“Huh!  Not sure about the rest of it but I guess that’s what you and all the other discontented young women really want:  some stranger kissing your hand!” At Carol’s gasp, the old squirrel-like Vida darted out and cried, “Oh, my dear, don’t take that too seriously.  I just meant——­”

“I know.  You just meant it.  Go on.  Be good for my soul.  Isn’t it funny:  here we all are—­me trying to be good for Gopher Prairie’s soul, and Gopher Prairie trying to be good for my soul.  What are my other sins?”

“Oh, there’s plenty of them.  Possibly some day we shall have your fat cynical Frenchman (horrible, sneering, tobacco-stained object, ruining his brains and his digestion with vile liquor!) but, thank heaven, for a while we’ll manage to keep busy with our lawns and pavements!  You see, these things really are coming!  The Thanatopsis is getting somewhere.  And you——­” Her tone italicized the words—­“to my great disappointment, are doing less, not more, than the people you laugh at!  Sam Clark, on the school-board, is working for better school ventilation.  Ella Stowbody (whose elocuting you always think is so absurd) has persuaded the railroad to share the expense of a parked space at the station, to do away with that vacant lot.

“You sneer so easily.  I’m sorry, but I do think there’s something essentially cheap in your attitude.  Especially about religion.

“If you must know, you’re not a sound reformer at all.  You’re an impossibilist.  And you give up too easily.  You gave up on the new city hall, the anti-fly campaign, club papers, the library-board, the dramatic association—­just because we didn’t graduate into Ibsen the very first thing.  You want perfection all at once.  Do you know what the finest thing you’ve done is—­aside from bringing Hugh into the world?  It was the help you gave Dr. Will during baby-welfare week.  You didn’t demand that each baby be a philosopher and artist before you weighed him, as you do with the rest of us.

“And now I’m afraid perhaps I’ll hurt you.  We’re going to have a new schoolbuilding in this town—­in just a few years—­and we’ll have it without one bit of help or interest from you!

“Professor Mott and I and some others have been dinging away at the moneyed men for years.  We didn’t call on you because you would never stand the pound-pound-pounding year after year without one bit of encouragement.  And we’ve won!  I’ve got the promise of everybody who counts that just as soon as war-conditions permit, they’ll vote the bonds for the schoolhouse.  And we’ll have a wonderful building—­lovely brown brick, with big windows, and agricultural and manual-training departments.  When we get it, that’ll be my answer to all your theories!”

“I’m glad.  And I’m ashamed I haven’t had any part in getting it.  But——­Please don’t think I’m unsympathetic if I ask one question:  Will the teachers in the hygienic new building go on informing the children that Persia is a yellow spot on the map, and ‘Caesar’ the title of a book of grammatical puzzles?”