Main Street quotes

But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere. The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would it be told Up York State or in the Carolina hills.

Main Street is the climax of civilization.

That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters.

What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider.

Our railway station is the final aspiration of architecture.

Sam Clark’s annual hardware turnover is the envy of the four counties which constitute God’s Country. In the sensitive art of the Rosebud Movie Palace there is a Message, and humor strictly moral.

Our railway station is the final aspiration of architecture. Sam Clark’s annual hardware turnover is the envy of the four counties which constitute God’s Country.

In the sensitive art of the Rosebud Movie Palace there is a Message, and humor strictly moral.

Such is our comfortable tradition and sure faith. Would he not betray himself an alien cynic who should otherwise portray Main Street, or distress the citizens by speculating whether there may not be other faiths?

She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life.

The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth.

It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College.

It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College.

The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest.

Blodgett College is on the edge of Minneapolis. It is a bulwark of sound religion. It is still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire, Darwin, and Robert Ingersoll.

Even when she was tired her dark eyes were observant.

She did not yet know the immense ability of the world to be casually cruel and proudly dull, but if she should ever learn those dismaying powers, her eyes would never become sullen or heavy or rheumily amorous.

For all her enthusiasms, for all the fondness and the “crushes” which she inspired, Carol’s acquaintances were shy of her. When she was most ardently singing hymns or planning deviltry she yet seemed gently aloof and critical. She was credulous, perhaps; a born hero-worshipper;

When she was most ardently singing hymns or planning deviltry she yet seemed gently aloof and critical. She was credulous, perhaps; a born hero-worshipper; yet she did question and examine unceasingly.

Whatever she might become she would never be static.

Her versatility ensnared her. By turns she hoped to discover that she had an unusual voice, a talent for the piano, the ability to act, to write, to manage organizations.

“What’s better than making a comfy home and bringing up some cute kids and knowing nice homey people?”

It was the immemorial male reply to the restless woman.

Thus to the young Sappho spake the melon-venders; thus the captains to Zenobia; and in the damp cave over gnawed bones the hairy suitor thus protested to the woman advocate of matriarchy.

The buildings were as ill-assorted, as temporary-looking, as a mining-camp street in the motion-pictures. The railroad station was a one-room frame box, a mirey cattle-pen on one side and a crimson wheat-elevator on the other.

The elevator, with its cupola on the ridge of a shingled roof, resembled a broad-shouldered man with a small, vicious, pointed head.

The only habitable structures to be seen were the florid redbrick Catholic church and rectory at the end of Main Street.

The long rows of wheat-shocks marched like soldiers in worn yellow tabards. The newly plowed fields were black banners fallen on the distant slope.

It was a martial immensity, vigorous, a little harsh, unsoftened by kindly gardens.

The expanse was relieved by clumps of oaks with patches of short wild grass; and every mile or two was a chain of cobalt slews, with the flicker of blackbirds’ wings across them.

The sunshine was dizzy on open stubble; shadows from immense cumulus clouds were forever sliding across low mounds; and the sky was wider and loftier and more resolutely blue than the sky of cities … she declared.

“It’s a glorious country; a land to be big in,” she crooned.

Then Kennicott startled her by chuckling, “D’ you realize the town after the next is Gopher Prairie? Home!”

His neck was heavy; his speech was heavy; he was twelve or thirteen years older than she; and about him was none of the magic of shared adventures and eagerness. She could not believe that she had ever slept in his arms.

That was one of the dreams which you had but did not officially admit.

She told herself how good he was, how dependable and understanding. She touched his ear, smoothed the plane of his solid jaw, and, turning away again, concentrated upon liking his town. It wouldn’t be like these barren settlements. It couldn’t be!

The broad, straight, unenticing gashes of the streets let in the grasping prairie on every side. She realized the vastness and the emptiness of the land.

The skeleton iron windmill on the farm a few blocks away, at the north end of Main Street, was like the ribs of a dead cow.

She thought of the coming of the Northern winter, when the unprotected houses would crouch together in terror of storms galloping out of that wild waste. They were so small and weak, the little brown houses.

She thought of the coming of the Northern winter, when the unprotected houses would crouch together in terror of storms galloping out of that wild waste. They were so small and weak, the little brown houses.

They were shelters for sparrows, not homes for warm laughing people.

She told herself that down the street the leaves were a splendor. The maples were orange; the oaks a solid tint of raspberry. And the lawns had been nursed with love. But the thought would not hold. At best the trees resembled a thinned woodlot.

an old farmer, solid, wholesome, but not clean—his face like a potato fresh from the earth. None of them had shaved for three days.

“If they can’t build shrines, out here on the prairie, surely there’s nothing to prevent their buying safety-razors!” she raged.

She fought herself: “I must be wrong. People do live here. It can’t be as ugly as—as I know it is! I must be wrong. But I can’t do it. I can’t go through with it.”

