Chapter 1-11

                              PART II

                       THE SONG OF THE LARK

                                 I

     THEA and Dr. Archie had been gone from Moonstone
four days.  On the afternoon of the nineteenth of Octo-
ber they were in a street-car, riding through the depressing,
unkept wastes of North Chicago, on their way to call upon
the Reverend Lars Larsen, a friend to whom Mr. Kron-
borg had written.  Thea was still staying at the rooms of
the Young Women's Christian Association, and was miser-
able and homesick there.  The housekeeper watched her in
a way that made her uncomfortable.  Things had not gone
very well, so far.  The noise and confusion of a big city
tired and disheartened her.  She had not had her trunk sent
to the Christian Association rooms because she did not
want to double cartage charges, and now she was running
up a bill for storage on it.  The contents of her gray tele-
scope were becoming untidy, and it seemed impossible to
keep one's face and hands clean in Chicago.  She felt as if
she were still on the train, traveling without enough
clothes to keep clean.  She wanted another nightgown,
and it did not occur to her that she could buy one.  There
were other clothes in her trunk that she needed very much,
and she seemed no nearer a place to stay than when
she arrived in the rain, on that first disillusioning morning.
     Dr. Archie had gone at once to his friend Hartley Evans,
the throat specialist, and had asked him to tell him of a good
piano teacher and direct him to a good boarding-house.
Dr. Evans said he could easily tell him who was the best
piano teacher in Chicago, but that most students' board-
ing-houses were "abominable places, where girls got poor
food for body and mind."  He gave Dr. Archie several ad-
dresses, however, and the doctor went to look the places
over.  He left Thea in her room, for she seemed tired and
was not at all like herself.  His inspection of boarding-
houses was not encouraging.  The only place that seemed
to him at all desirable was full, and the mistress of the
house could not give Thea a room in which she could have
a piano.  She said Thea might use the piano in her parlor;
but when Dr. Archie went to look at the parlor he found
a girl talking to a young man on one of the corner sofas.
Learning that the boarders received all their callers there,
he gave up that house, too, as hopeless.
     So when they set out to make the acquaintance of Mr.
Larsen on the afternoon he had appointed, the question
of a lodging was still undecided.  The Swedish Reform
Church was in a sloughy, weedy district, near a group of
factories.  The church itself was a very neat little building.
The parsonage, next door, looked clean and comfortable,
and there was a well-kept yard about it, with a picket
fence.  Thea saw several little children playing under a
swing, and wondered why ministers always had so many.
When they rang at the parsonage door, a capable-looking
Swedish servant girl answered the bell and told them that
Mr. Larsen's study was in the church, and that he was
waiting for them there.
     Mr. Larsen received them very cordially.  The furniture
in his study was so new and the pictures were so heavily
framed, that Thea thought it looked more like the wait-
ing-room of the fashionable Denver dentist to whom Dr.
Archie had taken her that summer, than like a preacher's
study.  There were even flowers in a glass vase on the
desk.  Mr. Larsen was a small, plump man, with a short,
yellow beard, very white teeth, and a little turned-up nose
on which he wore gold-rimmed eye-glasses.  He looked
about thirty-five, but he was growing bald, and his thin,
hair was parted above his left ear and brought up over
the bare spot on the top of his head.  He looked cheerful
and agreeable.  He wore a blue coat and no cuffs.
     After Dr. Archie and Thea sat down on a slippery leather
couch, the minister asked for an outline of Thea's plans.
Dr. Archie explained that she meant to study piano with
Andor Harsanyi; that they had already seen him, that
Thea had played for him and he said he would be glad to
teach her.
     Mr. Larsen lifted his pale eyebrows and rubbed his
plump white hands together.  "But he is a concert pianist
already.  He will be very expensive."
     "That's why Miss Kronborg wants to get a church posi-
tion if possible.  She has not money enough to see her
through the winter.  There's no use her coming all the way
from Colorado and studying with a second-rate teacher.
My friends here tell me Harsanyi is the best."
     "Oh, very likely!  I have heard him play with Thomas.
