(The grocer was Mr. Frederick F. Ludelmeyer, whose market is at the corner of Main Street and Lincoln Avenue.  In supposing that only she was observant Carol was ignorant, misled by the indifference of cities.  She fancied that she was slipping through the streets invisible; but when she had passed, Mr. Ludelmeyer puffed into the store and coughed at his clerk, “I seen a young woman, she come along the side street.  I bet she iss Doc Kennicott’s new bride, good-looker, nice legs, but she wore a hell of a plain suit, no style, I wonder will she pay cash, I bet she goes to Howland & Gould’s more as she does here, what you done with the poster for Fluffed Oats?”)

II

When Carol had walked for thirty-two minutes she had completely covered the town, east and west, north and south; and she stood at the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue and despaired.

Main Street with its two-story brick shops, its story-and-a-half wooden residences, its muddy expanse from concrete walk to walk, its huddle of Fords and lumber-wagons, was too small to absorb her.  The broad, straight, unenticing gashes of the streets let in the grasping prairie on every side.  She realized the vastness and the emptiness of the land.  The skeleton iron windmill on the farm a few blocks away, at the north end of Main Street, was like the ribs of a dead cow.  She thought of the coming of the Northern winter, when the unprotected houses would crouch together in terror of storms galloping out of that wild waste.  They were so small and weak, the little brown houses.  They were shelters for sparrows, not homes for warm laughing people.

She told herself that down the street the leaves were a splendor.  The maples were orange; the oaks a solid tint of raspberry.  And the lawns had been nursed with love.  But the thought would not hold.  At best the trees resembled a thinned woodlot.  There was no park to rest the eyes.  And since not Gopher Prairie but Wakamin was the county-seat, there was no court-house with its grounds.

She glanced through the fly-specked windows of the most pretentious building in sight, the one place which welcomed strangers and determined their opinion of the charm and luxury of Gopher Prairie—­the Minniemashie House.  It was a tall lean shabby structure, three stories of yellow-streaked wood, the corners covered with sanded pine slabs purporting to symbolize stone.  In the hotel office she could see a stretch of bare unclean floor, a line of rickety chairs with brass cuspidors between, a writing-desk with advertisements in mother-of-pearl letters upon the glass-covered back.  The dining-room beyond was a jungle of stained table-cloths and catsup bottles.

She looked no more at the Minniemashie House.

A man in cuffless shirt-sleeves with pink arm-garters, wearing a linen collar but no tie, yawned his way from Dyer’s Drug Store across to the hotel.  He leaned against the wall, scratched a while, sighed, and in a bored way gossiped with a man tilted back in a chair.  A lumber-wagon, its long green box filled with large spools of barbed-wire fencing, creaked down the block.  A Ford, in reverse, sounded as though it were shaking to pieces, then recovered and rattled away.  In the Greek candy-store was the whine of a peanut-roaster, and the oily smell of nuts.