SHE tried to be content, which was a contradiction in terms. She fanatically cleaned house all April. She knitted a sweater for Hugh. She was diligent¹ at Red Cross work. She was silent when Vida raved² that though America hated war as much as ever, we must invade Germany and wipe out every man, because it was now proven that there was no soldier in the German army who was not crucifying prisoners and cutting off babies’ hands.
Carol was volunteer nurse when Mrs. Champ Perry suddenly died of pneumonia³.
In her funeral procession were the eleven people left out of the Grand Army and the Territorial⁴ Pioneers, old men and women, very old and weak, who a few decades ago had been boys and girls of the frontier, riding broncos through the rank windy grass of this prairie. They hobbled behind a band made up of business men and high-school boys, who straggled along without uniforms or ranks or leader, trying to play Chopin’s Funeral March — a shabby group of neighbors with grave eyes, stumbling through the slush under a solemnity of faltering⁶ music.
Champ was broken. His rheumatism⁷ was worse. The rooms over the store were silent. He could not do his work as buyer at the elevator. Farmers coming in with sled-loads of wheat complained that Champ could not read the scale, that he seemed always to be watching some one back in the darkness of the bins⁸. He was seen slipping through alleys⁹, talking to himself, trying to avoid observation, creeping at last to the cemetery¹⁰. Once Carol followed him and found the coarse, tobacco-stained, unimaginative old man lying on the snow of the grave, his thick arms spread out across the raw

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