You Western people do things on a big scale.  There are
half a dozen teachers that I should think--  However, you
know what you want."  Mr. Larsen showed his contempt
for such extravagant standards by a shrug.  He felt that
Dr. Archie was trying to impress him.  He had succeeded,
indeed, in bringing out the doctor's stiffest manner.  Mr.
Larsen went on to explain that he managed the music in
his church himself, and drilled his choir, though the tenor
was the official choirmaster.  Unfortunately there were no
vacancies in his choir just now.  He had his four voices,
very good ones.  He looked away from Dr. Archie and
glanced at Thea.  She looked troubled, even a little fright-
ened when he said this, and drew in her lower lip.  She, cer-
tainly, was not pretentious, if her protector was.  He con-
tinued to study her.  She was sitting on the lounge, her
knees far apart, her gloved hands lying stiffly in her lap,
like a country girl.  Her turban, which seemed a little too big
for her, had got tilted in the wind,--it was always windy
in that part of Chicago,--and she looked tired.  She wore
no veil, and her hair, too, was the worse for the wind and
dust.  When he said he had all the voices he required, he
noticed that her gloved hands shut tightly.  Mr. Larsen
reflected that she was not, after all, responsible for the lofty
manner of her father's physician; that she was not even
responsible for her father, whom he remembered as a tire-
some fellow.  As he watched her tired, worried face, he felt
sorry for her.
     "All the same, I would like to try your voice," he said,
turning pointedly away from her companion.  "I am inter-
ested in voices.  Can you sing to the violin?"
     "I guess so," Thea replied dully.  "I don't know.  I
never tried."
     Mr. Larsen took his violin out of the case and began to
tighten the keys.  "We might go into the lecture-room and
see how it goes.  I can't tell much about a voice by the
organ.  The violin is really the proper instrument to try
a voice."  He opened a door at the back of his study, pushed
Thea gently through it, and looking over his shoulder to
Dr. Archie said, "Excuse us, sir.  We will be back soon."
     Dr. Archie chuckled.  All preachers were alike, officious
and on their dignity; liked to deal with women and girls,
but not with men.  He took up a thin volume from the
minister's desk.  To his amusement it proved to be a book
of "Devotional and Kindred Poems; by Mrs. Aurelia S.
Larsen."  He looked them over, thinking that the world
changed very little.  He could remember when the wife of
his father's minister had published a volume of verses,
which all the church members had to buy and all the chil-
dren were encouraged to read.  His grandfather had made
a face at the book and said, "Puir body!"  Both ladies
seemed to have chosen the same subjects, too: Jephthah's
Daughter, Rizpah, David's Lament for Absalom, etc.  The
doctor found the book very amusing.
     The Reverend Lars Larsen was a reactionary Swede.
His father came to Iowa in the sixties, married a Swedish
girl who was ambitious, like himself, and they moved to
Kansas and took up land under the Homestead Act.  After
that, they bought land and leased it from the Government,
acquired land in every possible way.  They worked like
horses, both of them; indeed, they would never have used
any horse-flesh they owned as they used themselves.  They
reared a large family and worked their sons and daughters
as mercilessly as they worked themselves; all of them but
Lars.  Lars was the fourth son, and he was born lazy.  He
seemed to bear the mark of overstrain on the part of his
parents.  Even in his cradle he was an example of physical
inertia; anything to lie still.  When he was a growing boy
his mother had to drag him out of bed every morning,
and he had to be driven to his chores.  At school he had a
model "attendance record," because he found getting his
lessons easier than farm work.  He was the only one of the
family who went through the high school, and by the time
he graduated he had already made up his mind to study
for the ministry, because it seemed to him the least labori-
ous of all callings.  In so far as he could see, it was the only
business in which there was practically no competition, in
which a man was not all the time pitted against other men
who were willing to work themselves to death.  His father
stubbornly opposed Lars's plan, but after keeping the boy
at home for a year and finding how useless he was on the
farm, he sent him to a theological seminary--as much to
conceal his laziness from the neighbors as because he did
not know what else to do with him.
     Larsen, like Peter Kronborg, got on well in the ministry,
because he got on well with the women.  His English was
no worse than that of most young preachers of American
parentage, and he made the most of his skill with the vio-
lin.  He was supposed to exert a very desirable influence
over young people and to stimulate their interest in church
work.  He married an American girl, and when his father
died he got his share of the property--which was very
considerable.  He invested his money carefully and was
that rare thing, a preacher of independent means.  His
white, well-kept hands were his result,--the evidence that
he had worked out his life successfully in the way that
pleased him.  His Kansas brothers hated the sight of his
hands.
