e 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.

She circled the outskirts of the town and viewed the slum of "Swede
Hollow." Wherever as many as three houses are gathered there will be a
slum of at least one house. In Gopher Prairie, the Sam Clarks boasted,
"you don't get any of this poverty that you find in cities--always
plenty of work--no need of charity--man got to be blame shiftless if he
don't get ahead." But now that the summer mask of leaves and grass was
gone, Carol discovered misery and dead hope. In a shack of thin boards
covered with tar-paper she saw the washerwoman, Mrs. Steinhof, working
in gray steam. Outside, her six-year-old boy chopped wood. He had a torn
jacket, muffler of a blue like skimmed milk. His hands were covered with
red mittens through which pro