II

No group angered her quite so much as these staring young roues.

She had tried to convince herself that the village, with its fresh air, its lakes for fishing and swimming, was healthier than the artificial city.  But she was sickened by glimpses of the gang of boys from fourteen to twenty who loafed before Dyer’s Drug Store, smoking cigarettes, displaying “fancy” shoes and purple ties and coats of diamond-shaped buttons, whistling the Hoochi-Koochi and catcalling, “Oh, you baby-doll” at every passing girl.

She saw them playing pool in the stinking room behind Del Snafflin’s barber shop, and shaking dice in “The Smoke House,” and gathered in a snickering knot to listen to the “juicy stories” of Bert Tybee, the bartender of the Minniemashie House.  She heard them smacking moist lips over every love-scene at the Rosebud Movie Palace.  At the counter of the Greek Confectionery Parlor, while they ate dreadful messes of decayed bananas, acid cherries, whipped cream, and gelatinous ice-cream, they screamed to one another, “Hey, lemme ’lone,” “Quit dog-gone you, looka what you went and done, you almost spilled my glass swater,” “Like hell I did,” “Hey, gol darn your hide, don’t you go sticking your coffin nail in my i-scream,” “Oh you Batty, how juh like dancing with Tillie McGuire, last night?  Some squeezing, heh, kid?”

By diligent consultation of American fiction she discovered that this was the only virile and amusing manner in which boys could function; that boys who were not compounded of the gutter and the mining-camp were mollycoddles and unhappy.  She had taken this for granted.  She had studied the boys pityingly, but impersonally.  It had not occurred to her that they might touch her.

Now she was aware that they knew all about her; that they were waiting for some affectation over which they could guffaw.  No schoolgirl passed their observation-posts more flushingly than did Mrs. Dr. Kennicott.  In shame she knew that they glanced appraisingly at her snowy overshoes, speculating about her legs.  Theirs were not young eyes—­there was no youth in all the town, she agonized.  They were born old, grim and old and spying and censorious.

She cried again that their youth was senile and cruel on the day when she overheard Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock.

Cyrus N. Bogart, son of the righteous widow who lived across the alley, was at this time a boy of fourteen or fifteen.  Carol had already seen quite enough of Cy Bogart.  On her first evening in Gopher Prairie Cy had appeared at the head of a “charivari,” banging immensely upon a discarded automobile fender.  His companions were yelping in imitation of coyotes.  Kennicott had felt rather complimented; had gone out and distributed a dollar.  But Cy was a capitalist in charivaris.  He returned with an entirely new group, and this time there were three automobile fenders and a carnival rattle.  When Kennicott again interrupted