     Larsen liked all the softer things of life,--in so far as he
knew about them.  He slept late in the morning, was fussy
about his food, and read a great many novels, preferring
sentimental ones.  He did not smoke, but he ate a great
deal of candy "for his throat," and always kept a box of
chocolate drops in the upper right-hand drawer of his desk.
He always bought season tickets for the symphony con-
certs, and he played his violin for women's culture clubs.
He did not wear cuffs, except on Sunday, because he be-
lieved that a free wrist facilitated his violin practice.
When he drilled his choir he always held his hand with the
little and index fingers curved higher than the other two,
like a noted German conductor he had seen.  On the whole,
the Reverend Larsen was not an insincere man; he merely
spent his life resting and playing, to make up for the time
his forebears had wasted grubbing in the earth.  He was
simple-hearted and kind; he enjoyed his candy and his
children and his sacred cantatas.  He could work energet-
ically at almost any form of play.
     Dr. Archie was deep in "The Lament of Mary Mag-
dalen," when Mr. Larsen and Thea came back to the
study.  From the minister's expression he judged that
Thea had succeeded in interesting him.
     Mr. Larsen seemed to have forgotten his hostility to-
ward him, and addressed him frankly as soon as he entered.
He stood holding his violin, and as Thea sat down he
pointed to her with his bow:--
     "I have just been telling Miss Kronborg that though I
cannot promise her anything permanent, I might give her
something for the next few months.  My soprano is a young
married woman and is temporarily indisposed.  She would
be glad to be excused from her duties for a while.  I like
Miss Kronborg's singing very much, and I think she would
benefit by the instruction in my choir.  Singing here might
very well lead to something else.  We pay our soprano only
eight dollars a Sunday, but she always gets ten dollars for
singing at funerals.  Miss Kronborg has a sympathetic
voice, and I think there would be a good deal of demand for
her at funerals.  Several American churches apply to me
for a soloist on such occasions, and I could help her to
pick up quite a little money that way."
     This sounded lugubrious to Dr. Archie, who had a physi-
cian's dislike of funerals, but he tried to accept the sug-
gestion cordially.
     "Miss Kronborg tells me she is having some trouble
getting located," Mr. Larsen went on with animation,
still holding his violin.  "I would advise her to keep away
from boarding-houses altogether.  Among my parishioners
there are two German women, a mother and daughter.
The daughter is a Swede by marriage, and clings to the
Swedish Church.  They live near here, and they rent some
of their rooms.  They have now a large room vacant, and
have asked me to recommend some one.  They have never
taken boarders, but Mrs. Lorch, the mother, is a good
cook,--at least, I am always glad to take supper with
her,--and I think I could persuade her to let this young
woman partake of the family table.  The daughter, Mrs.
Andersen, is musical, too, and sings in the Mozart Society.
I think they might like to have a music student in the
house.  You speak German, I suppose?" he turned to
Thea.
     "Oh, no; a few words.  I don't know the grammar," she
murmured.
     Dr. Archie noticed that her eyes looked alive again, not
frozen as they had looked all morning.  "If this fellow can
help her, it's not for me to be stand-offish," he said to him-
self.
     "Do you think you would like to stay in such a quiet
place, with old-fashioned people?" Mr. Larsen asked.  "I
shouldn't think you could find a better place to work, if
that's what you want."
     "I think mother would like to have me with people like
that," Thea replied.  "And I'd be glad to settle down most
anywhere.  I'm losing time."
     "Very well, there's no time like the present.  Let us go
to see Mrs. Lorch and Mrs. Andersen."
     The minister put his violin in its case and caught up a
black-and-white checked traveling-cap that he wore when
he rode his high Columbia wheel.  The three left the church
together.

                                II

     SO Thea did not go to a boarding-house after all.  When
Dr. Archie left Chicago she was comfortably settled
with Mrs. Lorch, and her happy reunion with her trunk
somewhat consoled her for his departure.
