to was called Another Job for the Undertaker, and in it an ignorant fellow from the countryside went to sleep in his hotel room with the gas lamp on but not lit. Within a minute, he was carried out to a hearse and driven away, much mourned by his friends. It was shocking, really, until Dora told her that the whole incident was staged. Another of these films was about Kansas, and demonstrated what Missourians were always saying, that Kansans had a distressing propensity for violence. In this picture, Mrs. Carrie Nation entered a saloon with her disciples. They were all carrying axes, and they proceeded to smash the place to smithereens. Mrs. Nation was the victor, although she got a dose of beer in the face when she smashed the tap.
Mrs. Bell gave Elizabeth the wedding she must have wished for Dora—a breakfast at the big house on Kingshighway, with the Danforths and all of the members of the Ladies’ Club in attendance, and the big staircase in the front hall strung with garlands of a yellow flower that Margaret didn’t know. Elizabeth sewed her own gown, with the help of Mrs. Bell’s sempstress, but the bodice was a piece of Branscomb family lace, Belgian and in perfect condition. The cake came from the best French pastry shop in St. Louis, and Margaret, Beatrice, and Lavinia all wore new hats from the May Company hat department. Elizabeth had seven new dresses, and her linen chest was full. Best of all, Margaret had had no hand in filling it. Mercer took his bride on a wedding trip to Hot Springs, down in Arkansas, a famous spa, and then they went to live in their new house in Kirkwood, which was two or three blocks from the railroad station. This meant that Elizabeth could come visit Margaret and Lavinia with hardly any trouble at all. Margaret herself rode the train back home after the wedding, and there were quite a few unaccompanied women on it, though, of course, they kept to themselves and did not go into cars where food or drink was being served.
MARGARET was twenty-three. Two girls her age, Mathilda Tierney and Martha Johnson, had gone out West to Idaho as itinerant teachers. They had found an abundance of eligible men and had married right away. It was exciting, it seemed, for a man or a woman to set out alone, not so exciting for them to set out as a couple. To Margaret, however, it seemed like a long trip, no matter how you made it. Lavinia said that she was a lazy thing, and that books had taught her to be more lazy. After you read a few of them, you had the feeling you knew all about wherever the book took place, so why take the long train ride? On top of all of this, according to many authors, dangers abounded in all of these locations. You had the dangers of train wrecks and gunshots and sinking ships and outlaws, but also the likelihood that you would be swindled. Inheritances would be stolen. Letters would go astray. The friendliest stranger would be the one that, long ago, purloined the deed to the family home. How much more preferable, it seemed to Margaret, in spite of the uncertainty of her future, to wake up in the warmth of the morning and look out the window at blooming honeysuckle, the skittering of squirrels, the cawing of crows and jays as they objected to the cats.
The natural thing would be that a bookish girl would teach school. There were schools around, both county schools and local academies, and plenty of the girls teaching in them knew less than she did. She might have talked her way into one of them, and perhaps she would have gone to a teacher-training institute—there was one held for three weeks each summer in the county seat. But the girls who taught school did not speak highly of the work—the big boys and the little girls and the firecrackers and the lost and damaged books and the evident indifference of one and all tested the teachers’ patience unmercifully. The schoolhouses were drafty and chill or stuffy and hot. A schoolmistress had to dress with extra sobriety. A girl of twenty might look thirty or forty, and the older boys, who were almost her age, or, in some cases, older than she was, would tease her anyway. Lavinia felt that teaching was an occupation of