Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [118]
“Like it, old lady?”
“It’s adorable. It’s so amusing. I love you for bringing me. You really are a dear!”
He looked blankly indulgent, and yawned, and condescended, “That’s a pretty slick arrangement on the radiator, so you can adjust it at any temperature you want. Must take a big furnace to run this place. Gosh, I hope Bea remembers to turn off the drafts tonight.”
Under the glass cover of the dressing-table was a menu with the most enchanting dishes: breast of guinea hen De Vitresse, pommes de terre à la Russe, meringue Chantilly, gâteaux Bruxelles.
“Oh let’s—I’m going to have a hot bath, and put on my new hat with the wool flowers, and let’s go down and eat for hours, and we’ll have a cocktail!” she chanted.
While Kennicott labored over ordering it was annoying to see him permit the waiter to be impertinent, but as the cocktail elevated her to a bridge among colored stars, as the oysters came in—not canned oysters in the Gopher Prairie fashion, but on the half-shell—she cried, “If you only knew how wonderful it is not to have had to plan this dinner, and order it at the butcher’s and fuss and think about it, and then watch Bea cook it! I feel so free. And to have new kinds of food, and different patterns of dishes and linen, and not worry about whether the pudding is being spoiled! Oh, this is a great moment for me!”
IV
They had all the experiences of provincials in a metropolis. After breakfast Carol bustled to a hair-dresser‘s, bought gloves and a blouse, and importantly met Kennicott in front of an optician’s, in accordance with plans laid down, revised, and verified. They admired the diamonds and furs and frosty silverware and mahogany chairs and polished morocco sewing-boxes in shop-windows, and were abashed by the throngs in the department-stores, and were bullied by a clerk into buying too many shirts for Kennicott, and gaped at the “clever novelty perfumes—just in from New York.” Carol got three books on the theater, and spent an exultant hour in warning herself that she could not afford this rajah-silk frock, in thinking how envious it would make Juanita Haydock, in closing her eyes, and buying it. Kennicott went from shop to shop, earnestly hunting down a felt-covered device to keep the windshield of his car clear of rain.
They dined extravagantly at their hotel at night, and next morning sneaked round the corner to economize at a Childs’ Restaurant. They were tired by three in the afternoon, and dozed at the motion-pictures and said they wished they were back in Gopher Prairie—and by eleven in the evening they were again so lively that they went to a Chinese restaurant that was frequented by clerks and their sweethearts on paydays. They sat at a teak and marble table eating Eggs Foo-yung, and listened to a brassy automatic piano, and were altogether cosmopolitan.
On the street they met people from home—the McGanums. They laughed, shook hands repeatedly, and exclaimed, “Well, this is quite a coincidence!” They asked when the McGanums had come down, and begged for news of the town they had left two days before. Whatever the McGanums were at home, here they stood out as so superior to all the undistinguishable strangers absurdly hurrying past that the Kennicotts held them as long as they could. The McGanums said good-by as though they were going to Tibet in-, stead of to the station to catch No. 7 north.
They explored Minneapolis. Kennicott was conversational and technical regarding gluten and cockle-cylinders and No. 1 Hard, when they were shown through the gray stone hulks and new cement elevators of the largest flour-mills in the world. They looked across Loring Park and the Parade to the towers of St. Mark’s and the Procathedral, and the red roofs of houses climbing Kenwood Hill. 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 ch