The recently built house of Sam Clark, in which was given the party to welcome Carol, was one of the largest in Gopher Prairie. It had a clean sweep of clapboards, a solid squareness, a small tower, and a large screened porch.

Inside, it was as shiny, as hard, and as cheerful as a new oak upright piano.

Carol looked imploringly at Sam Clark as he rolled to the door and shouted, “Welcome, little lady! The keys of the city are yourn!”

Carol listened.

She discovered that conversation did not exist in Gopher Prairie.

Even at this affair, which brought out the young smart set, the hunting squire set, the respectable intellectual set, and the solid financial set, they sat up with gaiety as with a corpse.

Books. But me,” he glanced about importantly, as one convinced that no other hero had ever been in so strange a plight, “I’m so darn busy I don’t have much time to read.”

“I never read anything I can’t check against,” said Sam Clark.

Thus ended the literary portion of the conversation, and for seven minutes Jackson Elder outlined reasons for believing that the pike-fishing was better on the west shore of Lake Minniemashie than on the east—though it was indeed quite true that on the east shore Nat …

and Ma Dawson—I didn’t hardly know whether she’d like you or not, she’s such a dried-up old bird, but she said, ‘Your bride is so quick and bright, I declare, she just wakes me up.’ ”

Carol liked praise, the flavor and fatness of it, but she was so energetically being sorry for herself that she could not taste this commendation.

“Please! Come on! Cheer up!” His lips said it, his anxious shoulder said it, his arm about her said it, as they halted on the obscure porch of their house.

“You will enjoy Gopher Prairie very much, Mrs. Kennicott,” petitioned Raymie.

His eyes were like those of a dog waiting to be let in out of the cold.

He passed the stewed apricots effusively. “There are a great many bright cultured people here. Mrs. Wilks, the Christian Science reader, is a very bright woman—though I am not a Scientist myself, in fact I sing in the Episcopal choir.

“Tin!” observed the traveling salesman.

Raymie bared his teeth like a belligerent mouse.

“Well, what if it is tin? That’s not my fault. I told D. H. to make it polished granite. You make me tired!”

Mrs. Bogart lived across the alley from the rear of Carol’s house. She was a widow, and a Prominent Baptist, and a Good Influence.

She had so painfully reared three sons to be Christian gentlemen that one of them had become an Omaha bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus N. Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most brazen member of the toughest gang in Boytown.

Mrs. Bogart was not the acid type of Good Influence. She was the soft, damp, fat, sighing, indigestive, clinging, melancholy, depressingly hopeful kind. There are in every large chicken-yard a number of old and indignant hens who resemble Mrs.

Mrs. Bogart was not the acid type of Good Influence. She was the soft, damp, fat, sighing, indigestive, clinging, melancholy, depressingly hopeful kind.

There are in every large chicken-yard a number of old and indignant hens who resemble Mrs. Bogart, and when they are served at Sunday noon dinner, as fricasseed chicken with thick dumplings, they keep up the resemblance.

Carol had noted that Mrs. Bogart from her side window kept an eye upon the house. The Kennicotts and Mrs. Bogart did not move in the same sets—which meant precisely the same in Gopher Prairie as it did on Fifth Avenue or in Mayfair.

It was twenty minutes later when Mrs. Bogart finally oozed out of the front door. Carol ran back into the living-room and jerked open the windows.

“That woman has left damp fingerprints in the air,” she said.

Carol was extravagant, but at least she did not try to clear herself of blame by going about whimpering, “I know I’m terribly extravagant but I don’t seem to be able to help it.”

George Edwin Mott giggled; Luke Dawson twisted his beard; Mrs. Clark insisted, “I did too, Sam—I got a shoe—I never knew I could fight so terrible!”

Carol was certain that she was a great reformer.

She mercifully had combs, mirrors, brushes, needle and thread ready. She permitted them to restore the divine decency of buttons.

Gopher Prairie was digging in for the winter. Through late November and all December it snowed daily; the thermometer was at zero and might drop to twenty below, or thirty.

Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.

Storm sheds were erected at every door. In every block the householders, Sam Clark, the wealthy Mr. Dawson, all save asthmatic Ezra Stowbody who extravagantly hired a boy, were seen perilously staggering up ladders, carrying storm windows and screwing them to second-story jambs.

It was Bea’s evening out—her evening for the Lutheran Dance. Carol was alone from three till midnight. She wearied of reading pure love stories in the magazines and sat by a radiator, beginning to brood.

Thus she chanced to discover that she had nothing to do.

She had, she meditated, passed through the novelty of seeing the town and meeting people, of skating and sliding and hunting. Bea was competent; there was no household labor except sewing and darning and gossipy assistance to Bea in bed-making.

She could not have outside employment. To the village doctor’s wife it was taboo.

She was a woman with a working brain and no work.

