There’s a regiment a-coming down the grand Trunk road.

He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal and reassured.  But when he complimented her, “That was fine.  I don’t know but what you can elocute just as good as Ella Stowbody,” she banged the book and suggested that they were not too late for the nine o’clock show at the movies.

That was her last effort to harvest the April wind, to teach divine unhappiness by a correspondence course, to buy the lilies of Avalon and the sunsets of Cockaigne in tin cans at Ole Jenson’s Grocery.

But the fact is that at the motion-pictures she discovered herself laughing as heartily as Kennicott at the humor of an actor who stuffed spaghetti down a woman’s evening frock.  For a second she loathed her laughter; mourned for the day when on her hill by the Mississippi she had walked the battlements with queens.  But the celebrated cinema jester’s conceit of dropping toads into a soup-plate flung her into unwilling tittering, and the afterglow faded, the dead queens fled through darkness.

VI

She went to the Jolly Seventeen’s afternoon bridge.  She had learned the elements of the game from the Sam Clarks.  She played quietly and reasonably badly.  She had no opinions on anything more polemic than woolen union-suits, a topic on which Mrs. Howland discoursed for five minutes.  She smiled frequently, and was the complete canary-bird in her manner of thanking the hostess, Mrs. Dave Dyer.

Her only anxious period was during the conference on husbands.

The young matrons discussed the intimacies of domesticity with a frankness and a minuteness which dismayed Carol.  Juanita Haydock communicated Harry’s method of shaving, and his interest in deer-shooting.  Mrs. Gougerling reported fully, and with some irritation, her husband’s inappreciation of liver and bacon.  Maud Dyer chronicled Dave’s digestive disorders; quoted a recent bedtime controversy with him in regard to Christian Science, socks and the sewing of buttons upon vests; announced that she “simply wasn’t going to stand his always pawing girls when he went and got crazy-jealous if a man just danced with her”; and rather more than sketched Dave’s varieties of kisses.

So meekly did Carol give attention, so obviously was she at last desirous of being one of them, that they looked on her fondly, and encouraged her to give such details of her honeymoon as might be of interest.  She was embarrassed rather than resentful.  She deliberately misunderstood.  She talked of Kennicott’s overshoes and medical ideals till they were thoroughly bored.  They regarded her as agreeable but green.

Till the end she labored to satisfy the inquisition.  She bubbled at Juanita, the president of the club, that she wanted to entertain them.  “Only,” she said, “I don’t know that I can give you any refreshments as nice as Mrs. Dyer’s salad, or that simply delicious angel’s-food we had at your house, dear.”