odges are the worst thing that ever
happened to this town, lot of young men squeezing girls and finding
out----Oh, it's dreadful. I've told the mayor he ought to put a stop
to them and----There was one boy in this town, I don't want to be
suspicious or uncharitable but----"

It was half an hour before Carol escaped.

She stopped on her own porch and thought viciously:

"If that woman is on the side of the angels, then I have no choice; I
must be on the side of the devil. But--isn't she like me? She too wants
to 'reform the town'! She too criticizes everybody! She too thinks the
men are vulgar and limited! AM I LIKE HER? This is ghastly!"

That evening she did not merely consent to play cribbage with Kennicott;
she urged him to play; and she worked up a hectic interest in land-deals
and Sam Clark.

VIII

In courtship days Kennicott had shown her a photograph of Nels
Erdstrom's baby and log cabin, but she had never seen the Erdstroms.
They had become merely "patients of the doctor." Kennicott telephoned
her on a mid-December afternoon, "Want to throw your coat on and drive
out to Erdstrom's with me? Fairly warm. Nels got the jaundice."

"Oh yes!" She hastened to put on woolen stockings, high boots, sweater,
muffler, cap, mittens.

The snow was too thick and the ruts frozen too hard for the motor. They
drove out in a clumsy high carriage. Tucked over them was a blue woolen
cover, prickly to her wrists, and outside of it a buffalo robe, humble
and moth-eaten now, used ever since the bison herds had streaked the
prairie a few miles to the west.

The scattered houses between which they passed in town were small and
desolate in contrast to the expanse of huge snowy yards and wide
street. They crossed the railroad tracks, and instantly were in the farm
country. The big piebald horses snorted clouds of steam, and started to
trot. The carriage squeaked in rhythm. Kennicott drove with clucks of
"There boy, take it easy!" He was thinking. He paid no attention to
Carol. Yet it was he who commented, "Pretty nice, over there," as they
approached an oak-grove where shifty winter sunlight quivered in the
hollow between two snow-drifts.

They drove from the natural prairie to a cleared district which twenty
years ago had been forest. The country seemed to stretch unchanging to
the North Pole: low hill, brush-scraggly bottom, reedy creek, muskrat
mound, fields with frozen brown clods thrust up through the snow.

Her ears