There were only three things which she could do: Have children; start her career of reforming; or become so definitely a part of the town that she would be fulfilled by the activities of church and study-club and bridge-parties.

“What if some children are destructive?

They learn to read. Books are cheaper than minds.

”

“

I’ll be as impersonal as cold boiled potatoes.

(Not that I shall ever be able to help you ‘make the town worth while.’) What do they say about me? Really. I want to know.”

She had tripped into the meadow to teach the lambs a pretty educational dance and found that the lambs were wolves.

There was no way out between their pressing gray shoulders. She was surrounded by fangs and sneering eyes.

She wanted to hide in the generous indifference of cities. She practised saying to Kennicott, “Think perhaps I’ll run down to St. Paul for a few days.” But she could not trust herself to say it carelessly; could not abide his certain questioning.

Reform the town? All she wanted was to be tolerated!

She could not look directly at people. She flushed and winced before citizens who a week ago had been amusing objects of study, and in their good-mornings she heard a cruel sniggering.

No schoolgirl passed their observation-posts more flushingly than did Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. In shame she knew that they glanced appraisingly at her snowy overshoes, speculating about her legs. Theirs were not young eyes—there was no youth in all the town, she agonized.

They were born old, grim and old and spying and censorious.

She cried again that their youth was senile and cruel on the day when she overheard Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock.

“Aw, gee whiz, didn’t Doc Kennicott used to chew tobacco all the time before he married this-here girl from the Cities? He used to spit—Gee! Some shot! He could hit a tree ten feet off.”

This was news to the girl from the Cities.

“Say, how is she?” continued Earl.

In her innocence she had not known that the whole town could discuss even her garments, her body.

She felt that she was being dragged naked down Main Street.

The moment it was dusk she pulled down the window-shades, all the shades flush with the sill, but beyond them she felt moist fleering eyes.

She reverted to her resolution to change the town—awaken it, prod it, “reform” it.

What if they were wolves instead of lambs? They’d eat her all the sooner if she was meek to them. Fight or be eaten.

It was easier to change the town completely than to conciliate it! She could not take their point of view; it was a negative thing; an intellectual squalor; a swamp of prejudices and fears. She would have to make them take hers.

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.”

“Oh yes, they are!

The dollar-sign has chased the crucifix clean off the map.

But then, I’ve got no kick. I do what I please, and I suppose I ought to let them do the same.”

Reverend Warren, the president of this-here Thanatopsis Club, think she’s running the works, but Miss Sherwin is the secret boss, and nags all the easygoing dames into doing something. But way I figure it out—You see, I’m not interested in these dinky reforms.

Miss Sherwin’s trying to repair the holes in this barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing out the water. And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry to the crew!

Me, I want to yank it up on the ways, and fire the poor bum of a shoemaker that built it so it sails crooked, and have it rebuilt right, from the keel up.”

But she felt insecure. Her chair was out in the open, exposed to their gaze, and it was a hard-slatted, quivery, slippery church-parlor chair, likely to collapse publicly and without warning. It was impossible to sit on it without folding the hands and listening piously.

She wanted to kick the chair and run. It would make a magnificent clatter.

She saw that Vida Sherwin was watching her. She pinched her wrist, as though she were a noisy child in church, and when she was decent and cramped again, she listened.

Miss Ella Stowbody obliged with a recital of “The Recessional” and extracts from Lalla Rookh. By request, she gave “An Old Sweetheart of Mine” as encore.

Gopher Prairie had finished the poets. It was ready for the next week’s labor: English Fiction and Essays.

Mrs. Dawson besought, “Now we will have a discussion of the papers, and I am sure we shall all enjoy hearing from one who we hope to have as a new member, Mrs.

She had replaced the city hall project by an entirely new and highly exhilarating thought of how little was done for these unpicturesque poor.

The spring of the plains is not a reluctant virgin but brazen and soon away.

The mud roads of a few days ago are powdery dust and the puddles beside them have hardened into lozenges of black sleek earth like cracked patent leather.

Had she actually believed that she could plant a seed of liberalism in the blank wall of mediocrity?

How had she fallen into the folly of trying to plant anything whatever in a wall so smooth and sun-glazed, and so satisfying to the happy sleepers within?

One week of authentic spring, one rare sweet week of May, one tranquil moment between the blast of winter and the charge of summer.

Daily Carol walked from town into flashing country hysteric with new life.

The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party of Blaine and McKinley, is the agent of the Lord and of the Baptist Church in temporal affairs.

All socialists ought to be hanged.

“Harold Bell Wright is a lovely writer, and he teaches such good morals in his novels, and folks say he’s made prett’ near a million dollars out of ’em.”

“Harold Bell Wright is a lovely writer, and he teaches such good morals in his novels, and folks say he’s made prett’ near a million dollars out of ’em.”

People who make more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred are wicked.

