It was good form for the customers to fight back. Juanita Haydock cheerfully jabbered, “You have it there by twelve or I'll snatch that fresh delivery-boy bald-headed.” But Carol had never been able to play the game of friendly rudeness; and now she was certain that she never would learn it. She formed the cowardly habit of going to Axel Egge's.
Axel was not respectable and rude. He was still a foreigner, and he expected to remain one. His manner was heavy and uninterrogative. His establishment was more fantastic than any cross-roads store. No one save Axel himself could find anything. A part of the assortment of children's stockings was under a blanket on a shelf, a part in a tin ginger-snap box, the rest heaped like a nest of black-cotton snakes upon a flour-barrel which was surrounded by brooms, Norwegian Bibles, dried cod for ludfisk, boxes of apricots, and a pair and a half of lumbermen's rubber-footed boots. The place was crowded with Scandinavian farmwives, standing aloof in shawls and ancient fawn-colored leg o' mutton jackets, awaiting the return of their lords. They spoke Norwegian or Swedish, and looked at Carol uncomprehendingly. They were a relief to her—they were not whispering that she was a poseur.
But what she told herself was that Axel Egge's was “so picturesque and romantic.”
It was in the matter of clothes that she was most self-conscious.
When she dared to go shopping in her new checked suit with the black-embroidered sulphur collar, she had as good as invited all of Gopher Prairie (which interested itself in nothing so intimately as in new clothes and the cost thereof) to investigate her. It was a smart suit with lines unfamiliar to the dragging yellow and pink frocks of the town. The Widow Bogart's stare, from her porch, indicated, “Well I never saw anything like that before!” Mrs. McGanum stopped Carol at the notions shop to hint, “My, that's a nice suit—wasn't it terribly expensive?” The gang of boys in front of the drug store commented, “Hey, Pudgie, play you a game of checkers on that dress.” Carol could not endure it. She drew her fur coat over the suit and hastily fastened the buttons, while the boys snickered.
II
No group angered her quite so much as these staring young roues.
She had tried to convince herself that the village, with its fresh air, its lakes for fishing and swimming, was healthier than the artificial city. But she was sickened by glimpses of the gang of boys from fourteen to twenty who loafed before Dyer's Drug Store, smoking cigarettes, displaying “fancy” shoes and purple ties and coats of diamond-shaped buttons, whistling the Hoochi-Koochi and catcalling, “Oh, you baby-doll” at every passing girl.
She saw them playing pool in the stinking room behind Del Snafflin's barber shop, and shaking dice in “The Smoke House,” and gathered in a snickering knot to listen to the “juicy stories” of Bert Tybee, the bartender of the Minniemashie House. She heard them smacking moist lips over every love-scene at the Rosebud Movie Palace. At the counter of the Greek Confectionery Parlor, while they ate dreadful messes of decayed bananas, acid cherries, whipped cream, and gelatinous ice-cream, they screamed to one another, “Hey, lemme 'lone,” “Quit dog-gone you, looka what you went and done, you almost spilled my glass swater,” “Like hell I did,” “Hey, gol darn your hide, don't you go sticking your coffin nail in my i-scream,” “Oh you Batty, how juh like dancing with Tillie McGuire, last night? Some squeezing, heh, kid?”
By diligent consultation of American fiction she discovered that this was the only virile and amusing manner in which boys could function; that boys who were not compounded of the gutter and the mining-camp were mollycoddles and unhappy. She had taken this for granted. She had studied the boys pityingly, but impersonally. It had not occurred to her that they might touch her.