Main Street: Chapters 12–19

Carol had none of the superiority she felt toward Mrs. Lyman Cass's plutocratic parlor.

The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party of Blaine and McKinley, is the agent of the Lord and of the Baptist Church in temporal affairs.

The Village Virus is the germ which—it's extraordinarily like the hook-worm—it infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces. You'll find it epidemic among lawyers and doctors and ministers and college-bred merchants—all these people who have had a glimpse of the world that thinks and laughs, but have returned to their swamp. I'm a perfect example. But I sha'n't pester you with my dolors.

She sat still and maundered, “I know. The Village Virus. Perhaps it will get me. Some day I'm going—Oh, no matter. At least, I am making you talk! Usually you have to be polite to my garrulousness, but now I'm sitting at your feet.”

She sat still and maundered, “I know. The Village Virus. Perhaps it will get me. Some day I'm going—Oh, no matter. At least, I am making you talk! Usually you have to be polite to my garrulousness, but now I'm sitting at your feet.”

The widow-robbing deacon of fiction can't help being hypocritical. The widows themselves demand it! They admire his unctuousness.

Suppose I did dare to make love to—some exquisite married woman. I wouldn't admit it to myself. I giggle with the most revolting salaciousness over La Vie Parisienne, when I get hold of one in Chicago, yet I shouldn't even try to hold your hand.

She had but little of the curiosity of the flirt, and none of the intrigante's joy in furtiveness.

With spurious enthusiasm he said, “Splendid! I will.”

Could I kiss him? No! No! Guy Pollock at twenty-six I could have kissed him then, maybe, even if I were married to some one else, and probably I'd have been glib in persuading myself that 'it wasn't really wrong.'

I wouldn't have the old fake in the house. Makes me tired, his everlasting palavering and soft-soaping.

What was a magnificent spectacle of generosity to you was humiliation to me. You GAVE me money—gave it to your mistress, if she was complaisant, and then you—

You give me a dollar, right out—the only proviso is that I must spend it on a tie for you!

She sat in abeyance till he croaked...

Kennicott examined the scar, smiled at Halvor and his wife, chanted, “Fine, b' gosh! Couldn't be better!” The Nelsons looked deprecating.

Six was the rigid, the canonical supper-hour, but at half-past six he had not come.

She could—at times—agree with Kennicott that the shaving-and-corsets familiarity of married life was not dreary vulgarity but a wholesome frankness; that artificial reticences might merely be irritating.

Self-pity because he did not divine that this was a surprise party rendered her sad and interesting to herself, and she had the pleasure of the martyrs in saying bravely to him, “It's nothing special. If you're busy long I'll trot home.”

The big piebald horses snorted clouds of steam, and started to trot.

My Lord, Bessie, it ain't possible this is the fellow that used to be so sickly? Why, say, he's a great big strapping Svenska now—going to be bigger 'n his daddy!

To him motoring was a faith not to be questioned, a high-church cult, with electric sparks for candles, and piston-rings possessing the sanctity of altar-vessels. His liturgy was composed of intoned and metrical road-comments: “They say there's a pretty good hike from Duluth to International Falls.”

Mr. Schnarken was at various high moments a cook, a life-guard, a burlesque actor, and a sculptor.

You've got a fine nerve, kicking about a movie because it shows a few legs! Why, you're always touting these Greek dancers, or whatever they are, that don't even wear a shimmy!

Just good taste? Fastidious people? Oh—no! I believe all of us want the same things—we're all together, the industrial workers and the women and the farmers and the negro race and the Asiatic colonies, and even a few of the Respectables.

The Little Theaters, which were to give piquancy to American drama three or four years later, were only in embryo.

She felt that in the turbulence of the drama she was discovering a history more important than the commonplace chronicles which dealt with senators and their pompous puerilities.

They drove about the chain of garden-circled lakes, and viewed the houses of the millers and lumbermen and real estate peers—the potentates of the expanding city.

They surveyed the small eccentric bungalows with pergolas, the houses of pebbledash and tapestry brick with sleeping-porches above sun-parlors, and one vast incredible chateau fronting the Lake of the Isles.

Two young men in brown robes like furniture-covers were gesturing vacuously and droning cryptic sentences full of repetitions.

Without understanding when or how, without a tangible change in the stilted intoning of the stage-puppets, she was conscious of another time and place.

It was the sort of farce which is advertised in “school entertainment” catalogues as: Riproaring knock-out, 5 m. 3 f., time 2 hrs., interior set, popular with churches and all high-class occasions.

Carol glanced from the scabrous object to Vida, and realized that she was not joking.

She read all she could find regarding staging, she bought paint and light wood; she borrowed furniture and drapes unscrupulously; she made Kennicott turn carpenter.

She sought faith in spacious banal phrases, taken from books: “the instinctive nobility of simple souls,” “need only the opportunity, to appreciate fine things,” and “sturdy exponents of democracy.”

She watched Guy Pollock stammer and twist his mustache when he should have been a bullying magnate; Vida Sherwin, as Grimm's timid wife, chatter at the audience as though they were her class in high-school English; Juanita, in the leading role, defy Mr. Grimm as though she were repeating a list of things she had to buy at the grocery this morning...

Herself she blamed for trying to carve intaglios in good wholesome jack-pine.

And for all their talk of the need of additional library-tax none of them was willing to risk censure by battling for it, though they now had so small a fund that, after paying for rent, heat, light, and Miss Villets's salary, they had only a hundred dollars a year for the purchase of books.

To Gopher Prairie the tracks were eternal verities, and boards of railroad directors an omnipotence.

But she was disappointed when she saw the program. It did not seem to be a tabloid university; it did not seem to be any kind of a university; it seemed to be a combination of vaudeville performance, Y. M. C. A. lecture, and the graduation exercises of an elocution class.

For from the Chautauqua itself she got nothing but wind and chaff and heavy laughter, the laughter of yokels at old jokes, a mirthless and primitive sound like the cries of beasts on a farm.