es
the vaudeville stage, facetious illustrators, and syndicated newspaper
humor, but out of actual life it passed forty years ago. Carol's small
town thinks not in hoss-swapping but in cheap motor cars,
telephones, ready-made clothes, silos, alfalfa, kodaks, phonographs,
leather-upholstered Morris chairs, bridge-prizes, oil-stocks,
motion-pictures, land-deals, unread sets of Mark Twain, and a chaste
version of national politics.

With such a small-town life a Kennicott or a Champ Perry is content, but
there are also hundreds of thousands, particularly women and young men,
who are not at all content. The more intelligent young people (and the
fortunate widows!) flee to the cities with agility and, despite the
fictional tradition, resolutely stay there, seldom returning even for
holidays. The most protesting patriots of the towns leave them in old
age, if they can afford it, and go to live in California or in the
cities.

The reason, Carol insisted, is not a whiskered rusticity. It is nothing
so amusing!

It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of
speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear
respectable. It is contentment . . . the contentment of the quiet
dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is
negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of
happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness
made God.

A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward,
coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane
decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things
about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the
greatest race in the world.

IV

She had inquired as to the effect of this dominating dullness upon
foreigners. She remembered the feeble exotic quality to be found in the
first-generation Scandinavians; she recalled the Norwegian Fair at the
Lutheran Church, to which Bea had taken her. There, in the bondestue,
the replica of a Norse farm kitchen, pale women in scarlet jackets
embroidered with gold thread and colored beads, in black skirts with a
line of blue, green-striped aprons, and ridged caps very pretty to set
off a fresh face, had served rommegrod og lefse--sweet cakes and sour
milk pudding spiced with cinnamon. For the first time in Gopher Prairie
Carol had found novelty. She had reveled in the mild foreignness