At this point Carol awoke.

She got through three more minutes by studying the face of a girl in the pew across:  a sensitive unhappy girl whose longing poured out with intimidating self-revelation as she worshiped Mr. Zitterel.  Carol wondered who the girl was.  She had seen her at church suppers.  She considered how many of the three thousand people in the town she did not know; to how many of them the Thanatopsis and the Jolly Seventeen were icy social peaks; how many of them might be toiling through boredom thicker than her own—­with greater courage.

She examined her nails.  She read two hymns.  She got some satisfaction out of rubbing an itching knuckle.  She pillowed on her shoulder the head of the baby who, after killing time in the same manner as his mother, was so fortunate as to fall asleep.  She read the introduction, title-page, and acknowledgment of copyrights, in the hymnal.  She tried to evolve a philosophy which would explain why Kennicott could never tie his scarf so that it would reach the top of the gap in his turn-down collar.

There were no other diversions to be found in the pew.  She glanced back at the congregation.  She thought that it would be amiable to bow to Mrs. Champ Perry.

Her slow turning head stopped, galvanized.

Across the aisle, two rows back, was a strange young man who shone among the cud-chewing citizens like a visitant from the sun-amber curls, low forehead, fine nose, chin smooth but not raw from Sabbath shaving.  His lips startled her.  The lips of men in Gopher Prairie are flat in the face, straight and grudging.  The stranger’s mouth was arched, the upper lip short.  He wore a brown jersey coat, a delft-blue bow, a white silk shirt, white flannel trousers.  He suggested the ocean beach, a tennis court, anything but the sun-blistered utility of Main Street.

A visitor from Minneapolis, here for business?  No.  He wasn’t a business man.  He was a poet.  Keats was in his face, and Shelley, and Arthur Upson, whom she had once seen in Minneapolis.  He was at once too sensitive and too sophisticated to touch business as she knew it in Gopher Prairie.

With restrained amusement he was analyzing the noisy Mr. Zitterel.  Carol was ashamed to have this spy from the Great World hear the pastor’s maundering.  She felt responsible for the town.  She resented his gaping at their private rites.  She flushed, turned away.  But she continued to feel his presence.

How could she meet him?  She must!  For an hour of talk.  He was all that she was hungry for.  She could not let him get away without a word—­and she would have to.  She pictured, and ridiculed, herself as walking up to him and remarking, “I am sick with the Village Virus.  Will you please tell me what people are saying and playing in New York?” She pictured, and groaned over, the expression of Kennicott if she should say, “Why wouldn’t it be reasonable for you, my soul, to ask that complete stranger in the brown jersey coat to come to supper tonight?”