When Carol sat at the piano again she did not think of her husband but of the book-drugged hermit, Guy Pollock.  She wished that Pollock would come calling.

“If a girl really kissed him, he’d creep out of his den and be human.  If Will were as literate as Guy, or Guy were as executive as Will, I think I could endure even Gopher Prairie.  It’s so hard to mother Will.  I could be maternal with Guy.  Is that what I want, something to mother, a man or a baby or a town?  I will have a baby.  Some day.  But to have him isolated here all his receptive years——­

“And so to bed.

“Have I found my real level in Bea and kitchen-gossip?

“Oh, I do miss you, Will.  But it will be pleasant to turn over in bed as often as I want to, without worrying about waking you up.

“Am I really this settled thing called a ‘married woman’?  I feel so unmarried tonight.  So free.  To think that there was once a Mrs. Kennicott who let herself worry over a town called Gopher Prairie when there was a whole world outside it!

“Of course Will is going to like poetry.”

III

A black February day.  Clouds hewn of ponderous timber weighing down on the earth; an irresolute dropping of snow specks upon the trampled wastes.  Gloom but no veiling of angularity.  The lines of roofs and sidewalks sharp and inescapable.

The second day of Kennicott’s absence.

She fled from the creepy house for a walk.  It was thirty below zero; too cold to exhilarate her.  In the spaces between houses the wind caught her.  It stung, it gnawed at nose and ears and aching cheeks, and she hastened from shelter to shelter, catching her breath in the lee of a barn, grateful for the protection of a billboard covered with ragged posters showing layer under layer of paste-smeared green and streaky red.

The grove of oaks at the end of the street suggested Indians, hunting, snow-shoes, and she struggled past the earth-banked cottages to the open country, to a farm and a low hill corrugated with hard snow.  In her loose nutria coat, seal toque, virginal cheeks unmarked by lines of village jealousies, she was as out of place on this dreary hillside as a scarlet tanager on an ice-floe.  She looked down on Gopher Prairie.  The snow, stretching without break from streets to devouring prairie beyond, wiped out the town’s pretense of being a shelter.  The houses were black specks on a white sheet.  Her heart shivered with that still loneliness as her body shivered with the wind.

She ran back into the huddle of streets, all the while protesting that she wanted a city’s yellow glare of shop-windows and restaurants, or the primitive forest with hooded furs and a rifle, or a barnyard warm and steamy, noisy with hens and cattle, certainly not these dun houses, these yards choked with winter ash-piles, these roads of dirty snow and clotted frozen mud.  The zest of winter was gone.  Three months more, till May, the cold might drag on, with the snow ever filthier, the weakened body less resistent.  She wondered why the good citizens insisted on adding the chill of prejudice, why they did not make the houses of their spirits more warm and frivolous, like the wise chatterers of Stockholm and Moscow.