very soon find out whether I'm a fool or not! I mean it! Do
you think I'd stay here one second after I found out that I was injuring
you? At least I have enough sense of justice not to do that."

"Please stop flying off at tangents, Carrie. This----"

"Tangents? TANGENTS! Let me tell you----"

"----isn't a theater-play; it's a serious effort to have us get together
on fundamentals. We've both been cranky, and said a lot of things we
didn't mean. I wish we were a couple o' bloomin' poets and just talked
about roses and moonshine, but we're human. All right. Let's cut out
jabbing at each other. Let's admit we both do fool things. See here: You
KNOW you feel superior to folks. You're not as bad as I say, but you're
not as good as you say--not by a long shot! What's the reason you're so
superior? Why can't you take folks as they are?"

Her preparations for stalking out of the Doll's House were not yet
visible. She mused:

"I think perhaps it's my childhood." She halted. When she went on
her voice had an artificial sound, her words the bookish quality of
emotional meditation. "My father was the tenderest man in the world, but
he did feel superior to ordinary people. Well, he was! And the Minnesota
Valley----I used to sit there on the cliffs above Mankato for hours at a
time, my chin in my hand, looking way down the valley, wanting to write
poems. The shiny tilted roofs below me, and the river, and beyond it the
level fields in the mist, and the rim of palisades across----It held my
thoughts in. I LIVED, in the valley. But the prairie--all my thoughts go
flying off into the big space. Do you think it might be that?"

"Um, well, maybe, but----Carrie, you always talk so much about getting
all you can out of life, and not letting the years slip by, and here you
deliberately go and deprive yourself of a lot of real good home pleasure
by not enjoying people unless they wear frock coats and trot out----"

("Morning clothes. Oh. Sorry. Didn't mean t' interrupt you.")

"----to a lot of tea-parties. Take Jack Elder. You think Jack hasn't got
any ideas about anything but manufacturing and the tariff on lumber.
But do you know that Jack is nutty about music? He'll put a grand-opera
record on the phonograph and sit and listen to it and close his
eyes----Or you take Lym Cass. Ever realize what a well-informed man he
is?"

"But IS he? Gopher Prairie calls anybody 'well-informed' who's been
through the State Capitol and heard about