ashington?"

"Perhaps. Did you ever realize that children are people?"

"That's all right. I'm not going to have him monopolizing the
conversation."

"No, of course. We have our rights, too. But I'm going to bring him up
as a human being. He has just as many thoughts as we have, and I want
him to develop them, not take Gopher Prairie's version of them. That's
my biggest work now--keeping myself, keeping you, from 'educating' him."

"Well, let's not scrap about it. But I'm not going to have him spoiled."

Kennicott had forgotten it in ten minutes; and she forgot it--this time.

VII

The Kennicotts and the Sam Clarks had driven north to a duck-pass
between two lakes, on an autumn day of blue and copper.

Kennicott had given her a light twenty-gauge shotgun. She had a first
lesson in shooting, in keeping her eyes open, not wincing, understanding
that the bead at the end of the barrel really had something to do with
pointing the gun. She was radiant; she almost believed Sam when he
insisted that it was she who had shot the mallard at which they had
fired together.

She sat on the bank of the reedy lake and found rest in Mrs. Clark's
drawling comments on nothing. The brown dusk was still. Behind them were
dark marshes. The plowed acres smelled fresh. The lake was garnet and
silver. The voices of the men, waiting for the last flight, were clear
in the cool air.

"Mark left!" sang Kennicott, in a long-drawn call.

Three ducks were swooping down in a swift line. The guns banged, and
a duck fluttered. The men pushed their light boat out on the burnished
lake, disappeared beyond the reeds. Their cheerful voices and the slow
splash and clank of oars came back to Carol from the dimness. In the sky
a fiery plain sloped down to a serene harbor. It dissolved; the lake
was white marble; and Kennicott was crying, "Well, old lady, how about
hiking out for home? Supper taste pretty good, eh?"

"I'll sit back with Ethel," she said, at the car.

It was the first time she had called Mrs. Clark by her given name; the
first time she had willingly sat back, a woman of Main Street.

"I'm hungry. It's good to be hungry," she reflected, as they drove away.

She looked across the silent fields to the west. She was conscious of an
unbroken sweep of land to the Rockies, to Alaska, a dominion which
will rise to unexampled greatness when other empires have grown senile.
Before that time, she knew, a hundred generations of Carols wi