Main Street | Page 3

the world.
Stewart Snyder peered at her. He rammed his large red fists into his
pockets, he jerked them out, he resolutely got rid of them by clenching
his hands behind him, and he stammered:
"I know. You get people. Most of these darn co-eds----Say, Carol, you
could do a lot for people."
"Oh--oh well--you know--sympathy and everything--if you were--say
you were a lawyer's wife. You'd understand his clients. I'm going to be
a lawyer. I admit I fall down in sympathy sometimes. I get so dog-gone
impatient with people that can't stand the gaff. You'd be good for a
fellow that was too serious. Make him more--more--YOU
know--sympathetic!"
His slightly pouting lips, his mastiff eyes, were begging her to beg him

to go on. She fled from the steam-roller of his sentiment. She cried,
"Oh, see those poor sheep--millions and millions of them." She darted
on.
Stewart was not interesting. He hadn't a shapely white neck, and he had
never lived among celebrated reformers. She wanted, just now, to have
a cell in a settlement-house, like a nun without the bother of a black
robe, and be kind, and read Bernard Shaw, and enormously improve a
horde of grateful poor.
The supplementary reading in sociology led her to a book on
village-improvement--tree-planting, town pageants, girls' clubs. It had
pictures of greens and garden-walls in France, New England,
Pennsylvania. She had picked it up carelessly, with a slight yawn which
she patted down with her finger-tips as delicately as a cat.
She dipped into the book, lounging on her window-seat, with her slim,
lisle-stockinged legs crossed, and her knees up under her chin. She
stroked a satin pillow while she read. About her was the clothy
exuberance of a Blodgett College room: cretonne-covered window-seat,
photographs of girls, a carbon print of the Coliseum, a chafing-dish,
and a dozen pillows embroidered or beaded or pyrographed.
Shockingly out of place was a miniature of the Dancing Bacchante. It
was the only trace of Carol in the room. She had inherited the rest from
generations of girl students.
It was as a part of all this commonplaceness that she regarded the
treatise on village-improvement. But she suddenly stopped fidgeting.
She strode into the book. She had fled half-way through it before the
three o'clock bell called her to the class in English history.
She sighed, "That's what I'll do after college! I'll get my hands on one
of these prairie towns and make it beautiful. Be an inspiration. I
suppose I'd better become a teacher then, but--I won't be that kind of a
teacher. I won't drone. Why should they have all the garden suburbs on
Long Island? Nobody has done anything with the ugly towns here in
the Northwest except hold revivals and build libraries to contain the
Elsie books. I'll make 'em put in a village green, and darling cottages,

and a quaint Main Street!"
Thus she triumphed through the class, which was a typical Blodgett
contest between a dreary teacher and unwilling children of twenty, won
by the teacher because his opponents had to answer his questions, while
their treacherous queries he could counter by demanding, "Have you
looked that up in the library? Well then, suppose you do!"
The history instructor was a retired minister. He was sarcastic today.
He begged of sporting young Mr. Charley Holmberg, "Now Charles,
would it interrupt your undoubtedly fascinating pursuit of that
malevolent fly if I were to ask you to tell us that you do not know
anything about King John?" He spent three delightful minutes in
assuring himself of the fact that no one exactly remembered the date of
Magna Charta.
Carol did not hear him. She was completing the roof of a half-timbered
town hall. She had found one man in the prairie village who did not
appreciate her picture of winding streets and arcades, but she had
assembled the town council and dramatically defeated him.

III
Though she was Minnesota-born Carol was not an intimate of the
prairie villages. Her father, the smiling and shabby, the learned and
teasingly kind, had come from Massachusetts, and through all her
childhood he had been a judge in Mankato, which is not a prairie town,
but in its garden-sheltered streets and aisles of elms is white and green
New England reborn. Mankato lies between cliffs and the Minnesota
River, hard by Traverse des Sioux, where the first settlers made treaties
with the Indians, and the cattle-rustlers once came galloping before
hell-for-leather posses.
As she climbed along the banks of the dark river Carol listened to its
fables about the wide land of yellow waters and bleached buffalo bones
to the West; the Southern levees and singing darkies and palm trees

toward which it was forever mysteriously gliding; and she heard again
the startled bells