“Oh, probably is.”  Maud’s manner indicated that the falsity of the story was an insignificant flaw in its general delightfulness.

Carol crept to her room, sat with hands curled tight together as she listened to a plague of voices.  She could hear the town yelping with it, every soul of them, gleeful at new details, panting to win importance by having details of their own to add.  How well they would make up for what they had been afraid to do by imagining it in another!  They who had not been entirely afraid (but merely careful and sneaky), all the barber-shop roues and millinery-parlor mondaines, how archly they were giggling (this second—­she could hear them at it); with what self-commendation they were cackling their suavest wit:  “You can’t tell me she ain’t a gay bird; I’m wise!”

And not one man in town to carry out their pioneer tradition of superb and contemptuous cursing, not one to verify the myth that their “rough chivalry” and “rugged virtues” were more generous than the petty scandal-picking of older lands, not one dramatic frontiersman to thunder, with fantastic and fictional oaths, “What are you hinting at?  What are you snickering at?  What facts have you?  What are these unheard-of sins you condemn so much—­and like so well?”

No one to say it.  Not Kennicott nor Guy Pollock nor Champ Perry.

Erik?  Possibly.  He would sputter uneasy protest.

She suddenly wondered what subterranean connection her interest in Erik had with this affair.  Wasn’t it because they had been prevented by her caste from bounding on her own trail that they were howling at Fern?

III

Before supper she found, by half a dozen telephone calls, that Fern had fled to the Minniemashie House.  She hastened there, trying not to be self-conscious about the people who looked at her on the street.  The clerk said indifferently that he “guessed” Miss Mullins was up in Room 37, and left Carol to find the way.  She hunted along the stale-smelling corridors with their wallpaper of cerise daisies and poison-green rosettes, streaked in white spots from spilled water, their frayed red and yellow matting, and rows of pine doors painted a sickly blue.  She could not find the number.  In the darkness at the end of a corridor she had to feel the aluminum figures on the door-panels.  She was startled once by a man’s voice:  “Yep?  Whadyuh want?” and fled.  When she reached the right door she stood listening.  She made out a long sobbing.  There was no answer till her third knock; then an alarmed “Who is it?  Go away!”

Her hatred of the town turned resolute as she pushed open the door.

Yesterday she had seen Fern Mullins in boots and tweed skirt and canary-yellow sweater, fleet and self-possessed.  Now she lay across the bed, in crumpled lavender cotton and shabby pumps, very feminine, utterly cowed.  She lifted her head in stupid terror.  Her hair was in tousled strings and her face was sallow, creased.  Her eyes were a blur from weeping.