It doesn’t hurt any to drink a glass of beer on a warm day, but anybody who touches wine is headed straight for hell.

It doesn’t hurt any to drink a glass of beer on a warm day, but anybody who touches wine is headed straight for hell.

Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be.

Nobody needs drugstore ice cream; pie is good enough for anybody.

Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be.

Nobody needs drugstore ice cream; pie is good enough for anybody.

The farmers want too much for their wheat.

“

Don’t be cynical. It hurts me, in you. It’s like blood on the wing of a hummingbird.

”

“

I’m not a hummingbird. I’m a hawk; a tiny leashed hawk, pecked to death by these large, white, flabby, wormy hens.

But I am grateful to you for confirming me in the faith. And I’m going home!”

He took out a cigar, a match. He tossed the vest on the floor. He lighted the cigar and puffed savagely. He broke up the match and snapped the fragments at the footboard.

She suddenly saw the footboard of the bed as the foot-stone of the grave of love.

The room was drab-colored and ill-ventilated—Kennicott did not “believe in opening the windows so darn wide that you heat all outdoors.” The stale air seemed never to change.

Now she put on her new moleskin cap, which made her face small and innocent, she rubbed off the traces of a lipstick—and fled across the alley before her admirable resolution should sneak away.

The age of houses, like the age of men, has small relation to their years.

The dull-green cottage of the good Widow Bogart was twenty years old, but it had the antiquity of Cheops, and the smell of mummy-dust. Its neatness rebuked the street. The two stones by the path were painted yellow;

And—and—Then there’s that Ole Jenson the grocer, that thinks he’s so plaguey smart, and I know he made up to a farmer’s wife and—And this awful man Bjornstam that does chores, and Nat Hicks and—”

There was, it seemed, no person in town who was not living a life of shame except Mrs. Bogart, and naturally she resented it.

She knew. She had always happened to be there. Once, she whispered, she was going by when an indiscreet window-shade had been left up a couple of inches. Once she had noticed a man and woman holding hands, and right at a Methodist sociable!

She muttered unsteadily, “Must run up and put on my shoes—slippers so cold.” In the not very romantic solitude of the locked bathroom she sat on the slippery edge of the tub and wept.

Kennicott had five hobbies: medicine, land-investment, Carol, motoring, and hunting. It is not certain in what order he preferred them.

Solid though his enthusiasms were in the matter of medicine—his admiration of this city surgeon, his condemnation of that for tricky ways of persuading country practitioners to bring in surgical patients, his indignation about fee-splitting, his pride in a new X-ray apparatus—none of these beatified …

Mr. Schnarken was at various high moments a cook, a lifeguard, a burlesque actor, and a sculptor. There was a hotel hallway up which policemen charged, only to be stunned by plaster busts hurled upon them from the innumerous doors.

If the plot lacked lucidity, the dual motif of legs and pie was clear and sure.

Bathing and modeling were equally sound occasions for legs; the wedding-scene was but an approach to the thunderous climax when Mr. Schnarken slipped a piece of custard pie into the clergyman’s rear pocket.

“How? I’ve failed at everything: the Thanatopsis, parties, pioneers, city hall, Guy and Vida. But—It doesn’t matter! I’m not trying to ‘reform the town’ now. I’m not trying to organize Browning Clubs, and sit in clean white kids yearning up at lecturers with ribbony eyeglasses.

I am trying to save my soul.

“Will Kennicott, asleep there, trusting me, thinking he holds me. And I’m leaving him. All of me left him when he laughed at me. It wasn’t enough for him that I admired him; I must change myself and grow like him. He takes advantage.

But Kennicott’s dominance was heavy upon her. She could not determine whether she was checked by fear or him, or by inertia—by dislike of the emotional labor of the “scenes” which would be involved in asserting independence.

She was like the revolutionist at fifty: not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades.

The second evening after the movies she impulsively summoned Vida Sherwin and Guy to the house for popcorn and cider.

we’re wiser than you.’ For ten thousand years they’ve said that. We want our Utopia now—and we’re going to try our hands at it. All we want is—everything for all of us! For every housewife and every longshoreman and every Hindu nationalist and every teacher.

We want everything. We shatn’t get it.

So we shatn’t ever be content—”

Kennicott, Sam Clark, Jackson Elder, young Dr. McGanum, and James Madison Howland, teetering on their toes near the stove, conversed with the sedate pomposity of the commercialist. In details the men were unlike, yet they said the same things in the same hearty monotonous voices.

You had to look at them to see which was speaking.

“Well, we made pretty good time coming up,” from one—any one.

“Yump, Pete’s got a good place there.”

They glided from these serious topics into the jocose insults which are the wit of Main Street.

Sam Clark was particularly apt at them. “What’s this wild-eyed sale of summer caps you think you’re trying to pull off?” he clamored at Harry Haydock. “Did you steal ’em, or are you just overcharging us, as usual?

