II
Kennicott was less shocked and much less frightened than
Carol, and more articulate in his description of Mrs. Bogart,
when she had gone.
Maud Dyer telephoned to Carol and, after a rather
improbable question about cooking lima beans with bacon, demanded,
"Have you heard the scandal about this Miss Mullins
and Cy Bogart?"
"I'm sure it's a lie."
"Oh, probably is." Maud's manner indicated that the
falsity of the story was an insignificant flaw in its general
delightfulness.
Carol crept to her room, sat with hands curled tight
together as she listened to a plague of voices. 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
barber-shop 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: "You can't tell me she ain't a gay bird; I'm
wise!"
And not one man in town to carry out their pioneer tradition
of superb and contemptuous cursing, not one to verify the
myth that their "rough chivalry" and "rugged virtues" were
more generous than the petty scandal-picking of older lands,
not one dramatic frontiersman to thunder, with fantastic and
fictional oaths, "What are you hinting at? What are you
snickering at? What facts have you? What are these
unheard-of sins you condemn so much—and like so well?"
No one to say it. Not Kennicott nor Guy Pollock nor
Champ Perry.
Erik? Possibly. He would sputter uneasy protest.
She suddenly wondered what subterranean connection her
interest in Erik had with this affair. Wasn't it because they
had been prevented by her caste from bounding on her own
trail that they were howling at Fern?