talking like this. Fern,
you never could be cagey!"

"Don't be frightened, my dear! . . . Doesn't that sound atrociously old
and kind! I'm talking to you the way Mrs. Westlake talks to me! That's
having a husband and a kitchen range, I suppose. But I feel young, and I
want to dance like a--like a hellion?--too. So I sympathize."

Fern made a sound of gratitude. Carol inquired, "What experience did you
have with college dramatics? I tried to start a kind of Little Theater
here. It was dreadful. I must tell you about it----"

Two hours later, when Kennicott came over to greet Fern and to yawn,
"Look here, Carrie, don't you suppose you better be thinking about
turning in? I've got a hard day tomorrow," the two were talking so
intimately that they constantly interrupted each other.

As she went respectably home, convoyed by a husband, and decorously
holding up her skirts, Carol rejoiced, "Everything has changed! I have
two friends, Fern and----But who's the other? That's queer; I thought
there was----Oh, how absurd!"

V

She often passed Erik Valborg on the street; the brown jersey coat
became unremarkable. When she was driving with Kennicott, in early
evening, she saw him on the lake shore, reading a thin book which might
easily have been poetry. She noted that he was the only person in the
motorized town who still took long walks.

She told herself that she was the daughter of a judge, the wife of a
doctor, and that she did not care to know a capering tailor. She told
herself that she was not responsive to men . . . not even to Percy
Bresnahan. She told herself that a woman of thirty who heeded a boy
of twenty-five was ridiculous. And on Friday, when she had convinced
herself that the errand was necessary, she went to Nat Hicks's shop,
bearing the not very romantic burden of a pair of her husband's
trousers. Hicks was in the back room. She faced the Greek god who, in a
somewhat ungodlike way, was stitching a coat on a scaley sewing-machine,
in a room of smutted plaster walls.

She saw that his hands were not in keeping with a Hellenic face. They
were thick, roughened with needle and hot iron and plow-handle. Even
in the shop he persisted in his finery. He wore a silk shirt, a topaz
scarf, thin tan shoes.

This she absorbed while she was saying curtly, "Can I get these pressed,
please?"

Not rising from the sewing-machine he stuck out his hand, mumbled, "When
do you want them?"

"Oh, Monday."

The adve