straightness which overwhelmed her. It was the planlessness, the flimsy
temporariness of the buildings, their faded unpleasant colors. The
street was cluttered with electric-light poles, telephone poles,
gasoline pumps for motor cars, boxes of goods. Each man had built
with the most valiant disregard of all the others. Between a large
new "block" of two-story brick shops on one side, and the fire-brick
Overland garage on the other side, was a one-story cottage turned into
a millinery shop. The white temple of the Farmers' Bank was elbowed back
by a grocery of glaring yellow brick. One store-building had a patchy
galvanized iron cornice; the building beside it was crowned with
battlements and pyramids of brick capped with blocks of red sandstone.

She escaped from Main Street, fled home.

She wouldn't have cared, she insisted, if the people had been comely.
She had noted a young man loafing before a shop, one unwashed hand
holding the cord of an awning; a middle-aged man who had a way of
staring at women as though he had been married too long and too
prosaically; an old farmer, solid, wholesome, but not clean--his face
like a potato fresh from the earth. None of them had shaved for three
days.

"If they can't build shrines, out here on the prairie, surely there's
nothing to prevent their buying safety-razors!" she raged.

She fought herself: "I must be wrong. People do live here. It CAN'T be
as ugly as--as I know it is! I must be wrong. But I can't do it. I can't
go through with it."

She came home too seriously worried for hysteria; and when she found