Carol was mediating, “I will go back!  I will go on asking questions.  I’ve always done it, and always failed at it, and it’s all I can do.  I’m going to ask Ezra Stowbody why he’s opposed to the nationalization of railroads, and ask Dave Dyer why a druggist always is pleased when he’s called ‘doctor,’ and maybe ask Mrs. Bogart why she wears a widow’s veil that looks like a dead crow.”

The woman leader straightened.  “And you have one thing.  You have a baby to hug.  That’s my temptation.  I dream of babies—­of a baby—­and I sneak around parks to see them playing. (The children in Dupont Circle are like a poppy-garden.) And the antis call me ’unsexed’!”

Carol was thinking, in panic, “Oughtn’t Hugh to have country air?  I won’t let him become a yokel.  I can guide him away from street-corner loafing. . . .  I think I can.”

On her way home:  “Now that I’ve made a precedent, joined the union and gone out on one strike and learned personal solidarity, I won’t be so afraid.  Will won’t always be resisting my running away.  Some day I really will go to Europe with him . . . or without him.

“I’ve lived with people who are not afraid to go to jail.  I could invite a Miles Bjornstam to dinner without being afraid of the Haydocks . . .  I think I could.

“I’ll take back the sound of Yvette Guilbert’s songs and Elman’s violin.  They’ll be only the lovelier against the thrumming of crickets in the stubble on an autumn day.

“I can laugh now and be serene . . .  I think I can.”

Though she should return, she said, she would not be utterly defeated.  She was glad of her rebellion.  The prairie was no longer empty land in the sun-glare; it was the living tawny beast which she had fought and made beautiful by fighting; and in the village streets were shadows of her desires and the sound of her marching and the seeds of mystery and greatness.

IX

Her active hatred of Gopher Prairie had run out.  She saw it now as a toiling new settlement.  With sympathy she remembered Kennicott’s defense of its citizens as “a lot of pretty good folks, working hard and trying to bring up their families the best they can.”  She recalled tenderly the young awkwardness of Main Street and the makeshifts of the little brown cottages; she pitied their shabbiness and isolation; had compassion for their assertion of culture, even as expressed in Thanatopsis papers, for their pretense of greatness, even as trumpeted in “boosting.”  She saw Main Street in the dusty prairie sunset, a line of frontier shanties with solemn lonely people waiting for her, solemn and lonely as an old man who has outlived his friends.  She remembered that Kennicott and Sam Clark had listened to her songs, and she wanted to run to them and sing.

“At last,” she rejoiced, “I’ve come to a fairer attitude toward the town.  I can love it, now.”

She was, perhaps, rather proud of herself for having acquired so much tolerance.