to the light.  In a testy way she brooded, “These people that want to change everything all of a sudden without doing any work, make me tired!  Here I have to go and work for four years, picking out the pupils for debates, and drilling them, and nagging at them to get them to look up references, and begging them to choose their own subjects—­four years, to get up a couple of good debates!  And she comes rushing in, and expects in one year to change the whole town into a lollypop paradise with everybody stopping everything else to grow tulips and drink tea.  And it’s a comfy homey old town, too!”

She had such an outburst after each of Carol’s campaigns—­for better Thanatopsis programs, for Shavian plays, for more human schools—­but she never betrayed herself, and always she was penitent.

Vida was, and always would be, a reformer, a liberal.  She believed that details could excitingly be altered, but that things-in-general were comely and kind and immutable.  Carol was, without understanding or accepting it, a revolutionist, a radical, and therefore possessed of “constructive ideas,” which only the destroyer can have, since the reformer believes that all the essential constructing has already been done.  After years of intimacy it was this unexpressed opposition more than the fancied loss of Kennicott’s love which held Vida irritably fascinated.

But the birth of Hugh revived the transcendental emotion.  She was indignant that Carol should not be utterly fulfilled in having borne Kennicott’s child.  She admitted that Carol seemed to have affection and immaculate care for the baby, but she began to identify herself now with Kennicott, and in this phase to feel that she had endured quite too much from Carol’s instability.

She recalled certain other women who had come from the Outside and had not appreciated Gopher Prairie.  She remembered the rector’s wife who had been chilly to callers and who was rumored throughout the town to have said, “Re-ah-ly I cawn’t endure this bucolic heartiness in the responses.”  The woman was positively known to have worn handkerchiefs in her bodice as padding—­oh, the town had simply roared at her.  Of course the rector and she were got rid of in a few months.

Then there was the mysterious woman with the dyed hair and penciled eyebrows, who wore tight English dresses, like basques, who smelled of stale musk, who flirted with the men and got them to advance money for her expenses in a lawsuit, who laughed at Vida’s reading at a school-entertainment, and went off owing a hotel-bill and the three hundred dollars she had borrowed.

Vida insisted that she loved Carol, but with some satisfaction she compared her to these traducers of the town.

II

Vida had enjoyed Raymie Wutherspoon’s singing in the Episcopal choir; she had thoroughly reviewed the weather with him at Methodist sociables and in the Bon Ton.  But she did not really know him till she moved to Mrs. Gurrey’s boarding-house.  It was five years after her affair with Kennicott.  She was thirty-nine, Raymie perhaps a year younger.