Everything was solved. She would be an authentic part of the town, yet escape the coma of the Village Virus. … She would be free of Kennicott again, without hurting him, without his knowing.

The moon was small and high now, and unheeding.

Though they had all been certain that they longed for the privilege of attending committee meetings and rehearsals, the dramatic association as definitely formed consisted only of Kennicott, Carol, Guy Pollock, Vida Sherwin, Ella Stowbody, the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, Raymie Wutherspoon, Dr.

Terry Gould, and four new candidates: flirtatious Rita Simons, Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon and Myrtle Cass, an uncomely but intense girl of nineteen. Of these fifteen only seven came to the first meeting.

The rest telephoned their unparalleled regrets and engagements and illnesses, and announced that they would be present at all other meetings through eternity.

Carol was made president and director.

Ella Stowbody, who was a professional, having studied elocution in Milwaukee, disapproved of Carol’s enthusiasm for recent plays.

Miss Stowbody expressed the fundamental principle of the American drama: the only way to be artistic is to present Shakespeare.

As no one listened to her she sat back and looked like Lady Macbeth.

Ella Stowbody, who was a professional, having studied elocution in Milwaukee, disapproved of Carol’s enthusiasm for recent plays. Miss Stowbody expressed the fundamental principle of the American drama: the only way to be artistic is to present Shakespeare.

As no one listened to her she sat back and looked like Lady Macbeth.

The Little Theaters, which were to give piquancy to American drama three or four years later, were only in embryo. But of this fast coming revolt Carol had premonitions. She knew from some lost magazine article that in Dublin were innovators called The Irish Players.

then he was Doc Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, and she was recaptured by Main Street. Never, not all her life, would she behold jungles and the tombs of kings.

There were strange things in the world, they really existed; but she would never see them.

She would recreate them in plays!

There were three sets of scenery: a woodland, a Poor Interior, and a Rich Interior, the last also useful for railway stations, offices, and as a background for the Swedish Quartet from Chicago.

There were three gradations of lighting: full on, half on, and entirely off.

This was the only theater in Gopher Prairie. It was known as the “op’ra house.”

She discovered that, despite the enthusiastic young writers, the drama was not half so native and close to the soil as motor cars and telephones.

She discovered that simple arts require sophisticated training.

She discovered that to produce one perfect stage-picture would be as difficult as to turn all of Gopher Prairie into a Georgian garden.

The company glanced doubtfully at one another.

In Gopher Prairie it is not good form to be holy except at a church, between ten-thirty and twelve on Sunday.

“But if we want to do it, we’ve got to work; we must have self-discipline.”

She wearily did not blame them, company nor audience.

Herself she blamed for trying to carve intaglios in good wholesome jack-pine.

“It’s the worst defeat of all. I’m beaten. By Main Street. ‘I must go on.’ But I can’t!”

She was startled to find that she was using the word “escape.”

Then, for three years which passed like one curt paragraph, she ceased to find anything interesting save the Bjornstams and her baby.

Down here there were no trains. The stillness was very great. The prairie encircled the lake, lay round her, raw, dusty, thick. Only the train could cut it.

Some day she would take a train; and that would be a great taking.

She turned to the Chautauqua as she had turned to the dramatic association, to the library-board.

she forgot the speakers while she listened to noises outside the tent: two farmers talking hoarsely, a wagon creaking down Main Street, the crow of a rooster. She was content. But it was the contentment of the lost hunter stopping to rest.

For from the Chautauqua itself she got nothing but wind and chaff and heavy laughter, the laughter of yokels at old jokes, a mirthless and primitive sound like the cries of beasts on a farm.

These were the several instructors in the condensed university’s seven-day course:

Honesty and courtesy in business are preferable to boorishness and exposed trickery, but this is not to be taken personally, since all persons in Gopher Prairie are known to be honest and courteous.

London is a large city. A distinguished statesman once taught Sunday School.

Four “entertainers” who told Jewish stories, Irish stories, German stories, Chinese stories, and Tennessee mountaineer stories, most of which Carol had heard.

The people who hemmed her in had been brilliantly reinforced by Mr. and Mrs. Whittier N. Smail—Kennicott’s Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie.

The true Main Streetite defines a relative as a person to whose house you go uninvited, to stay as long as you like.

If you hear that Lym Cass on his journey East has spent all his time “visiting” in Oyster Center, it does not mean that he prefers that village to the rest of New England, but that he has relatives there.

… was just—I find that onions don’t agree with me, it’s very strange, ever since I had an attack of biliousness one time, I have found that onions, either fried onions or raw ones, and Whittier does love raw onions with vinegar and sugar on them—”

Carol was discovering that the one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.

She supposed that she was being gracefully dull and standardized in the Smails’ presence, but they scented the heretic, and with forward-stooping delight they sat and tried to drag out her ludicrous concepts for their amusement.

