Main Street, Sinclair Lewis [red white and royal blue hardcover txt] 📗

you’re missing a big chance. There’s nothing to these cities. Believe me, I know! This is a good town, as they go. You’re lucky to be here. I wish I could shy on!”

“Very well, why don’t you?”

“Huh? Why⁠—Lord⁠—can’t get away fr⁠—”

“You don’t have to stay. I do! So I want to change it. Do you know that men like you, prominent men, do quite a reasonable amount of harm by insisting that your native towns and native states are perfect? It’s you who encourage the denizens not to change. They quote you, and go on believing that they live in paradise, and⁠—” She clenched her fist. “The incredible dullness of it!”

“Suppose you were right. Even so, don’t you think you waste a lot of thundering on one poor scared little town? Kind of mean!”

“I tell you it’s dull. Dull!”

“The folks don’t find it dull. These couples like the Haydocks have a high old time; dances and cards⁠—”

“They don’t. They’re bored. Almost everyone here is. Vacuousness and bad manners and spiteful gossip⁠—that’s what I hate.”

“Those things⁠—course they’re here. So are they in Boston! And every place else! Why, the faults you find in this town are simply human nature, and never will be changed.”

“Perhaps. But in a Boston all the good Carols (I’ll admit I have no faults) can find one another and play. But here⁠—I’m alone, in a stale pool⁠—except as it’s stirred by the great Mr. Bresnahan!”

“My Lord, to hear you tell it, a fellow’d think that all the denizens, as you impolitely call ’em, are so confoundedly unhappy that it’s a wonder they don’t all up and commit suicide. But they seem to struggle along somehow!”

“They don’t know what they miss. And anybody can endure anything. Look at men in mines and in prisons.”

He drew up on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie. He glanced across the reeds reflected on the water, the quiver of wavelets like crumpled tinfoil, the distant shores patched with dark woods, silvery oats and deep yellow wheat. He patted her hand. “Sis⁠—Carol, you’re a darling girl, but you’re difficult. Know what I think?”

“Yes.”

“Humph. Maybe you do, but⁠—My humble (not too humble!) opinion is that you like to be different. You like to think you’re peculiar. Why, if you knew how many tens of thousands of women, especially in New York, say just what you do, you’d lose all the fun of thinking you’re a lone genius and you’d be on the bandwagon whooping it up for Gopher Prairie and a good decent family life. There’s always about a million young women just out of college who want to teach their grandmothers how to suck eggs.”

“How proud you are of that homely rustic metaphor! You use it at ‘banquets’ and directors’ meetings, and boast of your climb from a humble homestead.”

“Huh! You may have my number. I’m not telling. But look here: You’re so prejudiced against Gopher Prairie that you overshoot the mark; you antagonize those who might be inclined to agree with you in some particulars but⁠—Great guns, the town can’t be all wrong!”

“No, it isn’t. But it could be. Let me tell you a fable. Imagine a cavewoman complaining to her mate. She doesn’t like one single thing; she hates the damp cave, the rats running over her bare legs, the stiff skin garments, the eating of half-raw meat, her husband’s bushy face, the constant battles, and the worship of the spirits who will hoodoo her unless she gives the priests her best claw necklace. Her man protests, ‘But it can’t all be wrong!’ and he thinks he has reduced her to absurdity. Now you assume that a world which produces a Percy Bresnahan and a Velvet Motor Company must be civilized. It is? Aren’t we only about halfway along in barbarism? I suggest Mrs. Bogart as a test. And we’ll continue in barbarism just as long as people as nearly intelligent as you continue to defend things as they are because they are.”

“You’re a fair spieler, child. But, by golly, I’d like to see you try to design a new manifold, or run a factory and keep a lot of your fellow reds from Czech-slovenski-magyar-godknowswheria on the job! You’d drop your theories so darn quick! I’m not any defender of things as they are. Sure. They’re rotten. Only I’m sensible.”

He preached his gospel: love of outdoors, Playing the Game, loyalty to friends. She had the neophyte’s shock of discovery that, outside of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answer when an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing statistics.

He was so much the man, the worker, the friend, that she liked him when she most tried to stand out against him; he was so much the successful executive that she did not want him to despise her. His manner of sneering at what he called “parlor socialists” (though the phrase was not overwhelmingly new) had a power which made her wish to placate his company of well-fed, speed-loving administrators. When he demanded, “Would you like to associate with nothing but a lot of turkey-necked, horn-spectacled nuts that have adenoids and need a haircut, and that spend all their time kicking about ‘conditions’ and never do a lick of work?” she said, “No, but just the same⁠—” When he asserted, “Even if your cavewoman was right in knocking the whole works, I bet some red-blooded Regular Fellow, some real He-man, found her a nice dry cave, and not any whining criticizing radical,” she wriggled her head feebly, between a nod and a shake.

His large hands, sensual lips, easy voice supported his self-confidence. He made her feel young and soft⁠—as Kennicott had once made her feel. She had nothing to say when he bent his powerful head and experimented, “My dear, I’m sorry I’m going away from this town. You’d be a darling child to play with. You are pretty! Some day in Boston I’ll show you how we buy a lunch. Well, hang it, got to be starting back.”

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