Lewis Sinclair. Main Street

Webster’s Thesaurus Edition for PSAT, SAT, GRE, LSAT, GMAT, and AP English Test Preparation.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 flour- mills 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.