     Mrs. Lorch and her daughter lived half a mile from the
Swedish Reform Church, in an old square frame house,
with a porch supported by frail pillars, set in a damp yard
full of big lilac bushes.  The house, which had been left over
from country times, needed paint badly, and looked gloomy
and despondent among its smart Queen Anne neighbors.
There was a big back yard with two rows of apple trees
and a grape arbor, and a warped walk, two planks wide,
which led to the coal bins at the back of the lot.  Thea's
room was on the second floor, overlooking this back yard,
and she understood that in the winter she must carry up
her own coal and kindling from the bin.  There was no fur-
nace in the house, no running water except in the kitchen,
and that was why the room rent was small.  All the rooms
were heated by stoves, and the lodgers pumped the water
they needed from the cistern under the porch, or from the
well at the entrance of the grape arbor.  Old Mrs. Lorch
could never bring herself to have costly improvements
made in her house; indeed she had very little money.  She
preferred to keep the house just as her husband built it,
and she thought her way of living good enough for plain
people.
     Thea's room was large enough to admit a rented upright
piano without crowding.  It was, the widowed daughter
said, "a double room that had always before been occupied
by two gentlemen"; the piano now took the place of a
second occupant.  There was an ingrain carpet on the floor,
green ivy leaves on a red ground, and clumsy, old-fashioned
walnut furniture.  The bed was very wide, and the mat-
tress thin and hard.  Over the fat pillows were "shams"
embroidered in Turkey red, each with a flowering
scroll--one with "Gute' Nacht," the other with "Guten
Morgen."  The dresser was so big that Thea wondered
how it had ever been got into the house and up the narrow
stairs.  Besides an old horsehair armchair, there were two
low plush "spring-rockers," against the massive pedestals
of which one was always stumbling in the dark.  Thea sat
in the dark a good deal those first weeks, and sometimes
a painful bump against one of those brutally immovable
pedestals roused her temper and pulled her out of a heavy
hour.  The wall-paper was brownish yellow, with blue
flowers.  When it was put on, the carpet, certainly, had
not been consulted.  There was only one picture on the
wall when Thea moved in: a large colored print of a
brightly lighted church in a snow-storm, on Christmas
Eve, with greens hanging about the stone doorway and
arched windows.  There was something warm and home,
like about this picture, and Thea grew fond of it.  One
day, on her way into town to take her lesson, she stopped
at a bookstore and bought a photograph of the Naples
bust of Julius Caesar.  This she had framed, and hung it on
the big bare wall behind her stove.  It was a curious choice,
but she was at the age when people do inexplicable
things.  She had been interested in Caesar's "Commen-
taries" when she left school to begin teaching, and she
loved to read about great generals; but these facts would
scarcely explain her wanting that grim bald head to share
her daily existence.  It seemed a strange freak, when she
bought so few things, and when she had, as Mrs. Andersen
said to Mrs. Lorch, "no pictures of the composers at all."
     Both the widows were kind to her, but Thea liked the
mother better.  Old Mrs. Lorch was fat and jolly, with a
red face, always shining as if she had just come from the
stove, bright little eyes, and hair of several colors.  Her
own hair was one cast of iron-gray, her switch another,
and her false front still another.  Her clothes always smelled
of savory cooking, except when she was dressed for church
or KAFFEEKLATSCH, and then she smelled of bay rum or of
the lemon-verbena sprig which she tucked inside her puffy
black kid glove.  Her cooking justified all that Mr. Larsen
had said of it, and Thea had never been so well nourished
before.
     The daughter, Mrs. Andersen,--Irene, her mother
called her,--was a different sort of woman altogether.
She was perhaps forty years old, angular, big-boned, with
large, thin features, light-blue eyes, and dry, yellow hair,
the bang tightly frizzed.  She was pale, anaemic, and senti-
mental.  She had married the youngest son of a rich, arro-
gant Swedish family who were lumber merchants in St.
