“I have become a small-town woman.  Absolute.  Typical.  Modest and moral and safe.  Protected from life.  Genteel!  The Village Virus—­the village virtuousness.  My hair—­just scrambled together.  What can Erik see in that wedded spinster there?  He does like me!  Because I’m the only woman who’s decent to him!  How long before he’ll wake up to me? . . .  I’ve waked up to myself. . . .  Am I as old as—­as old as I am?

“Not really old.  Become careless.  Let myself look tabby.

“I want to chuck every stitch I own.  Black hair and pale cheeks—­they’d go with a Spanish dancer’s costume—­rose behind my ear, scarlet mantilla over one shoulder, the other bare.”

She seized the rouge sponge, daubed her cheeks, scratched at her lips with the vermilion pencil until they stung, tore open her collar.  She posed with her thin arms in the attitude of the fandango.  She dropped them sharply.  She shook her head.  “My heart doesn’t dance,” she said.  She flushed as she fastened her blouse.

“At least I’m much more graceful than Fern Mullins.  Heavens!  When I came here from the Cities, girls imitated me.  Now I’m trying to imitate a city girl.”

CHAPTER XXX

Fern Mullins rushed into the house on a Saturday morning early in September and shrieked at Carol, “School starts next Tuesday.  I’ve got to have one more spree before I’m arrested.  Let’s get up a picnic down the lake for this afternoon.  Won’t you come, Mrs. Kennicott, and the doctor?  Cy Bogart wants to go—­he’s a brat but he’s lively.”

“I don’t think the doctor can go,” sedately.  “He said something about having to make a country call this afternoon.  But I’d love to.”

“That’s dandy!  Who can we get?”

“Mrs. Dyer might be chaperon.  She’s been so nice.  And maybe Dave, if he could get away from the store.”

“How about Erik Valborg?  I think he’s got lots more style than these town boys.  You like him all right, don’t you?”

So the picnic of Carol, Fern, Erik, Cy Bogart, and the Dyers was not only moral but inevitable.

They drove to the birch grove on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie.  Dave Dyer was his most clownish self.  He yelped, jigged, wore Carol’s hat, dropped an ant down Fern’s back, and when they went swimming (the women modestly changing in the car with the side curtains up, the men undressing behind the bushes, constantly repeating, “Gee, hope we don’t run into poison ivy"), Dave splashed water on them and dived to clutch his wife’s ankle.  He infected the others.  Erik gave an imitation of the Greek dancers he had seen in vaudeville, and when they sat down to picnic supper spread on a lap-robe on the grass, Cy climbed a tree to throw acorns at them.

But Carol could not frolic.