Though the town seemed to Carol to change no more than the surrounding fields, there was a constant shifting, these three years. The citizen of the prairie drifts always westward.

It may be because he is the heir of ancient migrations⁠—and it may be because he finds within his own spirit so little adventure that he is driven to seek it by changing his horizon.

The towns remain unvaried, yet the individual faces alter like classes in college.

Gray steel that seems unmoving because it spins so fast in the balanced flywheel, gray snow in an avenue of elms, gray dawn with the sun behind it⁠—this was the gray of Vida Sherwin’s life at thirty-six.

She was small and active and sallow; her yellow hair was faded, and looked dry; her blue silk blouses and modest lace collars and high black shoes and sailor hats were as literal and uncharming as a schoolroom desk;

The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day.

It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman. It was this which puzzled Carol in regard to the married Vida.

“I love her for being so happy,” Carol brooded. “I ought to be that way. I worship the baby, but the housework—Oh, I suppose I’m fortunate; so much better off than farm-women on a new clearing, or people in a slum.”

It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.

In Carol’s own twenty-four hours a day she got up, dressed the baby, had breakfast, talked to Oscarina about the day’s shopping, put the baby on the porch to play, went to the butcher’s to choose between steak and pork chops, bathed the baby, nailed …

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.

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.

But a village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance.

It is a force seeking to dominate the earth, to drain the hills and sea of color, to set Dante at boosting Gopher Prairie, and to dress the high gods in Klassy Kollege Klothes.

Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicate to the sayings of Confucius.

And such a society, such a nation, is determined by the Gopher Prairies.

The greatest manufacturer is but a busier Sam Clark, and all the rotund senators and presidents are village lawyers and bankers grown nine feet tall.

Though a Gopher Prairie regards itself as a part of the Great World, compares itself to Rome and Vienna, it will not acquire the scientific spirit, the international mind, which would make it great.

It picks at information which will visibly procure money or social distinction. Its conception of a community ideal is not the grand manner, the noble aspiration, the fine aristocratic pride, but cheap labor for the kitchen and rapid increase in the price of land.

It plays at cards on greasy oilcloth in a shanty, and does not know that prophets are walking and talking on the terrace.

If all the provincials were as kindly as Champ Perry and Sam Clark there would be no reason for desiring the town to seek great traditions.

… and from sight of the grim sweep of land, nor any windings to coax the loiterer along, while the breadth which would be majestic in an avenue of palaces makes the low shabby shops creeping down the typical Main Street the more mean by comparison.

The universal similarity⁠—that is the physical expression of the philosophy of dull safety.

Nine-tenths of the American towns are so alike that it is the completest boredom to wander from one to another.

they exist to fatten on the farmers, to provide for the townsmen large motors and social preferment; and, unlike the capitals, they do not give to the district in return for usury a stately and permanent center, but only this ragged camp.

It is a “parasitic Greek civilization”⁠—minus the civilization.

“There we are then,” said Carol. “The remedy? Is there any? Criticism, perhaps, for the beginning of the beginning. Oh, there’s nothing that attacks the Tribal God Mediocrity that doesn’t help a little … and probably there’s nothing that helps very much.

I am I! When I die the world will be annihilated, as far as I’m concerned. I am I!

I’m not content to leave the sea and the ivory towers to others. I want them for me!

Damn Vida! Damn all of them! Do they think they can make me believe that a display of potatoes at Howland & Gould’s is enough beauty and strangeness?”

She was equally irritated, when the motor returned through Gopher Prairie, to find that she was proud of sharing in Bresnahan’s kudos as people waved, and Juanita Haydock leaned from a window. She said to herself, “

As though I cared whether I’m seen with this fat phonograph!

” and simultaneously, “Everybody has noticed how much Will and I are playing with Mr. Bresnahan.”

and he thinks he has reduced her to absurdity. Now you assume that a world which produces a Percy Bresnahan and a Velvet Motor Company must be civilized. It is? Aren’t we only about halfway along in barbarism? I suggest Mrs. Bogart as a test.

And we’ll continue in barbarism just as long as people as nearly intelligent as you continue to defend things as they are because they are.

”

He preached his gospel: love of outdoors, Playing the Game, loyalty to friends.

She had the neophyte’s shock of discovery that, outside of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answer when an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing statistics.

He was so much the man, the worker, the friend, that she liked him when she most tried to stand out against him; he was so much the successful executive that she did not want him to despise her.

That they were invariably clean, that his were the scoured fingers of the surgeon, made his stubborn untidiness the more jarring.

They were wise hands, kind hands, but they were not the hands of love.

She remembered him in the days of courtship. He had tried to please her, then, had touched her by sheepishly wearing a colored band on his straw hat. Was it possible that those days of fumbling for each other were gone so completely?

At first he had amorously deceived himself into liking her experiments with food—the one medium in which she could express imagination—but now he wanted only his round of favorite dishes: steak, roast beef, boiled pig’s-feet, oatmeal, baked apples.

