A year Carol spent in Chicago.  Her study of library-cataloguing, recording, books of reference, was easy and not too somniferous.  She reveled in the Art Institute, in symphonies and violin recitals and chamber music, in the theater and classic dancing.  She almost gave up library work to become one of the young women who dance in cheese-cloth in the moonlight.  She was taken to a certified Studio Party, with beer, cigarettes, bobbed hair, and a Russian Jewess who sang the Internationale.  It cannot be reported that Carol had anything significant to say to the Bohemians.  She was awkward with them, and felt ignorant, and she was shocked by the free manners which she had for years desired.  But she heard and remembered discussions of Freud, Romain Rolland, syndicalism, the Confederation Generale du Travail, feminism vs. haremism, Chinese lyrics, nationalization of mines, Christian Science, and fishing in Ontario.

She went home, and that was the beginning and end of her Bohemian life.

The second cousin of Carol’s sister’s husband lived in Winnetka, and once invited her out to Sunday dinner.  She walked back through Wilmette and Evanston, discovered new forms of suburban architecture, and remembered her desire to recreate villages.  She decided that she would give up library work and, by a miracle whose nature was not very clearly revealed to her, turn a prairie town into Georgian houses and Japanese bungalows.

The next day in library class she had to read a theme on the use of the Cumulative Index, and she was taken so seriously in the discussion that she put off her career of town-planning—­and in the autumn she was in the public library of St. Paul.

VII

Carol was not unhappy and she was not exhilarated, in the St. Paul Library.  She slowly confessed that she was not visibly affecting lives.  She did, at first, put into her contact with the patrons a willingness which should have moved worlds.  But so few of these stolid worlds wanted to be moved.  When she was in charge of the magazine room the readers did not ask for suggestions about elevated essays.  They grunted, “Wanta find the Leather Goods Gazette for last February.”  When she was giving out books the principal query was, “Can you tell me of a good, light, exciting love story to read?  My husband’s going away for a week.”

She was fond of the other librarians; proud of their aspirations.  And by the chance of propinquity she read scores of books unnatural to her gay white littleness:  volumes of anthropology with ditches of foot-notes filled with heaps of small dusty type, Parisian imagistes, Hindu recipes for curry, voyages to the Solomon Isles, theosophy with modern American improvements, treatises upon success in the real-estate business.  She took walks, and was sensible about shoes and diet.  And never did she feel that she was living.

She went to dances and suppers at the houses of college acquaintances.  Sometimes she one-stepped demurely; sometimes, in dread of life’s slipping past, she turned into a bacchanal, her tender eyes excited, her throat tense, as she slid down the room.