CHAPTER THREE
The village of Rainbow was in a valley, as all villages should be, with a clean, rapidly-running river passing through its midst and cutting it into the East Side and the West Side for purposes of local rivalry. You lived on one Hill or the other—if you made any pretense to living in the right place, and had bleeding hearts growing in your flower beds. There is something significant about the bleeding heart, for it seems to flower only in villages like Rainbow, where it can be unhurried and away from smoke, and where it can thrive on odors of actual cooking which waft from actual kitchens. In Rainbow housewives bake batches of bread, batches of cookies—the thick, soft kind with sugar on the top—they concoct fried cakes, which other and uninstructed communities incorrectly term doughnuts. Picket fences persist, and, in spite of the municipal waterworks, the knowing still carry their pails to Jenkins’s well for the coolest, sweetest water which ever passed down a throat.
On the east side are three churches: the white
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