Her “reforms,” her impulses toward beauty in raw Main Street, they had become indistinct.  But she would set them going now.  She would!  She swore it with soft fist beating the edges of the radiator.  And at the end of all her vows she had no notion as to when and where the crusade was to begin.

Become an authentic part of the town?  She began to think with unpleasant lucidity.  She reflected that she did not know whether the people liked her.  She had gone to the women at afternoon-coffees, to the merchants in their stores, with so many outpouring comments and whimsies that she hadn’t given them a chance to betray their opinions of her.  The men smiled—­but did they like her?  She was lively among the women—­but was she one of them?  She could not recall many times when she had been admitted to the whispering of scandal which is the secret chamber of Gopher Prairie conversation.

She was poisoned with doubt, as she drooped up to bed.

Next day, through her shopping, her mind sat back and observed.  Dave Dyer and Sam Clark were as cordial as she had been fancying; but wasn’t there an impersonal abruptness in the “H’ are yuh?” of Chet Dashaway?  Howland the grocer was curt.  Was that merely his usual manner?

“It’s infuriating to have to pay attention to what people think.  In St. Paul I didn’t care.  But here I’m spied on.  They’re watching me.  I mustn’t let it make me self-conscious,” she coaxed herself—­overstimulated by the drug of thought, and offensively on the defensive.

III

A thaw which stripped the snow from the sidewalks; a ringing iron night when the lakes could be heard booming; a clear roistering morning.  In tam o’shanter and tweed skirt Carol felt herself a college junior going out to play hockey.  She wanted to whoop, her legs ached to run.  On the way home from shopping she yielded, as a pup would have yielded.  She galloped down a block and as she jumped from a curb across a welter of slush, she gave a student “Yippee!”

She saw that in a window three old women were gasping.  Their triple glare was paralyzing.  Across the street, at another window, the curtain had secretively moved.  She stopped, walked on sedately, changed from the girl Carol into Mrs. Dr. Kennicott.

She never again felt quite young enough and defiant enough and free enough to run and halloo in the public streets; and it was as a Nice Married Woman that she attended the next weekly bridge of the Jolly Seventeen.

IV

The Jolly Seventeen (the membership of which ranged from fourteen to twenty-six) was the social cornice of Gopher Prairie.  It was the country club, the diplomatic set, the St. Cecilia, the Ritz oval room, the Club de Vingt.  To belong to it was to be “in.”  Though its membership partly coincided with that of the Thanatopsis study club, the Jolly Seventeen as a separate entity guffawed at the Thanatopsis, and considered it middle-class and even “highbrow.”