Sinclair Lewis: Main Street

14. CHAPTER XIV (continued)

"I think perhaps it's my childhood." She halted. When she went on her voice had an artificial sound, her words the bookish quality of emotional meditation. "My father was the tenderest man in the world, but he did feel superior to ordinary people. Well, he was! And the Minnesota Valley---- I used to sit there on the cliffs above Mankato for hours at a time, my chin in my hand, looking way down the valley, wanting to write poems. The shiny tilted roofs below me, and the river, and beyond it the level fields in the mist, and the rim of palisades across---- It held my thoughts in. I LIVED, in the valley. But the prairie--all my thoughts go flying off into the big space. Do you think it might be that?"

"Um, well, maybe, but---- Carrie, you always talk so much about getting all you can out of life, and not letting the years slip by, and here you deliberately go and deprive yourself of a lot of real good home pleasure by not enjoying people unless they wear frock coats and trot out----"

("Morning clothes. Oh. Sorry. Didn't mean t' interrupt you.")

"----to a lot of tea-parties. Take Jack Elder. You think Jack hasn't got any ideas about anything but manufacturing and the tariff on lumber. But do you know that Jack is nutty about music? He'll put a grand-opera record on the phonograph and sit and listen to it and close his eyes---- Or you take Lym Cass. Ever realize what a well-informed man he is?"

"But IS he? Gopher Prairie calls anybody `well-informed' who's been through the State Capitol and heard about Gladstone."

"Now I'm telling you! Lym reads a lot--solid stuff-- history. Or take Mart Mahoney, the garageman. He's got a lot of Perry prints of famous pictures in his office. Or old Bingham Playfair, that died here 'bout a year ago--lived seven miles out. He was a captain in the Civil War, and knew General Sherman, and they say he was a miner in Nevada right alongside of Mark Twain. You'll find these characters in all these small towns, and a pile of savvy in every single one of them, if you just dig for it."