“I didn’t!  I didn’t!” was all she would say at first, and she repeated it while Carol kissed her cheek, stroked her hair, bathed her forehead.  She rested then, while Carol looked about the room—­the welcome to strangers, the sanctuary of hospitable Main Street, the lucrative property of Kennicott’s friend, Jackson Elder.  It smelled of old linen and decaying carpet and ancient tobacco smoke.  The bed was rickety, with a thin knotty mattress; the sand-colored walls were scratched and gouged; in every corner, under everything, were fluffy dust and cigar ashes; on the tilted wash-stand was a nicked and squatty pitcher; the only chair was a grim straight object of spotty varnish; but there was an altogether splendid gilt and rose cuspidor.

She did not try to draw out Fern’s story; Fern insisted on telling it.

She had gone to the party, not quite liking Cy but willing to endure him for the sake of dancing, of escaping from Mrs. Bogart’s flow of moral comments, of relaxing after the first strained weeks of teaching.  Cy “promised to be good.”  He was, on the way out.  There were a few workmen from Gopher Prairie at the dance, with many young farm-people.  Half a dozen squatters from a degenerate colony in a brush-hidden hollow, planters of potatoes, suspected thieves, came in noisily drunk.  They all pounded the floor of the barn in old-fashioned square dances, swinging their partners, skipping, laughing, under the incantations of Del Snafflin the barber, who fiddled and called the figures.  Cy had two drinks from pocket-flasks.  Fern saw him fumbling among the overcoats piled on the feedbox at the far end of the barn; soon after she heard a farmer declaring that some one had stolen his bottle.  She taxed Cy with the theft; he chuckled, “Oh, it’s just a joke; I’m going to give it back.”  He demanded that she take a drink.  Unless she did, he wouldn’t return the bottle.

“I just brushed my lips with it, and gave it back to him,” moaned Fern.  She sat up, glared at Carol.  “Did you ever take a drink?”

“I have.  A few.  I’d love to have one right now!  This contact with righteousness has about done me up!”

Fern could laugh then.  “So would I!  I don’t suppose I’ve had five drinks in my life, but if I meet just one more Bogart and Son——­Well, I didn’t really touch that bottle—­horrible raw whisky—­though I’d have loved some wine.  I felt so jolly.  The barn was almost like a stage scene—­the high rafters, and the dark stalls, and tin lanterns swinging, and a silage-cutter up at the end like some mysterious kind of machine.  And I’d been having lots of fun dancing with the nicest young farmer, so strong and nice, and awfully intelligent.  But I got uneasy when I saw how Cy was.  So I doubt if I touched two drops of the beastly stuff.  Do you suppose God is punishing me for even wanting wine?”

“My dear, Mrs. Bogart’s god may be—­Main Street’s god.  But all the courageous intelligent people are fighting him . . . though he slay us.”