“Ma was telling somebody that she heard that Mrs. Kennicott claimed she made forty dollars a week when she was on some job in the Cities, and Ma says she knows posolutely that she never made but eighteen a week—­Ma says that when she’s lived here a while she won’t go round making a fool of herself, pulling that bighead stuff on folks that know a whole lot more than she does.  They’re all laughing up their sleeves at her.”

“Say, jever notice how Mrs. Kennicott fusses around the house?  Other evening when I was coming over here, she’d forgot to pull down the curtain, and I watched her for ten minutes.  Jeeze, you’d ‘a’ died laughing.  She was there all alone, and she must ‘a’ spent five minutes getting a picture straight.  It was funny as hell the way she’d stick out her finger to straighten the picture—­deedle-dee, see my tunnin’ ’ittle finger, oh my, ain’t I cute, what a fine long tail my cat’s got!”

“But say, Earl, she’s some good-looker, just the same, and O Ignatz! the glad rags she must of bought for her wedding.  Jever notice these low-cut dresses and these thin shimmy-shirts she wears?  I had a good squint at ’em when they were out on the line with the wash.  And some ankles she’s got, heh?”

Then Carol fled.

In her innocence she had not known that the whole town could discuss even her garments, her body.  She felt that she was being dragged naked down Main Street.

The moment it was dusk she pulled down the window-shades, all the shades flush with the sill, but beyond them she felt moist fleering eyes.

III

She remembered, and tried to forget, and remembered more sharply the vulgar detail of her husband’s having observed the ancient customs of the land by chewing tobacco.  She would have preferred a prettier vice—­gambling or a mistress.  For these she might have found a luxury of forgiveness.  She could not remember any fascinatingly wicked hero of fiction who chewed tobacco.  She asserted that it proved him to be a man of the bold free West.  She tried to align him with the hairy-chested heroes of the motion-pictures.  She curled on the couch a pallid softness in the twilight, and fought herself, and lost the battle.  Spitting did not identify him with rangers riding the buttes; it merely bound him to Gopher Prairie—­to Nat Hicks the tailor and Bert Tybee the bartender.

“But he gave it up for me.  Oh, what does it matter!  We’re all filthy in some things.  I think of myself as so superior, but I do eat and digest, I do wash my dirty paws and scratch.  I’m not a cool slim goddess on a column.  There aren’t any!  He gave it up for me.  He stands by me, believing that every one loves me.  He’s the Rock of Ages—­in a storm of meanness that’s driving me mad . . . it will drive me mad.”

All evening she sang Scotch ballads to Kennicott, and when she noticed that he was chewing an unlighted cigar she smiled maternally at his secret.