IV
They had all the experiences of provincials in a metropolis.
After breakfast Carol bustled to a hair-dresser's, bought gloves
and a blouse, and importantly met Kennicott in front of an
optician's, in accordance with plans laid down, revised, and
verified. They admired the diamonds and furs and frosty
silverware and mahogany chairs and polished morocco
sewing-boxes in shop-windows, and were abashed by the throngs in the
department-stores, and were bullied by a clerk into buying too
many shirts for Kennicott, and gaped at the "clever novelty
perfumes—just in from New York." Carol got three books
on the theater, and spent an exultant hour in warning herself
that she could not afford this rajah-silk frock, in thinking how
envious it would make Juanita Haydock, in closing her eyes,
and buying it. Kennicott went from shop to shop, earnestly
hunting down a felt-covered device to keep the windshield of
his car clear of rain.
They dined extravagantly at their hotel at night, and next
morning sneaked round the corner to economize at a Childs'
Restaurant. They were tired by three in the afternoon, and
dozed at the motion-pictures and said they wished they were
back in Gopher Prairie—and by eleven in the evening they were
again so lively that they went to a Chinese restaurant that was
frequented by clerks and their sweethearts on pay-days. They
sat at a teak and marble table eating Eggs Fooyung, and
listened to a brassy automatic piano, and were altogether
cosmopolitan.
On the street they met people from home—the McGanums.
They laughed, shook hands repeatedly, and exclaimed, "Well,
this is quite a coincidence!" They asked when the McGanums
had come down, and begged for news of the town they had
left two days before. Whatever the McGanums were at home,
here they stood out as so superior to all the undistinguishable
strangers absurdly hurrying past that the Kennicotts held
them as long as they could. The McGanums said good-by
as though they were going to Tibet instead of to the station
to catch No. 7 north.
They explored Minneapolis. Kennicott was conversational
and technical regarding gluten and cockle-cylinders and No.
I Hard, when they were shown through the gray stone hulks
and new cement elevators of the largest flour-mills in the world.
They looked across Loring Park and the Parade to the towers
of St. Mark's and the Procathedral, and the red roofs of
houses climbing Kenwood Hill. They drove about the chain
of garden-circled lakes, and viewed the houses of the millers
and lumbermen and real estate peers—the potentates of the
expanding city. They surveyed the small eccentric bungalows
with pergolas, the houses of pebbledash and tapestry brick
with sleeping-porches above sun-parlors, and one vast incredible
château fronting the Lake of the Isles. They tramped through
a shining-new section of apartment-houses; not the tall bleak
apartments of Eastern cities but low structures of cheerful
yellow brick, in which each flat had its glass-enclosed porch
with swinging couch and scarlet cushions and Russian brass
bowls. Between a waste of tracks and a raw gouged hill they
found poverty in staggering shanties.
They saw miles of the city which they had never known in
their days of absorption in college. They were distinguished
explorers, and they remarked, in great mutual esteem, "I bet
Harry Haydock's never seen the City like this! Why, he'd
never have sense enough to study the machinery in the mills,
or go through all these outlying districts. Wonder folks in
Gopher Prairie wouldn't use their legs and explore, the way we
do!"
They had two meals with Carol's sister, and were bored, and
felt that intimacy which beatifies married people when they
suddenly admit that they equally dislike a relative of either
of them.
So it was with affection but also with weariness that they
approached the evening on which Carol was to see the plays at
the dramatic school. Kennicott suggested not going. "So darn
tired from all this walking; don't know but what we better
turn in early and get rested up." It was only from duty that
Carol dragged him and herself out of the warm hotel, into a
stinking trolley, up the brownstone steps of the converted
residence which lugubriously housed the dramatic school.
