* * *

Mr. and Mrs. David Dyer, Mrs. Dyer’s sister, Mrs. Jennie Dayborn of Jackrabbit, and Dr. Will Kennicott drove to Minniemashie on Tuesday for a delightful picnic.

CHAPTER XXXVII

I

She found employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance.  Though the armistice with Germany was signed a few weeks after her coming to Washington, the work of the bureau continued.  She filed correspondence all day; then she dictated answers to letters of inquiry.  It was an endurance of monotonous details, yet she asserted that she had found “real work.”

Disillusions she did have.  She discovered that in the afternoon, office routine stretches to the grave.  She discovered that an office is as full of cliques and scandals as a Gopher Prairie She discovered that most of the women in the government bureaus lived unhealthfully, dining on snatches in their crammed apartments.  But she also discovered that business women may have friendships and enmities as frankly as men and may revel in a bliss which no housewife attains—­a free Sunday.  It did not appear that the Great World needed her inspiration, but she felt that her letters, her contact with the anxieties of men and women all over the country, were a part of vast affairs, not confined to Main Street and a kitchen but linked with Paris, Bangkok, Madrid.

She perceived that she could do office work without losing any of the putative feminine virtue of domesticity; that cooking and cleaning, when divested of the fussing of an Aunt Bessie, take but a tenth of the time which, in a Gopher Prairie, it is but decent to devote to them.

Not to have to apologize for her thoughts to the Jolly Seventeen, not to have to report to Kennicott at the end of the day all that she had done or might do, was a relief which made up for the office weariness.  She felt that she was no longer one-half of a marriage but the whole of a human being.

II

Washington gave her all the graciousness in which she had had faith:  white columns seen across leafy parks, spacious avenues, twisty alleys.  Daily she passed a dark square house with a hint of magnolias and a courtyard behind it, and a tall curtained second-story window through which a woman was always peering.  The woman was mystery, romance, a story which told itself differently every day; now she was a murderess, now the neglected wife of an ambassador.  It was mystery which Carol had most lacked in Gopher Prairie, where every house was open to view, where every person was but too easy to meet, where there were no secret gates opening upon moors over which one might walk by moss-deadened paths to strange high adventures in an ancient garden.