“But, dear, the trouble with that film—­it wasn’t that it got in so many legs, but that it giggled coyly and promised to show more of them, and then didn’t keep the promise.  It was Peeping Tom’s idea of humor.”

“I don’t get you.  Look here now——­”

She lay awake, while he rumbled with sleep

“I must go on.  My ‘crank ideas;’ he calls them.  I thought that adoring him, watching him operate, would be enough.  It isn’t.  Not after the first thrill.

“I don’t want to hurt him.  But I must go on.

“It isn’t enough, to stand by while he fills an automobile radiator and chucks me bits of information.

“If I stood by and admired him long enough, I would be content.  I would become a ‘nice little woman.’  The Village Virus.  Already——­I’m not reading anything.  I haven’t touched the piano for a week.  I’m letting the days drown in worship of ‘a good deal, ten plunks more per acre.’  I won’t!  I won’t succumb!

“How?  I’ve failed at everything:  the Thanatopsis, parties, pioneers, city hall, Guy and Vida.  But——­It doesn’t matter!  I’m not trying to ‘reform the town’ now.  I’m not trying to organize Browning Clubs, and sit in clean white kids yearning up at lecturers with ribbony eyeglasses.  I am trying to save my soul.

“Will Kennicott, asleep there, trusting me, thinking he holds me.  And I’m leaving him.  All of me left him when he laughed at me.  It wasn’t enough for him that I admired him; I must change myself and grow like him.  He takes advantage.  No more.  It’s finished.  I will go on.”

IV

Her violin lay on top of the upright piano.  She picked it up.  Since she had last touched it the dried strings had snapped, and upon it lay a gold and crimson cigar-band.

V

She longed to see Guy Pollock, for the confirming of the brethren in the faith.  But Kennicott’s dominance was heavy upon her.  She could not determine whether she was checked by fear or him, or by inertia—­by dislike of the emotional labor of the “scenes” which would be involved in asserting independence.  She was like the revolutionist at fifty:  not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades.

The second evening after the movies she impulsively summoned Vida Sherwin and Guy to the house for pop-corn and cider.  In the living-room Vida and Kennicott debated “the value of manual training in grades below the eighth,” while Carol sat beside Guy at the dining table, buttering pop-corn.  She was quickened by the speculation in his eyes.  She murmured: 

“Guy, do you want to help me?”

“My dear!  How?”

“I don’t know!”

He waited.