IV
She was encouraged to believe that she had not been
abnormal in viewing Gopher Prairie as unduly tedious and
slatternly. She found the same faith not only in girls escaped
from domesticity but also in demure old ladies who, tragically
deprived of esteemed husbands and huge old houses, yet
managed to make a very comfortable thing of it by living in
small flats and having time to read.
But she also learned that by comparison Gopher Prairie
was a model of daring color, clever planning, and frenzied
intellectuality. From her teacher-housemate she had a sardonic
description of a Middlewestern railroad-division town, of the
same size as Gopher Prairie but devoid of lawns and trees, a
town where the tracks sprawled along the cinder-scabbed
Main Street, and the railroad shops, dripping soot from eaves
and doorway, rolled out smoke in greasy coils.
Other towns she came to know by anecdote: a prairie village
where the wind blew all day long, and the mud was two feet
thick in spring, and in summer the flying sand scarred
new-painted houses and dust covered the few flowers set out in
pots. New England mill-towns with the hands living in rows
of cottages like blocks of lava. A rich farming-center in New
Jersey, off the railroad, furiously pious, ruled by old men,
unbelievably ignorant old men, sitting about the grocery talking
of James G. Blaine. A Southern town, full of the magnolias
and white columns which Carol had accepted as proof of
romance, but hating the negroes, obsequious to the Old
Families. A Western mining-settlement like a tumor. A booming
semi-city with parks and clever architects, visited by
famous pianists and unctuous lecturers, but irritable from a
struggle between union labor and the manufacturers' association,
so that in even the gayest of the new houses there was a
ceaseless and intimidating heresy-hunt.
