She was born in a hill-smothered Wisconsin village where her father was a prosy minister; she labored through a sanctimonious college; she taught for two years in an iron-range town of blurry-faced Tatars and Montenegrins, and wastes of ore, and when she came to Gopher Prairie, its trees and the shining spaciousness of the wheat prairie made her certain that she was in paradise.

She admitted to her fellow-teachers that the schoolbuilding was slightly damp, but she insisted that the rooms were “arranged so conveniently—­and then that bust of President McKinley at the head of the stairs, it’s a lovely art-work, and isn’t it an inspiration to have the brave, honest, martyr president to think about!” She taught French, English, and history, and the Sophomore Latin class, which dealt in matters of a metaphysical nature called Indirect Discourse and the Ablative Absolute.  Each year she was reconvinced that the pupils were beginning to learn more quickly.  She spent four winters in building up the Debating Society, and when the debate really was lively one Friday afternoon, and the speakers of pieces did not forget their lines, she felt rewarded.

She lived an engrossed useful life, and seemed as cool and simple as an apple.  But secretly she was creeping among fears, longing, and guilt.  She knew what it was, but she dared not name it.  She hated even the sound of the word “sex.”  When she dreamed of being a woman of the harem, with great white warm limbs, she awoke to shudder, defenseless in the dusk of her room.  She prayed to Jesus, always to the Son of God, offering him the terrible power of her adoration, addressing him as the eternal lover, growing passionate, exalted, large, as she contemplated his splendor.  Thus she mounted to endurance and surcease.

By day, rattling about in many activities, she was able to ridicule her blazing nights of darkness.  With spurious cheerfulness she announced everywhere, “I guess I’m a born spinster,” and “No one will ever marry a plain schoolma’am like me,” and “You men, great big noisy bothersome creatures, we women wouldn’t have you round the place, dirtying up nice clean rooms, if it wasn’t that you have to be petted and guided.  We just ought to say ‘Scat!’ to all of you!”

But when a man held her close at a dance, even when “Professor” George Edwin Mott patted her hand paternally as they considered the naughtinesses of Cy Bogart, she quivered, and reflected how superior she was to have kept her virginity.

In the autumn of 1911, a year before Dr. Will Kennicott was married, Vida was his partner at a five-hundred tournament.  She was thirty-four then; Kennicott about thirty-six.  To her he was a superb, boyish, diverting creature; all the heroic qualities in a manly magnificent body.  They had been helping the hostess to serve the Waldorf salad and coffee and gingerbread.  They were in the kitchen, side by side on a bench, while the others ponderously supped in the room beyond.