Paul.  There she dwelt during her married life.  Oscar
Andersen was a strong, full-blooded fellow who had counted
on a long life and had been rather careless about his busi-
ness affairs.  He was killed by the explosion of a steam
boiler in the mills, and his brothers managed to prove that
he had very little stock in the big business.  They had
strongly disapproved of his marriage and they agreed
among themselves that they were entirely justified in de-
frauding his widow, who, they said, "would only marry
again and give some fellow a good thing of it."  Mrs. Ander-
sen would not go to law with the family that had always
snubbed and wounded her--she felt the humiliation of be-
ing thrust out more than she felt her impoverishment; so
she went back to Chicago to live with her widowed mother
on an income of five hundred a year.  This experience had
given her sentimental nature an incurable hurt.  Something
withered away in her.  Her head had a downward droop;
her step was soft and apologetic, even in her mother's
house, and her smile had the sickly, uncertain flicker that
so often comes from a secret humiliation.  She was affable
and yet shrinking, like one who has come down in the
world, who has known better clothes, better carpets, bet-
ter people, brighter hopes.  Her husband was buried in the
Andersen lot in St. Paul, with a locked iron fence around
it.  She had to go to his eldest brother for the key when she
went to say good-bye to his grave.  She clung to the Swedish
Church because it had been her husband's church.
     As her mother had no room for her household belongings,
Mrs. Andersen had brought home with her only her bed-
room set, which now furnished her own room at Mrs.
Lorch's.  There she spent most of her time, doing fancy-
work or writing letters to sympathizing German friends
in St. Paul, surrounded by keepsakes and photographs of
the burly Oscar Andersen.  Thea, when she was admitted
to this room, and shown these photographs, found her-
self wondering, like the Andersen family, why such a lusty,
gay-looking fellow ever thought he wanted this pallid,
long-cheeked woman, whose manner was always that of
withdrawing, and who must have been rather thin-blooded
even as a girl.
     Mrs. Andersen was certainly a depressing person.  It
sometimes annoyed Thea very much to hear her insinuat-
ing knock on the door, her flurried explanation of why she
had come, as she backed toward the stairs.  Mrs. Andersen
admired Thea greatly.  She thought it a distinction to be
even a "temporary soprano"--Thea called herself so quite
seriously--in the Swedish Church.  She also thought it
distinguished to be a pupil of Harsanyi's.  She considered
Thea very handsome, very Swedish, very talented.  She
fluttered about the upper floor when Thea was practicing.
In short, she tried to make a heroine of her, just as Tillie
Kronborg had always done, and Thea was conscious of
something of the sort.  When she was working and heard
Mrs. Andersen tip-toeing past her door, she used to shrug
her shoulders and wonder whether she was always to have
a Tillie diving furtively about her in some disguise or other.

     At the dressmaker's Mrs. Andersen recalled Tillie even
more painfully.  After her first Sunday in Mr. Larsen's
choir, Thea saw that she must have a proper dress for
morning service.  Her Moonstone party dress might do to
wear in the evening, but she must have one frock that could
stand the light of day.  She, of course, knew nothing about
Chicago dressmakers, so she let Mrs. Andersen take her to
a German woman whom she recommended warmly.  The
German dressmaker was excitable and dramatic.  Concert
dresses, she said, were her specialty.  In her fitting-room
there were photographs of singers in the dresses she had
made them for this or that SANGERFEST.  She and Mrs. An-
dersen together achieved a costume which would have
warmed Tillie Kronborg's heart.  It was clearly intended
for a woman of forty, with violent tastes.  There seemed to
be a piece of every known fabric in it somewhere.  When
it came home, and was spread out on her huge bed, Thea
looked it over and told herself candidly that it was "a
horror."  However, her money was gone, and there was
nothing to do but make the best of the dress.  She never
wore it except, as she said, "to sing in," as if it were an
unbecoming uniform.  When Mrs. Lorch and Irene told her
that she "looked like a little bird-of-Paradise in it," Thea
shut her teeth and repeated to herself words she had
learned from Joe Giddy and Spanish Johnny.
     In these two good women Thea found faithful friends,
and in their house she found the quiet and peace which
helped her to support the great experiences of that winter.

                                III

     ANDOR HARSANYI had never had a pupil in the
least like Thea Kronborg.  He had never had one
more intelligent, and he had never had one so ignorant.
