f the town? She began to think with unpleasant
lucidity. She reflected that she did not know whether the people liked
her. She had gone to the women at afternoon-coffees, to the merchants
in their stores, with so many outpouring comments and whimsies that
she hadn't given them a chance to betray their opinions of her. The men
smiled--but did they like her? She was lively among the women--but
was she one of them? She could not recall many times when she had been
admitted to the whispering of scandal which is the secret chamber of
Gopher Prairie conversation.

She was poisoned with doubt, as she drooped up to bed.

Next day, through her shopping, her mind sat back and observed. Dave
Dyer and Sam Clark were as cordial as she had been fancying; but wasn't
there an impersonal abruptness in the "H' are yuh?" of Chet Dashaway?
Howland the grocer was curt. Was that merely his usual manner?

"It's infuriating to have to pay attention to what people think. In
St. Paul I didn't care. But here I'm spied on. They're watching
me. I mustn't let it make me self-conscious," she coaxed
herself--overstimulated by the drug of thought, and offensively on the
defensive.

III

A thaw which stripped the snow from the sidewalks; a ringing iron night
when the lakes could be heard booming; a clear roistering morning. In
tam o'shanter and tweed skirt Carol felt herself a college junior going
out to play hockey. She wanted to whoop, her legs ached to run. On the
way home from shopping she yielded, as a pup would have yielded. She
galloped down a block and as she jumped from a curb across a welter of
slush, she gave a student "Yippee!"

She saw that in a window three old women were gasping. Their triple
glare was paralyzing. Across the street, at another window, the curtain
had secretively moved. She stopped, walked on sedately, changed from the
girl Carol into Mrs. Dr. Kennicott.

She never again felt quite young enough and defiant enough and free
enough to run and halloo in the public streets; and it was as a Nice
Married Woman that she attended the next weekly bridge of the Jolly
Seventeen.

IV

The Jolly Seventeen (the membership of which ranged from fourteen to
twenty-six) was the social cornice of Gopher Prairie. It was the country
club, the diplomatic set, the St. Cecilia, the Ritz oval room, the Club
de Vingt. To belong to it was to be "in." Though its membership partly
coincided with that of the Thanatopsis study clu