In her class there were two or three prettier girls, but none more eager. She played tennis, gave chafing-dish parties, took a graduate seminar in the drama, went 'twosing,' and joined half a dozen societies for the practise of the arts or the tense stalking of a thing called General Culture. The smallness of the school, the fewness of rivals, permitted her to experiment with her perilous versatility. So the four years which Carol spent at Blodgett were not altogether wasted. But it secretes friendly girls, young men who sing, and one lady instructress who really likes Milton and Carlyle. Pious families in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Dakotas send their children thither, and Blodgett protects them from the wickedness of the universities. It is still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire, Darwin, and Robert Ingersoll. 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.īlodgett College is on the edge of Minneapolis. It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth. A girl on a hilltop credulous, plastic, young drinking the air as she longed to drink life.

She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. 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.Ī 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. Nor was she thinking of squaws and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her.

She saw no Indians now she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. ON a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky.

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