This is America
          --a town of a
               few thousand,
           in a region of wheat
               and corn
             and dairies and little groves.

    The town is,
           in our tale,
         called
           "Gopher Prairie,
               Minnesota."

    But its Main Street
        is the
             continuation
                of Main Streets everywhere.

    The story
        would be the same
               in Ohio
              or Montana,
           in Kansas
              or Kentucky or Illinois,
         and not very differently
            would it
                  be told Up York State
                      or in the Carolina hills.

    Main Street
        is the climax of civilization.

    That this Ford car
        might stand
               in front
                   of the Bon Ton Store,
           Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus
            wrote in Oxford cloisters.

    What Ole Jenson the grocer
        says to Ezra Stowbody
               the banker
        is the new law
               for London,
           Prague,
         and the
             unprofitable
                isles of the sea;
        whatsoever Ezra
            does not know and sanction,
           that thing is heresy,
         worthless for
              knowing and wicked to consider.

    Our railway station
     is the final aspiration
            of architecture.

    Sam Clark's annual hardware turnover
        is the envy
               of the four counties
          which constitute God's Country.

    In the sensitive art
           of the Rosebud Movie Palace
        there is a Message,
           and humor strictly moral.

    Such is our comfortable tradition
           and sure faith.

    Would he not
          betray himself an alien cynic
         who should otherwise
              portray Main Street,
           or distress the citizens
               by speculating
             whether there
                may not be other faiths?

 
  CHAPTER I

 
  I

    ON a hill
           by the Mississippi
         where Chippewas
              camped two generations ago,
           a girl
            stood in relief
                   against the cornflower blue
                       of Northern sky.

    She saw no Indians now;
        she saw flourmills
               and the blinking windows
                   of skyscrapers
               in Minneapolis
                   and St. Paul. Nor was
             she thinking of squaws
                   and portages,
           and the Yankee fur-traders
             whose shadows
                were all about her.

    She was meditating
         upon walnut fudge,
           the plays of Brieux,
         the reasons
             why heels run over,
           and the fact
             that the chemistry instructor
                had stared
                       at the new coiffure
                  which concealed her ears.

    A breeze
          which had
              crossed a thousand miles
                   of wheat-lands bellied
                       her taffeta skirt
                   in a line so graceful,
           so full of animation and
              moving beauty,
         that the heart
               of a chance watcher
             on the lower road tightened
                   to wistfulness
               over her quality
                   of suspended freedom.

    She lifted her arms,
           she leaned back
               against the wind,
         her skirt dipped and flared,
           a lock blew wild.

    A girl on a hilltop;
        credulous,
           plastic,
         young;
        drinking the air as
             she longed to drink life.

    The eternal
          aching comedy of expectant youth.

    It is Carol Milford,
           fleeing for an hour
               from Blodgett College.

    The days of pioneering,
           of lassies in sunbonnets,
         and bears
              killed with axes
                   in piney clearings,
           are deader now than Camelot;
        and a rebellious girl
            is the spirit of
             that bewildered empire
                  called the American Middlewest.
 
  II

    Blodgett College
        is on
               the edge of Minneapolis.

    It is a bulwark
           of sound religion.

    It is
          still combating the recent heresies
               of Voltaire,
           Darwin,
         and Robert Ingersoll.

    Pious families in Minnesota,
           Iowa,
         Wisconsin,
           the Dakotas
              send their children thither,
         and Blodgett
            protects them
                   from the wickedness
                       of the universities.

    But it secretes friendly girls,
           young men who sing,
         and one lady instructress