building. A fashion-plate showing human pitchforks in garments which
looked as hard as steel plate.

On another side street a raw red-brick Catholic Church with a varnished
yellow door.

The post-office--merely a partition of glass and brass shutting off
the rear of a mildewed room which must once have been a shop. A tilted
writing-shelf against a wall rubbed black and scattered with official
notices and army recruiting-posters.

The damp, yellow-brick schoolbuilding in its cindery grounds.

The State Bank, stucco masking wood.

The Farmers' National Bank. An Ionic temple of marble. Pure, exquisite,
solitary. A brass plate with "Ezra Stowbody, Pres't."

A score of similar shops and establishments.

Behind them and mixed with them, the houses, meek cottages or large,
comfortable, soundly uninteresting symbols of prosperity.

In all the town not one building save the Ionic bank which gave pleasure
to Carol's eyes; not a dozen buildings which suggested that, in the
fifty years of Gopher Prairie's existence, the citizens had realized
that it was either desirable or possible to make this, their common
home, amusing or attractive.

It was not only the unsparing unapologetic ugliness and the rigid