For the moment, as it happens, Mark 0'Dea*s
locale is an imaginary small town in Iowa. Any
cornbelt village of approximately the same size
and subject to the same general living conditions
is, inevitably. Red Bud. And what, precisely,
does Red Bud stand for among us today? It
stands for the stark empty lives of American farm
women; but for Mark O'Dea it stands also for
an awakening dimly astir in the consciousness of
these women. They reach out for new light; they
grope and totter and fall, half blinded by the
dazzle of the sudden sunshine; they seek to become
disinterested and gaze at life with but lately
opened eyes, searching for the beauty they have
hitherto so poignantly missed. They shudder
away from that vagueness of self which has been
so overwhelmingly their lot. But Red Bud, and
the world, to boot, thrusts them back, wounded,
fatally hurt, outlined stabbingly against the sur-
rounding bleakness.
Those women of Red Bud — Mrs. Sykes, Miss

Myrtle, Miss Pansy, Ethelyn and, above all,

...
xiu



FOREWORD



Hulda — gather within themselves, within their
hungry or aroused or tormented souls, all the
visionary escapements and sun-touched day-
dreams of half the women of present-day America.
Here, beyond the outer rim of what we like to
style the benefits of civilization, irradiated by not
so much as a casual Chautauqua, one does not, it
seems, even encounter the garrulous frou-frou of
the culture or reading club. Meanwhile we are
concerned, as Mark O'Dea so finely indicates, with
the naked essentials of human existence, with
the luminous end-of-the-road beckoning always
and the balked will and the frustrate dream.
A short while ago in a magazine article, Mr.
