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For a second she saw nothing in all the pink and brown mass of their faces save the hunger of the two men. She shook off the spell and ran down. "We're going to have a real Chinese concert. Messrs. Pollock, Kennicott, and, well, Stowbody are drummers; the rest of us sing and play the fife." The fifes were combs with tissue paper; the drums were tabourets and the sewing-table.
Dawson, "Say, Luke, when was't Biggins first settled in Winnebago Township? Wa'n't it in 1879?" "Why no 'twa'n't!" Mr. Dawson was indignant. "He come out from Vermont in 1867 no, wait, in 1868, it must have been and took a claim on the Rum River, quite a ways above Anoka." "He did not!" roared Mr. Stowbody. "He settled first in Blue Earth County, him and his father!"
Every one looked at every one else and waited for every one else to begin. Carol kicked off her silver slippers, and ignored the universal glance at her arches. The embarrassed but loyal Vida Sherwin unbuttoned her high black shoes. Ezra Stowbody cackled, "Well, you're a terror to old folks. You're like the gals I used to go horseback-riding with, back in the sixties.
Grimm as though she were repeating a list of things she had to buy at the grocery this morning; Ella Stowbody remark "I'd like a cup of tea" as though she were reciting "Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight"; and Dr. Gould, making love to Rita Simons, squeak, "My my you are a won'erful girl."
"Kennicott." "Kennicott. Oh! Oh say, you're Mrs. Dr. Kennicott then, aren't you?" "Yes." She stood at the door. Now that she had carried out her preposterous impulse to see what he was like, she was cold, she was as ready to detect familiarities as the virtuous Miss Ella Stowbody. "I've heard about you. Myrtle Cass was saying you got up a dramatic club and gave a dandy play.
Dawson, all save asthmatic Ezra Stowbody who extravagantly hired a boy, were seen perilously staggering up ladders, carrying storm windows and screwing them to second-story jambs. While Kennicott put up his windows Carol danced inside the bedrooms and begged him not to swallow the screws, which he held in his mouth like an extraordinary set of external false teeth.
Brick wrapped up in a flannel petticoat just as good, anyway!" "How's Ella's tonsils, Mr. Stowbody?" yawned Chet Dashaway. While Mr. Stowbody gave a somatic and psychic study of them, Carol reflected, "Are they really so terribly interested in Ella's tonsils, or even in Ella's esophagus? I wonder if I could get them away from personalities? Let's risk damnation and try."
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.
As she went dragging through the prickly-hot street she reflected that a citizen of Gopher Prairie does not have jests he has a jest. Every cold morning for five winters Lyman Cass had remarked, "Fair to middlin' chilly get worse before it gets better." Fifty times had Ezra Stowbody informed the public that Carol had once asked, "Shall I indorse this check on the back?"
Selling nails was considered as sacred as banking. These upstarts the Clarks, the Haydocks had no dignity. They were sound and conservative in politics, but they talked about motor cars and pump-guns and heaven only knew what new-fangled fads. Mr. Stowbody felt out of place with them.
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