When Thea sat down to take her first lesson from him, she
had never heard a work by Beethoven or a composition
by Chopin.  She knew their names vaguely.  Wunsch had
been a musician once, long before he wandered into Moon-
stone, but when Thea awoke his interest there was not
much left of him.  From him Thea had learned something
about the works of Gluck and Bach, and he used to play her
some of the compositions of Schumann.  In his trunk he had
a mutilated score of the F sharp minor sonata, which he had
heard Clara Schumann play at a festival in Leipsic.  Though
his powers of execution were at such a low ebb, he used to
play at this sonata for his pupil and managed to give her
some idea of its beauty.  When Wunsch was a young man,
it was still daring to like Schumann; enthusiasm for his
work was considered an expression of youthful wayward-
ness.  Perhaps that was why Wunsch remembered him best.
Thea studied some of the KINDERSZENEN with him, as well
as some little sonatas by Mozart and Clementi.  But for
the most part Wunsch stuck to Czerny and Hummel.
     Harsanyi found in Thea a pupil with sure, strong hands,
one who read rapidly and intelligently, who had, he felt, a
richly gifted nature.  But she had been given no direction,
and her ardor was unawakened.  She had never heard a
symphony orchestra.  The literature of the piano was an
undiscovered world to her.  He wondered how she had been
able to work so hard when she knew so little of what she
was working toward.  She had been taught according to the
old Stuttgart method; stiff back, stiff elbows, a very formal
position of the hands.  The best thing about her prepara-
tion was that she had developed an unusual power of work.
He noticed at once her way of charging at difficulties.  She
ran to meet them as if they were foes she had long been
seeking, seized them as if they were destined for her and
she for them.  Whatever she did well, she took for granted.
Her eagerness aroused all the young Hungarian's chivalry.
Instinctively one went to the rescue of a creature who had
so much to overcome and who struggled so hard.  He used
to tell his wife that Miss Kronborg's hour took more out of
him than half a dozen other lessons.  He usually kept her
long over time; he changed her lessons about so that he
could do so, and often gave her time at the end of the day,
when he could talk to her afterward and play for her a
little from what he happened to be studying.  It was always
interesting to play for her.  Sometimes she was so silent
that he wondered, when she left him, whether she had got
anything out of it.  But a week later, two weeks later, she
would give back his idea again in a way that set him
vibrating.
     All this was very well for Harsanyi; an interesting varia-
tion in the routine of teaching.  But for Thea Kronborg,
that winter was almost beyond enduring.  She always re-
membered it as the happiest and wildest and saddest of her
life.  Things came too fast for her; she had not had enough
preparation.  There were times when she came home from
her lesson and lay upon her bed hating Wunsch and her
family, hating a world that had let her grow up so ignorant;
when she wished that she could die then and there, and be
born over again to begin anew.  She said something of this
kind once to her teacher, in the midst of a bitter struggle.
Harsanyi turned the light of his wonderful eye upon her--
poor fellow, he had but one, though that was set in such a
handsome head--and said slowly: "Every artist makes
himself born.  It is very much harder than the other time,
and longer.  Your mother did not bring anything into the
world to play piano.  That you must bring into the world
yourself."
     This comforted Thea temporarily, for it seemed to give
her a chance.  But a great deal of the time she was com-
fortless.  Her letters to Dr. Archie were brief and business-
like.  She was not apt to chatter much, even in the stim-
ulating company of people she liked, and to chatter on
paper was simply impossible for her.  If she tried to write
him anything definite about her work, she immediately
scratched it out as being only partially true, or not true at
all.  Nothing that she could say about her studies seemed
unqualifiedly true, once she put it down on paper.
     Late one afternoon, when she was thoroughly tired and
wanted to struggle on into the dusk, Harsanyi, tired too,
threw up his hands and laughed at her.  "Not to-day, Miss
Kronborg.  That sonata will keep; it won't run away.
Even if you and I should not waken up to-morrow, it will
be there."
     Thea turned to him fiercely.  "No, it isn't here unless
I have it--not for me," she cried passionately.  "Only
what I hold in my two hands is there for me!"
     Harsanyi made no reply.  He took a deep breath and
sat down again.  "The second movement now, quietly,
with the shoulders relaxed."
     There were hours, too, of great exaltation; when she was
at her best and became a part of what she was doing and
ceased to exist in any other sense.  There were other times
when she was so shattered by ideas that she could do noth-
ing worth while; when they trampled over her like an army
and she felt as if she were bleeding to death under them.
