While Kennicott labored over ordering it was annoying to see him permit the waiter to be impertinent, but as the cocktail elevated her to a bridge among colored stars, as the oysters came in—­not canned oysters in the Gopher Prairie fashion, but on the half-shell—­she cried, “If you only knew how wonderful it is not to have had to plan this dinner, and order it at the butcher’s and fuss and think about it, and then watch Bea cook it!  I feel so free.  And to have new kinds of food, and different patterns of dishes and linen, and not worry about whether the pudding is being spoiled!  Oh, this is a great moment for me!”

IV

They had all the experiences of provincials in a metropolis.  After breakfast Carol bustled to a hair-dresser’s, bought gloves and a blouse, and importantly met Kennicott in front of an optician’s, in accordance with plans laid down, revised, and verified.  They admired the diamonds and furs and frosty silverware and mahogany chairs and polished morocco sewing-boxes in shop-windows, and were abashed by the throngs in the department-stores, and were bullied by a clerk into buying too many shirts for Kennicott, and gaped at the “clever novelty perfumes—­just in from New York.”  Carol got three books on the theater, and spent an exultant hour in warning herself that she could not afford this rajah-silk frock, in thinking how envious it would make Juanita Haydock, in closing her eyes, and buying it.  Kennicott went from shop to shop, earnestly hunting down a felt-covered device to keep the windshield of his car clear of rain.

They dined extravagantly at their hotel at night, and next morning sneaked round the corner to economize at a Childs’ Restaurant.  They were tired by three in the afternoon, and dozed at the motion-pictures and said they wished they were back in Gopher Prairie—­and by eleven in the evening they were again so lively that they went to a Chinese restaurant that was frequented by clerks and their sweethearts on pay-days.  They sat at a teak and marble table eating Eggs Fooyung, and listened to a brassy automatic piano, and were altogether cosmopolitan.

On the street they met people from home—­the McGanums.  They laughed, shook hands repeatedly, and exclaimed, “Well, this is quite a coincidence!” They asked when the McGanums had come down, and begged for news of the town they had left two days before.  Whatever the McGanums were at home, here they stood out as so superior to all the undistinguishable strangers absurdly hurrying past that the Kennicotts held them as long as they could.  The McGanums said good-by as though they were going to Tibet instead of to the station to catch No. 7 north.