She needed new clothes. Kennicott had promised, "We'll have a good trip down to the Cities in the fall, and take plenty of time for it, and you can get your new glad-rags then." But as she examined her wardrobe she flung her ancient black velvet frock on the floor and raged, "They're disgraceful. Everything I have is falling to pieces."

There was a new dressmaker and milliner, a Mrs. Swiftwaite. It was said that she was not altogether an elevating influence in the way she glanced at men; that she would as soon take away a legally appropriated husband as not; that if there WAS any Mr. Swiftwaite, "it certainly was strange that n.o.body seemed to know anything about him!" But she had made for Rita Gould an organdy frock and hat to match universally admitted to be "too cunning for words," and the matrons went cautiously, with darting eyes and excessive politeness, to the rooms which Mrs.

Swiftwaite had taken in the old Luke Dawson house, on Floral Avenue.

With none of the spiritual preparation which normally precedes the buying of new clothes in Gopher Prairie, Carol marched into Mrs.

Swiftwaite's, and demanded, "I want to see a hat, and possibly a blouse."

In the dingy old front parlor which she had tried to make smart with a pier gla.s.s, covers from fashion magazines, anemic French prints, Mrs.

Swiftwaite moved smoothly among the dress-dummies and hat-rests, spoke smoothly as she took up a small black and red turban. "I am sure the lady will find this extremely attractive."

"It's dreadfully tabby and small-towny," thought Carol, while she soothed, "I don't believe it quite goes with me."

"It's the choicest thing I have, and I'm sure you'll find it suits you beautifully. It has a great deal of chic. Please try it on," said Mrs.

Swiftwaite, more smoothly than ever.

Carol studied the woman. She was as imitative as a gla.s.s diamond. She was the more rustic in her effort to appear urban. She wore a severe high-collared blouse with a row of small black b.u.t.tons, which was becoming to her low-breasted slim neatness, but her skirt was hysterically checkered, her cheeks were too highly rouged, her lips too sharply penciled. She was magnificently a specimen of the illiterate divorcee of forty made up to look thirty, clever, and alluring.

While she was trying on the hat Carol felt very condescending. She took it off, shook her head, explained with the kind smile for inferiors, "I'm afraid it won't do, though it's unusually nice for so small a town as this."

"But it's really absolutely New-Yorkish."

"Well, it----"

"You see, I know my New York styles. I lived in New York for years, besides almost a year in Akron!"

"You did?" Carol was polite, and edged away, and went home unhappily.

She was wondering whether her own airs were as laughable as Mrs.

Swiftwaite's. She put on the eye-gla.s.ses which Kennicott had recently given to her for reading, and looked over a grocery bill. She went hastily up to her room, to her mirror. She was in a mood of self-depreciation. Accurately or not, this was the picture she saw in the mirror:

Neat rimless eye-gla.s.ses. Black hair clumsily tucked under a mauve straw hat which would have suited a spinster. Cheeks clear, bloodless. Thin nose. Gentle mouth and chin. A modest voile blouse with an edging of lace at the neck. A virginal sweetness and timorousness--no flare of gaiety, no suggestion of cities, music, quick laughter.

"I have become a small-town woman. Absolute. Typical. Modest and moral and safe. Protected from life. GENTEEL! The Village Virus--the village virtuousness. My hair--just scrambled together. What can Erik see in that wedded spinster there? He does like me! Because I'm the only woman who's decent to him! How long before he'll wake up to me? ... I've waked up to myself... . Am I as old as--as old as I am?

"Not really old. Become careless. Let myself look tabby.

"I want to chuck every st.i.tch I own. Black hair and pale cheeks--they'd go with a Spanish dancer's costume--rose behind my ear, scarlet mantilla over one shoulder, the other bare."

She seized the rouge sponge, daubed her cheeks, scratched at her lips with the vermilion pencil until they stung, tore open her collar. She posed with her thin arms in the att.i.tude of the fandango. She dropped them sharply. She shook her head. "My heart doesn't dance," she said.

She flushed as she fastened her blouse.

"At least I'm much more graceful than Fern Mullins. Heavens! When I came here from the Cities, girls imitated me. Now I'm trying to imitate a city girl."

CHAPTER x.x.x

FERN Mullins rushed into the house on a Sat.u.r.day morning early in September and shrieked at Carol, "School starts next Tuesday. I've got to have one more spree before I'm arrested. Let's get up a picnic down the lake for this afternoon. Won't you come, Mrs. Kennicott, and the doctor? Cy Bogart wants to go--he's a brat but he's lively."

