CHAPTER XXII

I

The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day.  It is this which puzzles the long-shoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.  It was this which puzzled Carol in regard to the married Vida.  Carol herself had the baby, a larger house to care for, all the telephone calls for Kennicott when he was away; and she read everything, while Vida was satisfied with newspaper headlines.

But after detached brown years in boarding-houses, Vida was hungry for housework, for the most pottering detail of it.  She had no maid, nor wanted one.  She cooked, baked, swept, washed supper-cloths, with the triumph of a chemist in a new laboratory.  To her the hearth was veritably the altar.  When she went shopping she hugged the cans of soup, and she bought a mop or a side of bacon as though she were preparing for a reception.  She knelt beside a bean sprout and crooned, “I raised this with my own hands—­I brought this new life into the world.”

“I love her for being so happy,” Carol brooded.  “I ought to be that way.  I worship the baby, but the housework——­Oh, I suppose I’m fortunate; so much better off than farm-women on a new clearing, or people in a slum.”

It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.

In Carol’s own twenty-four hours a day she got up, dressed the baby, had breakfast, talked to Oscarina about the day’s shopping, put the baby on the porch to play, went to the butcher’s to choose between steak and pork chops, bathed the baby, nailed up a shelf, had dinner, put the baby to bed for a nap, paid the iceman, read for an hour, took the baby out for a walk, called on Vida, had supper, put the baby to bed, darned socks, listened to Kennicott’s yawning comment on what a fool Dr. McGanum was to try to use that cheap X-ray outfit of his on an epithelioma, repaired a frock, drowsily heard Kennicott stoke the furnace, tried to read a page of Thorstein Veblen—­and the day was gone.

Except when Hugh was vigorously naughty, or whiney, or laughing, or saying “I like my chair” with thrilling maturity, she was always enfeebled by loneliness.  She no longer felt superior about that misfortune.  She would gladly have been converted to Vida’s satisfaction in Gopher Prairie and mopping the floor.

II

Carol drove through an astonishing number of books from the public library and from city shops.  Kennicott was at first uncomfortable over her disconcerting habit of buying them.  A book was a book, and if you had several thousand of them right here in the library, free, why the dickens should you spend your good money?  After worrying about it for two or three years, he decided that this was one of the Funny Ideas which she had caught as a librarian and from which she would never entirely recover.