cert-hall, and a
famous 'cellist playing--playing to her.

One scene had a persistent witchery:

She stood on a terrace overlooking a boulevard by the warm sea. She was
certain, though she had no reason for it, that the place was Mentone.
Along the drive below her swept barouches, with a mechanical tlot-tlot,
tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, and great cars with polished black hoods and
engines quiet as the sigh of an old man. In them were women erect,
slender, enameled, and expressionless as marionettes, their small hands
upon parasols, their unchanging eyes always forward, ignoring the men
beside them, tall men with gray hair and distinguished faces. Beyond the
drive were painted sea and painted sands, and blue and yellow pavilions.
Nothing moved except the gliding carriages, and the people were small
and wooden, spots in a picture drenched with gold and hard bright blues.
There was no sound of sea or winds; no softness of whispers nor of
falling petals; nothing but yellow and cobalt and staring light, and the
never-changing tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot----

She startled. She whimpered. It was the rapid ticking of the clock which
had hypnotized her into hearing the steady hoofs. No aching color of the
sea and pride of supercilious people, but the reality of a round-bellied
nickel alarm-clock on a shelf against a fuzzy unplaned pine wall, with
a stiff gray wash-rag hanging above it and a kerosene-stove standing
below.

A thousand dreams governed by the fiction she had read, drawn from the
pictures she had envied, absorbed her drowsy lake afternoons, but
always in the midst of them Kennicott came out from town, drew on khaki
trousers which were plastered with dry fish-scales, asked, "Enjoying
yourself?" and did not listen to her answer.

And nothing was changed, and there was no reason to believe that there
ever would be change.

VI

Trains!

At the lake cottage she missed the passing of the trains. She realized
that in town she had depended upon them for assurance that there
remained a world beyond.

The railroad was more than a means of transportation to Gopher Prairie.
It was a new god; a monster of steel limbs, oak ribs, flesh of gravel,
and a stupendous hunger for freight; a deity created by man that he
might keep himself respectful to Property, as elsewhere he had elevated
and served as tribal gods the mines, cotton-mills, motor-factories,
colleges, army.

The East remembered generations when there had been no railr