"I don't think the doctor can go," sedately. "He said something about having to make a country call this afternoon. But I'd love to."

"That's dandy! Who can we get?"

"Mrs. Dyer might be chaperon. She's been so nice. And maybe Dave, if he could get away from the store."

"How about Erik Valborg? I think he's got lots more style than these town boys. You like him all right, don't you?"

So the picnic of Carol, Fern, Erik, Cy Bogart, and the Dyers was not only moral but inevitable.

They drove to the birch grove on the south sh.o.r.e of Lake Minniemashie.

Dave Dyer was his most clownish self. He yelped, jigged, wore Carol's hat, dropped an ant down Fern's back, and when they went swimming (the women modestly changing in the car with the side curtains up, the men undressing behind the bushes, constantly repeating, "Gee, hope we don't run into poison ivy"), Dave splashed water on them and dived to clutch his wife's ankle. He infected the others. Erik gave an imitation of the Greek dancers he had seen in vaudeville, and when they sat down to picnic supper spread on a lap-robe on the gra.s.s, Cy climbed a tree to throw acorns at them.

But Carol could not frolic.

She had made herself young, with parted hair, sailor blouse and large blue bow, white canvas shoes and short linen skirt. Her mirror had a.s.serted that she looked exactly as she had in college, that her throat was smooth, her collar-bone not very noticeable. But she was under restraint. When they swam she enjoyed the freshness of the water but she was irritated by Cy's tricks, by Dave's excessive good spirits. She admired Erik's dance; he could never betray bad taste, as Cy did, and Dave. She waited for him to come to her. He did not come. By his joyousness he had apparently endeared himself to the Dyers. Maud watched him and, after supper, cried to him, "Come sit down beside me, bad boy!"

Carol winced at his willingness to be a bad boy and come and sit, at his enjoyment of a not very stimulating game in which Maud, Dave, and Cy s.n.a.t.c.hed slices of cold tongue from one another's plates. Maud, it seemed, was slightly dizzy from the swim. She remarked publicly, "Dr.

Kennicott has helped me so much by putting me on a diet," but it was to Erik alone that she gave the complete version of her peculiarity in being so sensitive, so easily hurt by the slightest cross word, that she simply had to have nice cheery friends.

Erik was nice and cheery.

Carol a.s.sured herself, "Whatever faults I may have, I certainly couldn't ever be jealous. I do like Maud; she's always so pleasant. But I wonder if she isn't just a bit fond of fishing for men's sympathy? Playing with Erik, and her married----Well----But she looks at him in that languishing, swooning, mid-Victorian way. Disgusting!"

Cy Bogart lay between the roots of a big birch, smoking his pipe and teasing Fern, a.s.suring her that a week from now, when he was again a high-school boy and she his teacher, he'd wink at her in cla.s.s. Maud Dyer wanted Erik to "come down to the beach to see the darling little minnies." Carol was left to Dave, who tried to entertain her with humorous accounts of Ella s...o...b..dy's fondness for chocolate peppermints.

She watched Maud Dyer put her hand on Erik's shoulder to steady herself.

"Disgusting!" she thought.

Cy Bogart covered Fern's nervous hand with his red paw, and when she bounced with half-anger and shrieked, "Let go, I tell you!" he grinned and waved his pipe--a gangling twenty-year-old satyr.

"Disgusting!"

When Maud and Erik returned and the grouping shifted, Erik muttered at Carol, "There's a boat on sh.o.r.e. Let's skip off and have a row."

"What will they think?" she worried. She saw Maud Dyer peer at Erik with moist possessive eyes. "Yes! Let's!" she said.

She cried to the party, with the canonical amount of sprightliness, "Good-by, everybody. We'll wireless you from China."

As the rhythmic oars plopped and creaked, as she floated on an unreality of delicate gray over which the sunset was poured out thin, the irritation of Cy and Maud slipped away. Erik smiled at her proudly. She considered him--coatless, in white thin shirt. She was conscious of his male differentness, of his flat masculine sides, his thin thighs, his easy rowing. They talked of the library, of the movies. He hummed and she softly sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." A breeze shivered across the agate lake. The wrinkled water was like armor damascened and polished.

The breeze flowed round the boat in a chill current. Carol drew the collar of her middy blouse over her bare throat.

"Getting cold. Afraid we'll have to go back," she said.

"Let's not go back to them yet. They'll be cutting up. Let's keep along the sh.o.r.e."

"But you enjoy the 'cutting up!' Maud and you had a beautiful time."

"Why! We just walked on the sh.o.r.e and talked about fishing!"

She was relieved, and apologetic to her friend Maud. "Of course. I was joking."