She sometimes came home from a late lesson so exhausted
that she could eat no supper.  If she tried to eat, she was
ill afterward.  She used to throw herself upon the bed and
lie there in the dark, not thinking, not feeling, but evapo-
rating.  That same night, perhaps, she would waken up
rested and calm, and as she went over her work in her mind,
the passages seemed to become something of themselves,
to take a sort of pattern in the darkness.  She had never
learned to work away from the piano until she came to
Harsanyi, and it helped her more than anything had ever
helped her before.
     She almost never worked now with the sunny, happy
contentment that had filled the hours when she worked
with Wunsch--"like a fat horse turning a sorgum mill,"
she said bitterly to herself.  Then, by sticking to it, she
could always do what she set out to do.  Now, every-
thing that she really wanted was impossible; a CANTABILE
like Harsanyi's, for instance, instead of her own cloudy
tone.  No use telling her she might have it in ten years.
She wanted it now.  She wondered how she had ever found
other things interesting: books, "Anna Karenina"--all
that seemed so unreal and on the outside of things.  She
was not born a musician, she decided; there was no other
way of explaining it.
     Sometimes she got so nervous at the piano that she left
it, and snatching up her hat and cape went out and walked,
hurrying through the streets like Christian fleeing from
the City of Destruction.  And while she walked she cried.
There was scarcely a street in the neighborhood that she
had not cried up and down before that winter was over.
The thing that used to lie under her cheek, that sat so
warmly over her heart when she glided away from the sand
hills that autumn morning, was far from her.  She had come
to Chicago to be with it, and it had deserted her, leaving
in its place a painful longing, an unresigned despair.

     Harsanyi knew that his interesting pupil--"the sav-
age blonde," one of his male students called her--was
sometimes very unhappy.  He saw in her discontent a
curious definition of character.  He would have said that
a girl with so much musical feeling, so intelligent, with good
training of eye and hand, would, when thus suddenly in-
troduced to the great literature of the piano, have found
boundless happiness.  But he soon learned that she was
not able to forget her own poverty in the richness of the
world he opened to her.  Often when he played to her,
her face was the picture of restless misery.  She would sit
crouching forward, her elbows on her knees, her brows
drawn together and her gray-green eyes smaller than ever,
reduced to mere pin-points of cold, piercing light.  Some-
times, while she listened, she would swallow hard, two or
three times, and look nervously from left to right, drawing
her shoulders together.  "Exactly," he thought, "as if she
were being watched, or as if she were naked and heard
some one coming."
     On the other hand, when she came several times to see
Mrs. Harsanyi and the two babies, she was like a little
girl, jolly and gay and eager to play with the children, who
loved her.  The little daughter, Tanya, liked to touch Miss
Kronborg's yellow hair and pat it, saying, "Dolly, dolly,"
because it was of a color much oftener seen on dolls than on
people.  But if Harsanyi opened the piano and sat down to
play, Miss Kronborg gradually drew away from the chil-
dren, retreated to a corner and became sullen or troubled.
Mrs. Harsanyi noticed this, also, and thought it very
strange behavior.
     Another thing that puzzled Harsanyi was Thea's ap-
parent lack of curiosity.  Several times he offered to give
her tickets to concerts, but she said she was too tired or
that it "knocked her out to be up late."  Harsanyi did not
know that she was singing in a choir, and had often to sing
at funerals, neither did he realize how much her work with
him stirred her and exhausted her.  Once, just as she was
leaving his studio, he called her back and told her he could
give her some tickets that had been sent him for Emma
Juch that evening.  Thea fingered the black wool on the
edge of her plush cape and replied, "Oh, thank you, Mr.
Harsanyi, but I have to wash my hair to-night."

     Mrs. Harsanyi liked Miss Kronborg thoroughly.  She
saw in her the making of a pupil who would reflect credit
upon Harsanyi.  She felt that the girl could be made to look
strikingly handsome, and that she had the kind of per-
sonality which takes hold of audiences.  Moreover, Miss
Kronborg was not in the least sentimental about her hus-
band.  Sometimes from the show pupils one had to endure
a good deal.  "I like that girl," she used to say, when
Harsanyi told her of one of Thea's GAUCHERIES.  "She doesn't
sigh every time the wind blows.  With her one swallow
doesn't make a summer."
