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Guy Pollock was the gentlest person she had found here. He spoke of her new jade and cream frock naturally, not jocosely; he held her chair for her as they sat down to dinner; and he did not, like Kennicott, interrupt her to shout, "Oh say, speaking of that, I heard a good story today." But Guy was incurably hermit. He sat late and talked hard, and did not come again.
He had a golf jacket of jersey, worn through at the creases in the sleeves. She noted that he did not apologize for it, as Kennicott would have done. He made conversation: "I didn't know you were a bosom friend of the Perrys. Champ is the salt of the earth but somehow I can't imagine him joining you in symbolic dancing, or making improvements on the Diesel engine." "No.
Carol dropped the curtain, stood with movement and reflection paralyzed. Automatically, without reasoning, she mumbled, "I will see him again soon and make him understand we must be friends. But The house is so empty. It echoes so." Kennicott had seemed nervous and absent-minded through that supper-hour, two evenings after.
From the cliffs across the river Carol and Kennicott looked back at St. Paul on its hills; an imperial sweep from the dome of the cathedral to the dome of the state capitol. The river road led past rocky field slopes, deep glens, woods flamboyant now with September, to Mendota, white walls and a spire among trees beneath a hill, old-world in its placid ease.
Joan shook her head. "I must learn to be your wife," she said. "Now it it dazzles and frightens me " "Joan!" "Have you forgotten, Kenny, that I have lived my life up here in hills and trees. And you " "Joan, please!" he begged in distress. "But I can't forget," said the girl steadily. "Whenever I read the article Garry sent about 'Kennicott O'Neill, brilliant painter' think of it, Kenny!
But Ma says she's stuck-up as hell. Ma's always talking about her. Ma says if Mrs. Kennicott thought as much about the doc as she does about her clothes, the doc wouldn't look so peaked." Spit. Silence. "Yuh. Juanita's always talking about her, too," from Earl. "She says Mrs. Kennicott thinks she knows it all. Juanita says she has to laugh till she almost busts every time she sees Mrs.
She had, on the train, worked herself up to such devotion that she was willing to give up her own room, to try to share all of her life with Kennicott. He mumbled, ten minutes after she had entered the house, "Say, I've kept your room for you like it was. I've kind of come round to your way of thinking. Don't see why folks need to get on each other's nerves just because they're friendly.
"No, but I wonder if you wouldn't like to give us a glass of milk?" condescended Kennicott. "Vell Ay should say Ay vill! You vait har a second and Ay run on de milk-house!" She nervously hastened to a tiny red building beside the windmill; she came back with a pitcher of milk from which Carol filled the thermos bottle. As they drove off Carol admired, "She's the dearest thing I ever saw.
The lesser sort appeared in yellow and black dogskin coats, but Kennicott was lordly in a long raccoon ulster and a new seal cap. When the snow was too deep for his motor he went off on country calls in a shiny, floral, steel-tipped cutter, only his ruddy nose and his cigar emerging from the fur. Carol herself stirred Main Street by a loose coat of nutria. Her finger-tips loved the silken fur.
As she followed Kennicott and the bags up to their bedroom she quavered to herself the song of the fat little-gods of the hearth: I have my own home, To do what I please with, To do what I please with, My den for me and my mate and my cubs, My own!
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