggested, “Let’s sit in the kitchen.  Please don’t trouble to light the parlor stove.”

“No trouble at all!  My gracious, and you coming so seldom and all, and the kitchen is a perfect sight, I try to keep it clean, but Cy will track mud all over it, I’ve spoken to him about it a hundred times if I’ve spoken once, no, you sit right there, dearie, and I’ll make a fire, no trouble at all, practically no trouble at all.”

Mrs. Bogart groaned, rubbed her joints, and repeatedly dusted her hands while she made the fire, and when Carol tried to help she lamented, “Oh, it doesn’t matter; guess I ain’t good for much but toil and workin’ anyway; seems as though that’s what a lot of folks think.”

The parlor was distinguished by an expanse of rag carpet from which, as they entered, Mrs. Bogart hastily picked one sad dead fly.  In the center of the carpet was a rug depicting a red Newfoundland dog, reclining in a green and yellow daisy field and labeled “Our Friend.”  The parlor organ, tall and thin, was adorned with a mirror partly circular, partly square, and partly diamond-shaped, and with brackets holding a pot of geraniums, a mouth-organ, and a copy of “The Oldtime Hymnal.”  On the center table was a Sears-Roebuck mail-order catalogue, a silver frame with photographs of the Baptist Church and of an elderly clergyman, and an aluminum tray containing a rattlesnake’s rattle and a broken spectacle-lens.

Mrs. Bogart spoke of the eloquence of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel, the coldness of cold days, the price of poplar wood, Dave Dyer’s new hair-cut, and Cy Bogart’s essential piety.  “As I said to his Sunday School teacher, Cy may be a little wild, but that’s because he’s got so much better brains than a lot of these boys, and this farmer that claims he caught Cy stealing ’beggies, is a liar, and I ought to have the law on him.”

Mrs. Bogart went thoroughly into the rumor that the girl waiter at Billy’s Lunch was not all she might be—­or, rather, was quite all she might be.