She awoke at three in the morning, after a dream of being tortured by Ella Stowbody and the Widow Bogart.

“I’ve been making the town a myth.  This is how people keep up the tradition of the perfect home-town, the happy boyhood, the brilliant college friends.  We forget so.  I’ve been forgetting that Main Street doesn’t think it’s in the least lonely and pitiful.  It thinks it’s God’s Own Country.  It isn’t waiting for me.  It doesn’t care.”

But the next evening she again saw Gopher Prairie as her home, waiting for her in the sunset, rimmed round with splendor.

She did not return for five months more; five months crammed with greedy accumulation of sounds and colors to take back for the long still days.

She had spent nearly two years in Washington.

When she departed for Gopher Prairie, in June, her second baby was stirring within her.

CHAPTER XXXIX

She wondered all the way home what her sensations would be.  She wondered about it so much that she had every sensation she had imagined.  She was excited by each familiar porch, each hearty “Well, well!” and flattered to be, for a day, the most important news of the community.  She bustled about, making calls.  Juanita Haydock bubbled over their Washington encounter, and took Carol to her social bosom.  This ancient opponent seemed likely to be her most intimate friend, for Vida Sherwin, though she was cordial, stood back and watched for imported heresies.

In the evening Carol went to the mill.  The mystical Om-Om-Om of the dynamos in the electric-light plant behind the mill was louder in the darkness.  Outside sat the night watchman, Champ Perry.  He held up his stringy hands and squeaked, “We’ve all missed you terrible.”

Who in Washington would miss her?

Who in Washington could be depended upon like Guy Pollock?  When she saw him on the street, smiling as always, he seemed an eternal thing, a part of her own self.

After a week she decided that she was neither glad nor sorry to be back.  She entered each day with the matter-of-fact attitude with which she had gone to her office in Washington.  It was her task; there would be mechanical details and meaningless talk; what of it?

The only problem which she had approached with emotion proved insignificant.  She had, on the train, worked herself up to such devotion that she was willing to give up her own room, to try to share all of her life with Kennicott.

He mumbled, ten minutes after she had entered the house, “Say, I’ve kept your room for you like it was.  I’ve kind of come round to your way of thinking.  Don’t see why folks need to get on each other’s nerves just because they’re friendly.  Darned if I haven’t got so I like a little privacy and mulling things over by myself.”

II