The chart which plots Carol’s progress is not easy to read.  The lines are broken and uncertain of direction; often instead of rising they sink in wavering scrawls; and the colors are watery blue and pink and the dim gray of rubbed pencil marks.  A few lines are traceable.

Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.  Carol had hidden in none of these refuges from reality, but she, who was tender and merry, had been made timorous by Gopher Prairie.  Even her flight had been but the temporary courage of panic.  The thing she gained in Washington was not information about office-systems and labor unions but renewed courage, that amiable contempt called poise.  Her glimpse of tasks involving millions of people and a score of nations reduced Main Street from bloated importance to its actual pettiness.  She could never again be quite so awed by the power with which she herself had endowed the Vidas and Blaussers and Bogarts.

From her work and from her association with women who had organized suffrage associations in hostile cities, or had defended political prisoners, she caught something of an impersonal attitude; saw that she had been as touchily personal as Maud Dyer.

And why, she began to ask, did she rage at individuals?  Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them.  They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, is unembittered laughter.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

She had lived in Washington for a year.  She was tired of the office.  It was tolerable, far more tolerable than housework, but it was not adventurous.

She was having tea and cinnamon toast, alone at a small round table on the balcony of Rauscher’s Confiserie.  Four debutantes clattered in.  She had felt young and dissipated, had thought rather well of her black and leaf-green suit, but as she watched them, thin of ankle, soft under the chin, seventeen or eighteen at most, smoking cigarettes with the correct ennui and talking of “bedroom farces” and their desire to “run up to New York and see something racy,” she became old and rustic and plain, and desirous of retreating from these hard brilliant children to a life easier and more sympathetic.  When they flickered out and one child gave orders to a chauffeur, Carol was not a defiant philosopher but a faded government clerk from Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.

She started dejectedly up Connecticut Avenue.  She stopped, her heart stopped.  Coming toward her were Harry and Juanita Haydock.  She ran to them, she kissed Juanita, while Harry confided, “Hadn’t expected to come to Washington—­had to go to New York for some buying—­didn’t have your address along—­just got in this morning—­wondered how in the world we could get hold of you.”