"He is wicked, isn't he, Mrs. Dawson? Don't you have to lock him up?"
"Oh no, but maybe I better," attempted Mrs. Dawson, a tint on her pallid
face.
For fifteen minutes Carol kept it up. She asserted that she was going
to stage a musical comedy, that she preferred cafe parfait to beefsteak,
that she hoped Dr. Kennicott would never lose his ability to make love
to charming women, and that she had a pair of gold stockings. They gaped
for more. But she could not keep it up. She retired to a chair behind
Sam Clark's bulk. The smile-wrinkles solemnly flattened out in the faces
of all the other collaborators in having a party, and again they stood
about hoping but not expecting to be amused.
Carol listened. She discovered that conversation did not exist in Gopher
Prairie. Even at this affair, which brought out the young smart set,
the hunting squire set, the respectable intellectual set, and the solid
financial set, they sat up with gaiety as with a corpse.
Juanita Haydock talked a good deal in her rattling voice but it was
invariably of personalities: the rumor that Raymie Wutherspoon was going
to send for a pair of patent leather shoes with gray buttoned tops; the
rheumatism of Champ Perry; the state of Guy Pollock's grippe; and the
dementia of Jim Howland in painting his fence salmon-pink.
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