Main Street | Page 4

and thick puffing of high-stacked river steamers
wrecked on sand-reefs sixty years ago. Along the decks she saw
missionaries, gamblers in tall pot hats, and Dakota chiefs with scarlet
blankets. . . . Far off whistles at night, round the river bend, plunking
paddles reechoed by the pines, and a glow on black sliding waters.
Carol's family were self-sufficient in their inventive life, with
Christmas a rite full of surprises and tenderness, and "dressing-up
parties" spontaneous and joyously absurd. The beasts in the Milford
hearth-mythology were not the obscene Night Animals who jump out
of closets and eat little girls, but beneficent and bright-eyed
creatures--the tam htab, who is woolly and blue and lives in the
bathroom, and runs rapidly to warm small feet; the ferruginous oil
stove, who purrs and knows stories; and the skitamarigg, who will play
with children before breakfast if they spring out of bed and close the
window at the very first line of the song about puellas which father
sings while shaving.
Judge Milford's pedagogical scheme was to let the children read
whatever they pleased, and in his brown library Carol absorbed Balzac
and Rabelais and Thoreau and Max Muller. He gravely taught them the
letters on the backs of the encyclopedias, and when polite visitors asked
about the mental progress of the "little ones," they were horrified to
hear the children earnestly repeating A-And, And-Aus, Aus-Bis,
Bis-Cal, Cal-Cha.
Carol's mother died when she was nine. Her father retired from the
judiciary when she was eleven, and took the family to Minneapolis.
There he died, two years after. Her sister, a busy proper advisory soul,
older than herself, had become a stranger to her even when they lived
in the same house.
From those early brown and silver days and from her independence of
relatives Carol retained a willingness to be different from brisk efficient
book-ignoring people; an instinct to observe and wonder at their bustle
even when she was taking part in it. But, she felt approvingly, as she
discovered her career of town-planning, she was now roused to being

brisk and efficient herself.

IV
In a month Carol's ambition had clouded. Her hesitancy about
becoming a teacher had returned. She was not, she worried, strong
enough to endure the routine, and she could not picture herself standing
before grinning children and pretending to be wise and decisive. But
the desire for the creation of a beautiful town remained. When she
encountered an item about small-town women's clubs or a photograph
of a straggling Main Street, she was homesick for it, she felt robbed of
her work.
It was the advice of the professor of English which led her to study
professional library-work in a Chicago school. Her imagination carved
and colored the new plan. She saw herself persuading children to read
charming fairy tales, helping young men to find books on mechanics,
being ever so courteous to old men who were hunting for
newspapers--the light of the library, an authority on books, invited to
dinners with poets and explorers, reading a paper to an association of
distinguished scholars.

V
The last faculty reception before commencement. In five days they
would be in the cyclone of final examinations.
The house of the president had been massed with palms suggestive of
polite undertaking parlors, and in the library, a ten-foot room with a
globe and the portraits of Whittier and Martha Washington, the student
orchestra was playing "Carmen" and "Madame Butterfly." Carol was
dizzy with music and the emotions of parting. She saw the palms as a
jungle, the pink-shaded electric globes as an opaline haze, and the
eye-glassed faculty as Olympians. She was melancholy at sight of the
mousey girls with whom she had "always intended to get acquainted,"

and the half dozen young men who were ready to fall in love with her.
But it was Stewart Snyder whom she encouraged. He was so much
manlier than the others; he was an even warm brown, like his new
ready-made suit with its padded shoulders. She sat with him, and with
two cups of coffee and a chicken patty, upon a pile of presidential
overshoes in the coat-closet under the stairs, and as the thin music
seeped in, Stewart whispered:
"I can't stand it, this breaking up after four years! The happiest years of
life."
She believed it. "Oh, I know! To think that in just a few days we'll be
parting, and we'll never see some of the bunch again!"
"Carol, you got to listen to me! You always duck when I try to talk
seriously to you, but you got to listen to me. I'm going to be a big
lawyer, maybe a judge, and I need you, and I'd protect you----"
His arm slid behind her shoulders. The insinuating music