"Could one well imagine anything less attractive than this?" she said. "Still, I believe the desolate place is looked upon as a rising city, and they are actually proud of it."
Eveline Annersly glanced up the single street with a twinkle in her eyes. It somewhat resembled a ploughed field, though the ruts and ridges the wheels had made were crumbling into dust. Above it ran a rickety sidewalk of planks, by means of which foot passengers could escape the mire in spring; and crude frame-houses, destitute of paint or any attempt at adornment, rose from that in turn. The fronts of most of them were carried sufficiently high to hide the pitch of sloped roof, so that they resembled squares of timber pierced by little windows. Above the topmost of the latter there usually ran a blatant but half-obliterated commendation of the wares sold within, for in the rising prairie town every house is, as a rule, either a store or a hotel.
"Well," she said, "one could scarcely call it picturesque, but we have colliery and other industrial villages at home that are not very far behind it."
Carrie laughed. "Still, we have the grace to attempt to justify them on the score of necessity, while they hold this place up as a model and a sign of progress. It is a barbarous country."
"Including Prospect, too?"
"Of course! Still, Prospect makes no pretence of civilisation. It is part of the prairie, and nobody could expect much from it."
"Or of those who dwell in it?"
A little tinge of colour showed in the girl's cheek. "Well," she said with faint scorn, "I don't mind admitting that, too. They are a distinctly primitive people."
Mrs. Annersly said nothing further. She had her fancies respecting the reason for the girl's bitterness, and did not think that her marriage accounted for all of it. This was, in a way, as she would have it. She sat silent until Carrie pulled the team up close to the dry-goods store. A crowd was collecting in front of it, and they could get no further. While they sat there, a clamour broke out, and amidst a sound of scuffling, two men reeled across the verandah of the hotel opposite them. Their faces were not at first visible, and Carrie smiled contemptuously when the crowd encouraged them as they grappled with each other.
"That," she said, "is evidently considered the correct thing when Western gentlemen have a difference of opinion. You will notice that nobody makes any attempt to put an end to it. After all, since they cannot keep their brutality under restraint, there is something to be said for the use of pistols."