Carol cried “Fine day!” to the boys; she came in a glow to Howland & Gould’s grocery, her collar white with frost from her breath; she bought a can of tomatoes as though it were Orient fruit; and returned home planning to surprise Kennicott with an omelet creole for dinner.

So brilliant was the snow-glare that when she entered the house she saw the door-knobs, the newspaper on the table, every white surface as dazzling mauve, and her head was dizzy in the pyrotechnic dimness.  When her eyes had recovered she felt expanded, drunk with health, mistress of life.  The world was so luminous that she sat down at her rickety little desk in the living-room to make a poem. (She got no farther than “The sky is bright, the sun is warm, there ne’er will be another storm.”)

In the mid-afternoon of this same day Kennicott was called into the country.  It was Bea’s evening out—­her evening for the Lutheran Dance.  Carol was alone from three till midnight.  She wearied of reading pure love stories in the magazines and sat by a radiator, beginning to brood.

Thus she chanced to discover that she had nothing to do.

II

She had, she meditated, passed through the novelty of seeing the town and meeting people, of skating and sliding and hunting.  Bea was competent; there was no household labor except sewing and darning and gossipy assistance to Bea in bed-making.  She couldn’t satisfy her ingenuity in planning meals.  At Dahl & Oleson’s Meat Market you didn’t give orders—­you wofully inquired whether there was anything today besides steak and pork and ham.  The cuts of beef were not cuts.  They were hacks.  Lamb chops were as exotic as sharks’ fins.  The meat-dealers shipped their best to the city, with its higher prices.

In all the shops there was the same lack of choice.  She could not find a glass-headed picture-nail in town; she did not hunt for the sort of veiling she wanted—­she took what she could get; and only at Howland & Gould’s was there such a luxury as canned asparagus.  Routine care was all she could devote to the house.  Only by such fussing as the Widow Bogart’s could she make it fill her time.

She could not have outside employment.  To the village doctor’s wife it was taboo.

She was a woman with a working brain and no work.

There were only three things which she could do:  Have children; start her career of reforming; or become so definitely a part of the town that she would be fulfilled by the activities of church and study-club and bridge-parties.

Children, yes, she wanted them, but——­She was not quite ready.  She had been embarrassed by Kennicott’s frankness, but she agreed with him that in the insane condition of civilization, which made the rearing of citizens more costly and perilous than any other crime, it was inadvisable to have children till he had made more money.  She was sorry——­Perhaps he had made all the mystery of love a mechanical cautiousness but——­She fled from the thought with a dubious, “Some day.”