Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [55]
She was poisoned with doubt, as she drooped up to bed.
Next day, through her shopping, her mind sat back and observed. Dave Dyer and Sam Clark were as cordial as she had been fancying; but wasn’t there an impersonal abruptness in the “H’ are yuh?” of Chet Dashaway? Howland the grocer was curt. Was that merely his usual manner?
“It’s infuriating to have to pay attention to what people think. In St. Paul I didn’t care. But here I’m spied on. They’re watching me. I mustn’t let it make me self conscious,” she coaxed herself—over-stimuiated by the drug of thought, and offensively on the defensive.
III
A thaw which stripped the snow from the sidewalks; a ringing iron night when the lakes could be heard booming; a clear roistering morning. In tam o’shanter and tweed skirt Carol felt herself a college junior going out to play hockey. She wanted to whoop, her legs ached to run. On the way home from shopping she yielded, as a pup would have yielded. She galloped down a block and as she jumped from a curb across a welter of slush, she gave a student “Yippee!”
She saw that in a window three old women were gasping. Their triple glare was paralyzing. Across the street, at another window, the curtain had secretively moved. She stopped, walked on sedately, changed from the girl Carol into Mrs. Dr. Kennicott.
She never again felt quite young enough and defiant enough and free enough to run and halloo in the public streets; and it was as a Nice Married Woman that she attended the next weekly bridge of the Jolly Seventeen.
IV
The Jolly Seventeen (the membership of which ranged from fourteen to twenty-six) was the social cornice of Gopher Prairie. It was the country club, the diplomatic set, St. Cecilia, the Ritz oval room, the Club de Vingt.ao To belong to it was to be “in.” Though its membership partly coincided with that of the Thanatopsis study club, the Jolly Seventeen as a separate entity guffawed at the Thanatopsis and considered it middle-class and even “highbrow.”
Most of the Jolly Seventeen were young married women, with their husbands as associate members. Once a week they had a women’s afternoon-bridge; once a month the husbands joined them for supper and evening-bridge; twice a year they had dances at I. O. O. F.ap Hall. Then the town exploded. Only at the annual balls of the Firemen and of the Eastern Staraq was there such prodigality of chiffon scarfs and tangoing and heart-burnings, and these rival institutions were not select—hired girls attended the Firemen’s Ball, with section-hands and laborers. Ella Stowbody had once gone to a Jolly Seventeen Soiree in the village hack, hitherto confined to chief mourners at funerals; and Harry Haydock and Dr. Terry Gould always appeared in the town’s only specimens of evening clothes.
The afternoon-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen which followed Carol’s lonely doubting was held at Juanita Haydock’s new concrete bungalow, with its door of polished oak and beveled plate-glass, jar of ferns in the plastered hall, and in the living-room, a fumed oak Morris chair, sixteen color-prints, and a square varnished table with a mat made of cigar-ribbons on which was one Illustrated Gift Edition and one pack of cards in a burnt-leather case.
Carol stepped into a sirocco of furnace heat. They were already playing. Despite her flabby resolves she had not yet learned bridge. She was winningly apologetic about it to Juanita, and ashamed that she should have to go on being apologetic.
Mrs. Dave Dyer, a sallow woman with a thin prettiness, devoted to experiments in religious cults, illnesses, and scandal-bearing, shook her finger at Carol and trilled, “You’re a naughty one! I don’t believe you appreciate the honor, when you got into the Jolly Seventeen so easy!”
Mrs. Chet Dashaway nudged her neighbor at the second table. But Carol kept up the appealing bridal manner so far as possible. She twittered,