She was on the peak that Sunday afternoon when she played in chapel.  Out of the dusk her violin took up the organ theme, and the candle-light revealed her in a straight golden frock, her arm arched to the bow, her lips serious.  Every man fell in love then with religion and Carol.

Throughout Senior year she anxiously related all her experiments and partial successes to a career.  Daily, on the library steps or in the hall of the Main Building, the co-eds talked of “What shall we do when we finish college?” Even the girls who knew that they were going to be married pretended to be considering important business positions; even they who knew that they would have to work hinted about fabulous suitors.  As for Carol, she was an orphan; her only near relative was a vanilla-flavored sister married to an optician in St. Paul.  She had used most of the money from her father’s estate.  She was not in love—­that is, not often, nor ever long at a time.  She would earn her living.

But how she was to earn it, how she was to conquer the world—­almost entirely for the world’s own good—­she did not see.  Most of the girls who were not betrothed meant to be teachers.  Of these there were two sorts:  careless young women who admitted that they intended to leave the “beastly classroom and grubby children” the minute they had a chance to marry; and studious, sometimes bulbous-browed and pop-eyed maidens who at class prayer-meetings requested God to “guide their feet along the paths of greatest usefulness.”  Neither sort tempted Carol.  The former seemed insincere (a favorite word of hers at this era).  The earnest virgins were, she fancied, as likely to do harm as to do good by their faith in the value of parsing Caesar.

At various times during Senior year Carol finally decided upon studying law, writing motion-picture scenarios, professional nursing, and marrying an unidentified hero.

Then she found a hobby in sociology.

The sociology instructor was new.  He was married, and therefore taboo, but he had come from Boston, he had lived among poets and socialists and Jews and millionaire uplifters at the University Settlement in New York, and he had a beautiful white strong neck.  He led a giggling class through the prisons, the charity bureaus, the employment agencies of Minneapolis and St. Paul.  Trailing at the end of the line Carol was indignant at the prodding curiosity of the others, their manner of staring at the poor as at a Zoo.  She felt herself a great liberator.  She put her hand to her mouth, her forefinger and thumb quite painfully pinching her lower lip, and frowned, and enjoyed being aloof.

A classmate named Stewart Snyder, a competent bulky young man in a gray flannel shirt, a rusty black bow tie, and the green-and-purple class cap, grumbled to her as they walked behind the others in the muck of the South St. Paul stockyards, “These college chumps make me tired.  They’re so top-lofty.  They ought to of worked on the farm, the way I have.  These workmen put it all over them.”