She was relieved when she had worked out a belief that she wasn’t really shameful, that there was a mystical relation between herself and Carol, so that she was vicariously yet veritably with Kennicott, and had the right to be.

She saw Carol during the first five minutes in Gopher Prairie.  She stared at the passing motor, at Kennicott and the girl beside him.  In that fog world of transference of emotion Vida had no normal jealousy but a conviction that, since through Carol she had received Kennicott’s love, then Carol was a part of her, an astral self, a heightened and more beloved self.  She was glad of the girl’s charm, of the smooth black hair, the airy head and young shoulders.  But she was suddenly angry.  Carol glanced at her for a quarter-second, but looked past her, at an old roadside barn.  If she had made the great sacrifice, at least she expected gratitude and recognition, Vida raged, while her conscious schoolroom mind fussily begged her to control this insanity.

During her first call half of her wanted to welcome a fellow reader of books; the other half itched to find out whether Carol knew anything about Kennicott’s former interest in herself.  She discovered that Carol was not aware that he had ever touched another woman’s hand.  Carol was an amusing, naive, curiously learned child.  While Vida was most actively describing the glories of the Thanatopsis, and complimenting this librarian on her training as a worker, she was fancying that this girl was the child born of herself and Kennicott; and out of that symbolizing she had a comfort she had not known for months.

When she came home, after supper with the Kennicotts and Guy Pollock, she had a sudden and rather pleasant backsliding from devotion.  She bustled into her room, she slammed her hat on the bed, and chattered, “I don’t care!  I’m a lot like her—­except a few years older.  I’m light and quick, too, and I can talk just as well as she can, and I’m sure——­Men are such fools.  I’d be ten times as sweet to make love to as that dreamy baby.  And I am as good-looking!”

But as she sat on the bed and stared at her thin thighs, defiance oozed away.  She mourned: 

“No.  I’m not.  Dear God, how we fool ourselves!  I pretend I’m ‘spiritual.’  I pretend my legs are graceful.  They aren’t.  They’re skinny.  Old-maidish.  I hate it!  I hate that impertinent young woman!  A selfish cat, taking his love for granted. . . .  No, she’s adorable. . . .  I don’t think she ought to be so friendly with Guy Pollock.”

For a year Vida loved Carol, longed to and did not pry into the details of her relations with Kennicott, enjoyed her spirit of play as expressed in childish tea-parties, and, with the mystic bond between them forgotten, was healthily vexed by Carol’s assumption that she was a sociological messiah come to save Gopher Prairie.  This last facet of Vida’s thought was the one which, after a year, was most often turned