She sought to be sensible; she elaborately explained to herself that it was hysterical to condemn Gopher Prairie because it did not foam over the drama.  Its justification was in its service as a market-town for farmers.  How bravely and generously it did its work, forwarding the bread of the world, feeding and healing the farmers!

Then, on the corner below her husband’s office, she heard a farmer holding forth: 

“Sure.  Course I was beaten.  The shipper and the grocers here wouldn’t pay us a decent price for our potatoes, even though folks in the cities were howling for ’em.  So we says, well, we’ll get a truck and ship ’em right down to Minneapolis.  But the commission merchants there were in cahoots with the local shipper here; they said they wouldn’t pay us a cent more than he would, not even if they was nearer to the market.  Well, we found we could get higher prices in Chicago, but when we tried to get freight cars to ship there, the railroads wouldn’t let us have ’em—­even though they had cars standing empty right here in the yards.  There you got it—­good market, and these towns keeping us from it.  Gus, that’s the way these towns work all the time.  They pay what they want to for our wheat, but we pay what they want us to for their clothes.  Stowbody and Dawson foreclose every mortgage they can, and put in tenant farmers.  The Dauntless lies to us about the Nonpartisan League, the lawyers sting us, the machinery-dealers hate to carry us over bad years, and then their daughters put on swell dresses and look at us as if we were a bunch of hoboes.  Man, I’d like to burn this town!”

Kennicott observed, “There’s that old crank Wes Brannigan shooting off his mouth again.  Gosh, but he loves to hear himself talk!  They ought to run that fellow out of town!”

VII

She felt old and detached through high-school commencement week, which is the fete of youth in Gopher Prairie; through baccalaureate sermon, senior Parade, junior entertainment, commencement address by an Iowa clergyman who asserted that he believed in the virtue of virtuousness, and the procession of Decoration Day, when the few Civil War veterans followed Champ Perry, in his rusty forage-cap, along the spring-powdered road to the cemetery.  She met Guy; she found that she had nothing to say to him.  Her head ached in an aimless way.  When Kennicott rejoiced, “We’ll have a great time this summer; move down to the lake early and wear old clothes and act natural,” she smiled, but her smile creaked.

In the prairie heat she trudged along unchanging ways, talked about nothing to tepid people, and reflected that she might never escape from them.

She was startled to find that she was using the word “escape.”

Then, for three years which passed like one curt paragraph, she ceased to find anything interesting save the Bjornstams and her baby.

CHAPTER XIX