Here—­she meditated—­is the newest empire of the world; the Northern Middlewest; a land of dairy herds and exquisite lakes, of new automobiles and tar-paper shanties and silos like red towers, of clumsy speech and a hope that is boundless.  An empire which feeds a quarter of the world—­yet its work is merely begun.  They are pioneers, these sweaty wayfarers, for all their telephones and bank-accounts and automatic pianos and co-operative leagues.  And for all its fat richness, theirs is a pioneer land.  What is its future? she wondered.  A future of cities and factory smut where now are loping empty fields?  Homes universal and secure?  Or placid chateaux ringed with sullen huts?  Youth free to find knowledge and laughter?  Willingness to sift the sanctified lies?  Or creamy-skinned fat women, smeared with grease and chalk, gorgeous in the skins of beasts and the bloody feathers of slain birds, playing bridge with puffy pink-nailed jeweled fingers, women who after much expenditure of labor and bad temper still grotesquely resemble their own flatulent lap-dogs?  The ancient stale inequalities, or something different in history, unlike the tedious maturity of other empires?  What future and what hope?

Carol’s head ached with the riddle.

She saw the prairie, flat in giant patches or rolling in long hummocks.  The width and bigness of it, which had expanded her spirit an hour ago, began to frighten her.  It spread out so; it went on so uncontrollably; she could never know it.  Kennicott was closeted in his detective story.  With the loneliness which comes most depressingly in the midst of many people she tried to forget problems, to look at the prairie objectively.

The grass beside the railroad had been burnt over; it was a smudge prickly with charred stalks of weeds.  Beyond the undeviating barbed-wire fences were clumps of golden rod.  Only this thin hedge shut them off from the plains-shorn wheat-lands of autumn, a hundred acres to a field, prickly and gray near-by but in the blurred distance like tawny velvet stretched over dipping hillocks.  The long rows of wheat-shocks marched like soldiers in worn yellow tabards.  The newly plowed fields were black banners fallen on the distant slope.  It was a martial immensity, vigorous, a little harsh, unsoftened by kindly gardens.

The expanse was relieved by clumps of oaks with patches of short wild grass; and every mile or two was a chain of cobalt slews, with the flicker of blackbirds’ wings across them.

All this working land was turned into exuberance by the light.  The sunshine was dizzy on open stubble; shadows from immense cumulus clouds were forever sliding across low mounds; and the sky was wider and loftier and more resolutely blue than the sky of cities . . . she declared.

“It’s a glorious country; a land to be big in,” she crooned.

Then Kennicott startled her by chuckling, “D’ you realize the town after the next is Gopher Prairie?  Home!”