There was no other sound nor sign of life.

She wanted to run, fleeing from the encroaching prairie, demanding the security of a great city.  Her dreams of creating a beautiful town were ludicrous.  Oozing out from every drab wall, she felt a forbidding spirit which she could never conquer.

She trailed down the street on one side, back on the other, glancing into the cross streets.  It was a private Seeing Main Street tour.  She was within ten minutes beholding not only the heart of a place called Gopher Prairie, but ten thousand towns from Albany to San Diego: 

Dyer’s Drug Store, a corner building of regular and unreal blocks of artificial stone.  Inside the store, a greasy marble soda-fountain with an electric lamp of red and green and curdled-yellow mosaic shade.  Pawed-over heaps of tooth-brushes and combs and packages of shaving-soap.  Shelves of soap-cartons, teething-rings, garden-seeds, and patent medicines in yellow “packages-nostrums” for consumption, for “women’s diseases”—­notorious mixtures of opium and alcohol, in the very shop to which her husband sent patients for the filling of prescriptions.

From a second-story window the sign “W.  P. Kennicott, Phys. & Surgeon,” gilt on black sand.

A small wooden motion-picture theater called “The Rosebud Movie Palace.”  Lithographs announcing a film called “Fatty in Love.”

Howland & Gould’s Grocery.  In the display window, black, overripe bananas and lettuce on which a cat was sleeping.  Shelves lined with red crepe paper which was now faded and torn and concentrically spotted.  Flat against the wall of the second story the signs of lodges—­the Knights of Pythias, the Maccabees, the Woodmen, the Masons.

Dahl & Oleson’s Meat Market—­a reek of blood.

A jewelry shop with tinny-looking wrist-watches for women.  In front of it, at the curb, a huge wooden clock which did not go.

A fly-buzzing saloon with a brilliant gold and enamel whisky sign across the front.  Other saloons down the block.  From them a stink of stale beer, and thick voices bellowing pidgin German or trolling out dirty songs—­vice gone feeble and unenterprising and dull—­the delicacy of a mining-camp minus its vigor.  In front of the saloons, farmwives sitting on the seats of wagons, waiting for their husbands to become drunk and ready to start home.

A tobacco shop called “The Smoke House,” filled with young men shaking dice for cigarettes.  Racks of magazines, and pictures of coy fat prostitutes in striped bathing-suits.

A clothing store with a display of “ox-blood-shade Oxfords with bull-dog toes.”  Suits which looked worn and glossless while they were still new, flabbily draped on dummies like corpses with painted cheeks.

The Bon Ton Store—­Haydock & Simons’—­the largest shop in town.  The first-story front of clear glass, the plates cleverly bound at the edges with brass.  The second story of pleasant tapestry brick.  One window of excellent clothes for men, interspersed with collars of floral pique which showed mauve daisies on a saffron ground.  Newness and an obvious notion of neatness and service.  Haydock & Simons.  Haydock.  She had met a Haydock at the station; Harry Haydock; an active person of thirty-five.  He seemed great to her, now, and very like a saint.  His shop was clean!