Only Guy looked sympathetic, and he stroked the pine table and said nothing.

The rest of the meeting they gave to a bellicose investigation of the fact that there was seventeen cents less than there should be in the Fund.  Miss Villets was summoned; she spent half an hour in explosively defending herself; the seventeen cents were gnawed over, penny by penny; and Carol, glancing at the carefully inscribed list which had been so lovely and exciting an hour before, was silent, and sorry for Miss Villets, and sorrier for herself.

She was reasonably regular in attendance till her two years were up and Vida Sherwin was appointed to the board in her place, but she did not try to be revolutionary.  In the plodding course of her life there was nothing changed, and nothing new.

IV

Kennicott made an excellent land-deal, but as he told her none of the details, she was not greatly exalted or agitated.  What did agitate her was his announcement, half whispered and half blurted, half tender and half coldly medical, that they “ought to have a baby, now they could afford it.”  They had so long agreed that “perhaps it would be just as well not to have any children for a while yet,” that childlessness had come to be natural.  Now, she feared and longed and did not know; she hesitatingly assented, and wished that she had not assented.

As there appeared no change in their drowsy relations, she forgot all about it, and life was planless.

V

Idling on the porch of their summer cottage at the lake, on afternoons when Kennicott was in town, when the water was glazed and the whole air languid, she pictured a hundred escapes:  Fifth Avenue in a snow-storm, with limousines, golden shops, a cathedral spire.  A reed hut on fantastic piles above the mud of a jungle river.  A suite in Paris, immense high grave rooms, with lambrequins and a balcony.  The Enchanted Mesa.  An ancient stone mill in Maryland, at the turn of the road, between rocky brook and abrupt hills.  An upland moor of sheep and flitting cool sunlight.  A clanging dock where steel cranes unloaded steamers from Buenos Ayres and Tsing-tao.  A Munich concert-hall, and a famous ’cellist playing—­playing to her.

One scene had a persistent witchery: 

She stood on a terrace overlooking a boulevard by the warm sea.  She was certain, though she had no reason for it, that the place was Mentone.  Along the drive below her swept barouches, with a mechanical tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, and great cars with polished black hoods and engines quiet as the sigh of an old man.  In them were women erect, slender, enameled, and expressionless as marionettes, their small hands upon parasols, their unchanging eyes always forward, ignoring the men beside them, tall men with gray hair and distinguished faces.  Beyond the drive were painted sea and painted sands, and blue and yellow pavilions.  Nothing moved except the gliding carriages, and the people were small and wooden, spots in a picture drenched with gold and hard bright blues.  There was no sound of sea or winds; no softness of whispers nor of falling petals; nothing but yellow and cobalt and staring light, and the never-changing tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot——­