VIII

Vida was indignant; Carol was apologetic; they talked for another hour, the eternal Mary and Martha—­an immoralist Mary and a reformist Martha.  It was Vida who conquered.

The fact that she had been left out of the campaign for the new schoolbuilding disconcerted Carol.  She laid her dreams of perfection aside.  When Vida asked her to take charge of a group of Camp Fire Girls, she obeyed, and had definite pleasure out of the Indian dances and ritual and costumes.  She went more regularly to the Thanatopsis.  With Vida as lieutenant and unofficial commander she campaigned for a village nurse to attend poor families, raised the fund herself, saw to it that the nurse was young and strong and amiable and intelligent.

Yet all the while she beheld the burly cynical Frenchman and the diaphanous dancers as clearly as the child sees its air-born playmates; she relished the Camp Fire Girls not because, in Vida’s words, “this Scout training will help so much to make them Good Wives,” but because she hoped that the Sioux dances would bring subversive color into their dinginess.

She helped Ella Stowbody to set out plants in the tiny triangular park at the railroad station; she squatted in the dirt, with a small curved trowel and the most decorous of gardening gauntlets; she talked to Ella about the public-spiritedness of fuchsias and cannas; and she felt that she was scrubbing a temple deserted by the gods and empty even of incense and the sound of chanting.  Passengers looking from trains saw her as a village woman of fading prettiness, incorruptible virtue, and no abnormalities; the baggageman heard her say, “Oh yes, I do think it will be a good example for the children”; and all the while she saw herself running garlanded through the streets of Babylon.

Planting led her to botanizing.  She never got much farther than recognizing the tiger lily and the wild rose, but she rediscovered Hugh.  “What does the buttercup say, mummy?” he cried, his hand full of straggly grasses, his cheek gilded with pollen.  She knelt to embrace him; she affirmed that he made life more than full; she was altogether reconciled . . . for an hour.

But she awoke at night to hovering death.  She crept away from the hump of bedding that was Kennicott; tiptoed into the bathroom and, by the mirror in the door of the medicine-cabinet, examined her pallid face.

Wasn’t she growing visibly older in ratio as Vida grew plumper and younger?  Wasn’t her nose sharper?  Wasn’t her neck granulated?  She stared and choked.  She was only thirty.  But the five years since her marriage—­had they not gone by as hastily and stupidly as though she had been under ether; would time not slink past till death?  She pounded her fist on the cool enameled rim of the bathtub and raged mutely against the indifferent gods: