ifferent when we come back."

VI

Dusk on a snowy December afternoon. The sleeper which would connect
at Kansas City with the California train rolled out of St. Paul with
a chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick as it crossed the other
tracks. It bumped through the factory belt, gained speed. Carol could
see nothing but gray fields, which had closed in on her all the way from
Gopher Prairie. Ahead was darkness.

"For an hour, in Minneapolis, I must have been near Erik. He's still
there, somewhere. He'll be gone when I come back. I'll never know where
he has gone."

As Kennicott switched on the seat-light she turned drearily to the
illustrations in a motion-picture magazine.

CHAPTER XXXIV

THEY journeyed for three and a half months. They saw the Grand Canyon,
the adobe walls of Sante Fe and, in a drive from El Paso into Mexico,
their first foreign land. They jogged from San Diego and La Jolla to Los
Angeles, Pasadena, Riverside, through towns with bell-towered missions
and orange-groves; they viewed Monterey and San Francisco and a forest
of sequoias. They bathed in the surf and climbed foothills and danced,
they saw a polo game and the making of motion-pictures, they sent one
hundred and seventeen souvenir post-cards to Gopher Prairie, and once,
on a dune by a foggy sea when she was walking alone, Carol found an
artist, and he looked up at her and said, "Too damned wet to paint; sit
down and talk," and so for ten minutes she lived in a romantic novel.

Her only struggle was in coaxing Kennicott not to spend all his time
with the tourists from the ten thousand other Gopher Prairies. In
winter, California is full of people from Iowa and Nebraska, Ohio and
Oklahoma, who, having traveled thousands of miles from their familiar
villages, hasten to secure an illusion of not having left them. They
hunt for people from their own states to stand between them and the
shame of naked mountains; they talk steadily, in Pullmans, on hotel
porches, at cafeterias and motion-picture shows, about the motors and
crops and county politics back home. Kennicott discussed land-prices
with them, he went into the merits of the several sorts of motor cars
with them, he was intimate with train porters, and he insisted on seeing
the Luke Dawsons at their flimsy bungalow in Pasadena, where Luke sat
and yearned to go back and make some more money. But Kennicott gave
promise of learning to play. He shouted in the pool at the Coron