Carol reflected that the carving-knife would make an excellent dagger with which to kill Uncle Whittier.  It would slide in easily.  The headlines would be terrible.

Kennicott said judiciously, “Oh, I don’t want to be unjust to him.  I believe he took his physical examination for military service.  Got varicose veins—­not bad, but enough to disqualify him.  Though I will say he doesn’t look like a fellow that would be so awful darn crazy to poke his bayonet into a Hun’s guts.”

“Will!  Please!”

“Well, he don’t.  Looks soft to me.  And they say he told Del Snafflin, when he was getting a hair-cut on Saturday, that he wished he could play the piano.”

“Isn’t it wonderful how much we all know about one another in a town like this,” said Carol innocently.

Kennicott was suspicious, but Aunt Bessie, serving the floating island pudding, agreed, “Yes, it is wonderful.  Folks can get away with all sorts of meannesses and sins in these terrible cities, but they can’t here.  I was noticing this tailor fellow this morning, and when Mrs. Riggs offered to share her hymn-book with him, he shook his head, and all the while we was singing he just stood there like a bump on a log and never opened his mouth.  Everybody says he’s got an idea that he’s got so much better manners and all than what the rest of us have, but if that’s what he calls good manners, I want to know!”

Carol again studied the carving-knife.  Blood on the whiteness of a tablecloth might be gorgeous.

Then: 

“Fool!  Neurotic impossibilist!  Telling yourself orchard fairy-tales—­at thirty. . . .  Dear Lord, am I really thirty?  That boy can’t be more than twenty-five.”

IV

She went calling.

Boarding with the Widow Bogart was Fern Mullins, a girl of twenty-two who was to be teacher of English, French, and gymnastics in the high school this coming session.  Fern Mullins had come to town early, for the six-weeks normal course for country teachers.  Carol had noticed her on the street, had heard almost as much about her as about Erik Valborg.  She was tall, weedy, pretty, and incurably rakish.  Whether she wore a low middy collar or dressed reticently for school in a black suit with a high-necked blouse, she was airy, flippant.  “She looks like an absolute totty,” said all the Mrs. Sam Clarks, disapprovingly, and all the Juanita Haydocks, enviously.

That Sunday evening, sitting in baggy canvas lawn-chairs beside the house, the Kennicotts saw Fern laughing with Cy Bogart who, though still a junior in high school, was now a lump of a man, only two or three years younger than Fern.  Cy had to go downtown for weighty matters connected with the pool-parlor.  Fern drooped on the Bogart porch, her chin in her hands.

“She looks lonely,” said Kennicott.

“She does, poor soul.  I believe I’ll go over and speak to her.  I was introduced to her at Dave’s but I haven’t called.”  Carol was slipping across the lawn, a white figure in the dimness, faintly brushing the dewy grass.  She was thinking of Erik and of the fact that her feet were wet, and she was casual in her greeting:  “Hello!  The doctor and I wondered if you were lonely.”