V
The chart which plots Carol's progress is not easy to read.
The lines are broken and uncertain of direction; often instead
of rising they sink in wavering scrawls; and the colors are
watery blue and pink and the dim gray of rubbed pencil
marks. A few lines are traceable.
Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness
by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought
religions, or by a fog of vagueness. Carol had hidden in none
of these refuges from reality, but she, who was tender and
merry, had been made timorous by Gopher Prairie. Even her
flight had been but the temporary courage of panic. The
thing she gained in Washington was not information about
office-systems and labor unions but renewed courage, that
amiable contempt called poise. Her glimpse of tasks involving
millions of people and a score of nations reduced Main Street
from bloated importance to its actual pettiness. She could
never again be quite so awed by the power with which she
herself had endowed the Vidas and Blaussers and Bogarts.
From her work and from her association with women who
had organized suffrage associations in hostile cities, or had
defended political prisoners, she caught something of an
impersonal attitude; saw that she had been as touchily personal
as Maud Dyer.
And why, she began to ask, did she rage at individuals? Not
individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most
afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They
insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous
names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound
Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race;
and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, is
unembittered laughter.
