The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather (best reads .TXT) 📕

don’t see Thea bringing up a family. She’s got a good deal of her mother in her, but she hasn’t got all. She’s too peppery and too fond of having her own way. Then she’s always got to be ahead in everything. That kind make good church-workers and missionaries and school teachers, but they don’t make good wives. They fret all their energy away, like colts, and get cut on the wire.”

Mrs. Kronborg laughed. “Give me the graham crackers I put in your pocket for Thor. He’s hungry. You’re a funny man, Peter. A body wouldn’t think, to hear you, you was talking about your own daughters. I guess you see through ’em. Still, even if Thea ain’t apt to have children of her own, I don’t know as that’s a good reason why she should wear herself out on other people’s.”

“That’s just the point, mother. A girl with all that energy has got to do something, same as a boy, to keep her out of mischief. If you don’t want her to marry Ray, let her do something to make herself independent.”

“Well, I’m not against it. It might be the best thing for her. I wish I felt sure she wouldn’t worry. She takes things hard. She nearly cried herself sick about Wunsch’s going away. She’s the smartest child of ’em all, Peter, by a long ways.”

Peter Kronborg smiled. “There you go, Anna. That’s you all over again. Now, I have no favorites; they all have their good points. But you,” with a twinkle, “always did go in for brains.”

Mrs. Kronborg chuckled as she wiped the cracker crumbs from Thor’s chin and fists. “Well, you’re mighty conceited, Peter! But I don’t know as I ever regretted it. I prefer having a family of my own to fussing with other folks’ children, that’s the truth.”

Before the Kronborgs reached Copper Hole, Thea’s destiny was pretty well mapped out for her. Mr. Kronborg was always delighted to have an excuse for enlarging the house.

Mrs. Kronborg was quite right in her conjecture that there would be unfriendly comment in Moonstone when Thea raised her prices for music-lessons. People said she was getting too conceited for anything. Mrs. Livery Johnson put on a new bonnet and paid up all her back calls to have the pleasure of announcing in each parlor she entered that her daughters, at least, would “never pay professional prices to Thea Kronborg.”

Thea raised no objection to quitting school. She was now in the “high room,” as it was called, in next to the highest class, and was studying geometry and beginning Caesar. She no longer recited her lessons to the teacher she liked, but to the Principal, a man who belonged, like Mrs. Livery Johnson, to the camp of Thea’s natural enemies. He taught school because he was too lazy to work among grown-up people, and he made an easy job of it. He got out of real work by inventing useless activities for his pupils, such as the “tree-diagramming system.” Thea had spent hours making trees out of “Thanatopsis,” Hamlet’s soliloquy, Cato on “Immortality.” She agonized under this waste of time, and was only too glad to accept her father’s offer of liberty.

So Thea left school the first of November. By the first of January she had eight one-hour pupils and ten half-hour pupils, and there would be more in the summer. She spent her earnings generously. She bought a new Brussels carpet for the parlor, and a rifle for Gunner and Axel, and an imitation tiger-skin coat and cap for Thor. She enjoyed being able to add to the family possessions, and thought Thor looked quite as handsome in his spots as the rich children she had seen in Denver. Thor was most complacent in his conspicuous apparel. He could walk anywhere by this time⁠—though he always preferred to sit, or to be pulled in his cart. He was a blissfully lazy child, and had a number of long, dull plays, such as making nests for his china duck and waiting for her to lay him an egg. Thea thought him very intelligent, and she was proud that he was so big and burly. She found him restful, loved to hear him call her “sitter,” and really liked his companionship, especially when she was tired. On Saturday, for instance, when she taught from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, she liked to get off in a corner with Thor after supper, away from all the bathing and dressing and joking and talking that went on in the house, and ask him about his duck, or hear him tell one of his rambling stories.

XV

By the time Thea’s fifteenth birthday came round, she was established as a music teacher in Moonstone. The new room had been added to the house early in the spring, and Thea had been giving her lessons there since the middle of May. She liked the personal independence which was accorded her as a wage-earner. The family questioned her comings and goings very little. She could go buggy-riding with Ray Kennedy, for instance, without taking Gunner or Axel. She could go to Spanish Johnny’s and sing part songs with the Mexicans, and nobody objected.

Thea was still under the first excitement of teaching, and was terribly in earnest about it. If a pupil did not get on well, she fumed and fretted. She counted until she was hoarse. She listened to scales in her sleep. Wunsch had taught only one pupil seriously, but Thea taught twenty. The duller they were, the more furiously she poked and prodded them. With the little girls she was nearly always patient, but with pupils older than herself, she sometimes lost her temper. One of her mistakes was to let herself in for a calling-down from Mrs. Livery Johnson. That lady appeared at the Kronborgs’ one morning and announced that she would allow no girl to stamp her foot at her daughter Grace. She added that Thea’s bad manners with the older