II
She had left a city which sat up nights to talk of universal
transition; of European revolution, guild socialism, free verse.
She had fancied that all the world was changing.
She found that it was not.
In Gopher Prairie the only ardent new topics were prohibition,
the place in Minneapolis where you could get whisky at
thirteen dollars a quart, recipes for home-made beer, the "high
cost of living," the presidential election, Clark's new car, and
not very novel foibles of Cy Bogart. Their problems were
exactly what they had been two years ago, what they had been
twenty years ago, and what they would be for twenty years
to come. With the world a possible volcano, the husbandmen
were plowing at the base of the mountain. A volcano does
occasionally drop a river of lava on even the best of agriculturists,
to their astonishment and considerable injury, but their
cousins inherit the farms and a year or two later go back to
the plowing.
She was unable to rhapsodize much over the seven new
bungalows and the two garages which Kennicott had made to
seem so important. Her intensest thought about them was,
"Oh yes, they're all right I suppose." The change which she
did heed was the erection of the schoolbuilding, with its cheerful
brick walls, broad windows, gymnasium, classrooms for
agriculture and cooking. It indicated Vida's triumph, and it
stirred her to activity—any activity. She went to Vida with a
jaunty, "I think I shall work for you. And I'll begin at the
bottom."
She did. She relieved the attendant at the rest-room for
an hour a day. Her only innovation was painting the pine
table a black and orange rather shocking to the Thanatopsis.
She talked to the farmwives and soothed their babies and was
happy.
Thinking of them she did not think of the ugliness of Main
Street as she hurried along it to the chatter of the Jolly
Seventeen.
She wore her eye-glasses on the street now. She was
beginning to ask Kennicott and Juanita if she didn't look young,
much younger than thirty-three. The eye-glasses pinched her
nose. She considered spectacles. They would make her seem
older, and hopelessly settled. No! She would not wear spectacles
yet. But she tried on a pair at Kennicott's office. They
really were much more comfortable.