Because at some more flexible period he had advanced from oranges to grapefruit he considered himself an epicure.

During their first autumn she had smiled over his affection for his hunting-coat, but now that the leather had come unstitched in dribbles of pale yellow thread, and tatters of canvas, smeared with dirt of the fields and grease from gun-cleaning, hung in a border …

Calibree stated to Kennicott, “No, I don’t believe we care to a whole lot, but you folks go ahead and try it.”

Kennicott summarized the whole case against wildness: “Let’s try it some other time, Carrie.”

She gave it up. She looked at the town. She saw that in adventuring from Main Street, Gopher Prairie, to Main Street, Joralemon, she had not stirred. There were the same two-story brick groceries with lodge-signs above the awnings; the same one-story wooden millinery shop;

She gave it up. She looked at the town.

She saw that in adventuring from Main Street, Gopher Prairie, to Main Street, Joralemon, she had not stirred.

There were the same two-story brick groceries with lodge-signs above the awnings; the same one-story wooden millinery shop; the same firebrick garages; the same prairie at the open end of the wide street;

He fled from himself. He rammed on his hat, threw his coat over his arm, banged the door, locked it, tramped downstairs.

“I won’t go!” he said sturdily and, as he said it, he would have given a good deal to know whether he was going.

He was refreshed, as always, by the familiar windows and faces. It restored his soul to have Sam Clark trustingly bellow, “Better come down to the lake this evening and have a swim, doc. Ain’t you going to open your cottage at all, this summer?

“Me? My moral in life is, ‘What they don’t know won’t hurt ’em none.’

The way to handle wives, like the fellow says, is to catch ’em early, treat ’em rough, and tell ’em nothing!

”

“You’re too late. You can’t do nothing now. Bea’s always kind of hoped that you folks would come see her. She wanted to have a chance and be friends. She used to sit waiting for somebody to knock. I’ve seen her sitting here, waiting. Now—

Oh, you ain’t worth God-damning.

” He shut the door.

“

Why not? I can! I’ve hated it for thirty-two years.

I’ll die here—and I’ll hate it till I die. I ought to have been a business woman. I had a good deal of talent for tending to figures. All gone now. Some folks think I’m crazy. Guess I am. Sit and grouch.

It was a street beyond the end of the world, beyond the boundaries of hope. Though she should sit here forever, no brave procession, no one who was interesting, would be coming by.

It was tediousness made tangible, a street builded of lassitude and of futility.

Myrtle Cass appeared, with Cy Bogart. She giggled and bounced when Cy tickled her ear in village love.

“It’s good to clear fields. But it’s not for you.

It’s one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.

I thought that myself, when I first came to the prairie. ‘Big—new.’ Oh, I don’t want to deny the prairie future. It will be magnificent.

As she walked home—without hurrying—she remembered her father saying to a serious ten-year-old Carol, “

Lady, only a fool thinks he’s superior to beautiful bindings, but only a double-distilled fool reads nothing but bindings.

”

Carol studied the woman.

She was as imitative as a glass diamond.

She was the more rustic in her effort to appear urban.

She fancied that everyone was watching her, but she could not be sure, and in rare strong moments she did not care. She could rebel against the town’s prying now that she had something, however indistinct, for which to rebel.

In a passionate escape there must be not only a place from which to flee but a place to which to flee.

She had known that she would gladly leave Gopher Prairie, leave Main Street and all that it signified, but she had had no destination. She had one now. That destination was not Erik Valborg and the love of Erik.

Her rather cheap sport ended abruptly as Vida cried, with contorted face, “What do you know about the thoughts in hearts? You just play at reforming the world. You don’t know what it means to suffer.”

There are two insults which no human being will endure: the assertion that he hasn’t a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Carol said furiously, “You think I don’t suffer? You think I’ve always had an easy—”

To Carol was given a sudden great philosophical understanding, an explanation of half the cautious reforms in history. “Yes. I’ve heard that plea. It’s a good one.

It sets revolts aside to cool. It keeps strays in the flock.

To word it differently: ‘You must live up to the popular code if you believe in it; but if you don’t believe in it, then you must live up to it!’ ”

“No one big enough or pitiful enough to sacrifice for.

Tragedy in neat blouses; the eternal flame all nice and safe in a kerosene stove.

Neither heroic faith nor heroic guilt. Peeping at love from behind lace curtains—on Main Street!”

“

The job of corrupting Cy was done by your sinless town, five years ago!

”

She could hear the town yelping with it, every soul of them, gleeful at new details, panting to win importance by having details of their own to add.

How well they would make up for what they had been afraid to do by imagining it in another!

They who had not been entirely afraid (but merely careful and sneaky), all the barbershop roués and millinery-parlor mondaines, how archly they were giggling (this second—she could hear them at it); with what self-commendation they were cackling their suavest wit:

He leaned forward, thick capable hands on thick sturdy thighs, mature and slow, yet beseeching. “No matter even if you are cold, I like you better than anybody in the world. One time I said that you were my soul. And that still goes.

You’re all the things that I see in a sunset when I’m driving in from the country, the things that I like but can’t make poetry of.

Do you realize what my job is? I go round twenty-four hours a day, in mud and blizzard, trying my damnedest to heal everybody, rich or poor.

Yes. She was back home! Nothing had changed. She had never been away. California? Had she seen it? Had she for one minute left this scraping sound of the small shovel in the ash-pit of the furnace? But Kennicott preposterously supposed that she had.

Never had she been quite so far from going away as now when he believed she had just come back.

She felt oozing through the walls the spirit of small houses and righteous people. At that instant she knew that in running away she had merely hidden her doubts behind the officious stir of travel.

“It is good to be wanted,” she thought. “It will drug me. But—

Oh, is all life, always, an unresolved But?

”

When Carol saw him with his uniform off, in a pepper-and-salt suit and a new gray felt hat, she was disappointed. He was not Major Wutherspoon; he was Raymie.

For a month small boys followed him down the street, and everybody called him Major, but that was presently shortened to Maje, and the small boys did not look up from their marbles as he went by.

The town was booming, as a result of the war price of wheat.

Retired farmers were moving into town. The price of lots had increased a third. But Carol could discover no more pictures nor interesting food nor gracious voices nor amusing conversation nor questing minds.

She could, she asserted, endure a shabby but modest town; the town shabby and egomaniac she could not endure.

She could nurse Champ Perry, and warm to the neighborliness of Sam Clark, but she could not sit applauding Honest Jim Blausser. Kennicott had begged her, in courtship days, to convert the town to beauty. If it was now as beautiful as Mr.

If we were fighting England, you’d call the radicals ‘pro-English.’ When this war is over, I suppose you’ll be calling them ‘red anarchists.’

What an eternal art it is⁠—such a glittery delightful art⁠—finding hard names for our opponents!

How we do sanctify our efforts to keep them from getting the holy dollars we want for ourselves! The churches have always done it, and the political orators—and I suppose I do it when I call Mrs. Bogart a ‘Puritan’ and Mr. Stowbody a ‘capitalist.’

If we were fighting England, you’d call the radicals ‘pro-English.’ When this war is over, I suppose you’ll be calling them ‘red anarchists.’ What an eternal art it is—such a glittery delightful art—finding hard names for our opponents!

How we do sanctify our efforts to keep them from getting the holy dollars we want for ourselves!

The churches have always done it, and the political orators—and I suppose I do it when I call Mrs. Bogart a ‘Puritan’ and Mr. Stowbody a ‘capitalist.’

“You’re right. All I’ve done has been in line. I don’t belong to Gopher Prairie. That isn’t meant as a condemnation of Gopher Prairie, and it may be a condemnation of me. All right! I don’t care!

I don’t belong here, and I’m going. I’m not asking permission any more. I’m simply going.

”

“Oh, conversation! No, it’s much more than that.

I think it’s a greatness of life⁠—a refusal to be content with even the healthiest mud.

”

It may be that some day I’ll come back, but not till I can bring something more than I have now. And even if I am cowardly and run away—all right, call it cowardly, call me anything you want to!

I’ve been ruled too long by fear of being called things.

I’m going away to be quiet and think. I’m—I’m going! I have a right to my own life.”

“

You have a right to me if you can keep me. Can you?

”

She waved to him as long as she could, and when he was lost she wanted to leap from the vestibule and run back to him. She thought of a hundred tendernesses she had neglected.

She had her freedom, and it was empty.

The moment was not the highest of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, which was altogether excellent, for instead of slipping downward she began to climb.

“

Oh, please wait till my generation has stopped rebelling before yours starts in!

”

“

It’s a ray in the illumination of the spirit.

”

“Cookies? Oh, most decidedly cookies. We’ve had enough of bread and porridge.

We’d get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.

”

Not to have to apologize for her thoughts to the Jolly Seventeen, not to have to report to Kennicott at the end of the day all that she had done or might do, was a relief which made up for the office weariness.

She felt that she was no longer one-half of a marriage but the whole of a human being.

Washington gave her all the graciousness in which she had had faith: white columns seen across leafy parks, spacious avenues, twisty alleys.

She encountered negro shanties turned into studios, with orange curtains and pots of mignonette; marble houses on New Hampshire Avenue, with butlers and limousines; and men who looked like fictional explorers and aviators.

Her days were swift, and she knew that in her folly of running away she had found the courage to be wise.

She had a dispiriting first month of hunting lodgings in the crowded city. She had to roost in a hall-room in a moldy mansion conducted by an indignant decayed gentlewoman, and leave Hugh to the care of a doubtful nurse.