     Thea told them very little about herself.  She was not
naturally communicative, and she found it hard to feel
confidence in new people.  She did not know why, but she
could not talk to Harsanyi as she could to Dr. Archie, or to
Johnny and Mrs. Tellamantez.  With Mr. Larsen she felt
more at home, and when she was walking she sometimes
stopped at his study to eat candy with him or to hear the
plot of the novel he happened to be reading.
     One evening toward the middle of December Thea was
to dine with the Harsanyis.  She arrived early, to have
time to play with the children before they went to bed.
Mrs. Harsanyi took her into her own room and helped her
take off her country "fascinator" and her clumsy plush
cape.  Thea had bought this cape at a big department store
and had paid $16.50 for it.  As she had never paid more
than ten dollars for a coat before, that seemed to her a
large price.  It was very heavy and not very warm, orna-
mented with a showy pattern in black disks, and trimmed
around the collar and the edges with some kind of black
wool that "crocked" badly in snow or rain.  It was lined
with a cotton stuff called "farmer's satin."  Mrs. Harsanyi
was one woman in a thousand.  As she lifted this cape from
Thea's shoulders and laid it on her white bed, she wished
that her husband did not have to charge pupils like this
one for their lessons.  Thea wore her Moonstone party
dress, white organdie, made with a "V" neck and elbow
sleeves, and a blue sash.  She looked very pretty in it, and
around her throat she had a string of pink coral and tiny
white shells that Ray once brought her from Los Angeles.
Mrs. Harsanyi noticed that she wore high heavy shoes
which needed blacking.  The choir in Mr. Larsen's church
stood behind a railing, so Thea did not pay much attention
to her shoes.
     "You have nothing to do to your hair," Mrs. Harsanyi
said kindly, as Thea turned to the mirror.  "However it
happens to lie, it's always pretty.  I admire it as much as
Tanya does."
     Thea glanced awkwardly away from her and looked
stern, but Mrs. Harsanyi knew that she was pleased.  They
went into the living-room, behind the studio, where the
two children were playing on the big rug before the coal
grate.  Andor, the boy, was six, a sturdy, handsome child,
and the little girl was four.  She came tripping to meet
Thea, looking like a little doll in her white net dress--her
mother made all her clothes.  Thea picked her up and
hugged her.  Mrs. Harsanyi excused herself and went to the
dining-room.  She kept only one maid and did a good deal
of the housework herself, besides cooking her husband's
favorite dishes for him.  She was still under thirty, a slender,
graceful woman, gracious, intelligent, and capable.  She
adapted herself to circumstances with a well-bred ease
which solved many of her husband's difficulties, and kept
him, as he said, from feeling cheap and down at the heel.
No musician ever had a better wife.  Unfortunately her
beauty was of a very frail and impressionable kind, and
she was beginning to lose it.  Her face was too thin now,
and there were often dark circles under her eyes.
     Left alone with the children, Thea sat down on Tanya's
little chair--she would rather have sat on the floor, but
was afraid of rumpling her dress--and helped them play
"cars" with Andor's iron railway set.  She showed him
new ways to lay his tracks and how to make switches, set
up his Noah's ark village for stations and packed the ani-
mals in the open coal cars to send them to the stockyards.
They worked out their shipment so realistically that when
Andor put the two little reindeer into the stock car, Tanya
snatched them out and began to cry, saying she wasn't
going to have all their animals killed.
     Harsanyi came in, jaded and tired, and asked Thea to go
on with her game, as he was not equal to talking much
before dinner.  He sat down and made pretense of glancing
at the evening paper, but he soon dropped it.  After the
railroad began to grow tiresome, Thea went with the child-
ren to the lounge in the corner, and played for them the
game with which she used to amuse Thor for hours to-
gether behind the parlor stove at home, making shadow
pictures against the wall with her hands.  Her fingers were
very supple, and she could make a duck and a cow and a
sheep and a fox and a rabbit and even an elephant.  Har-
sanyi, from his low chair, watched them, smiling.  The boy
was on his knees, jumping up and down with the excite-
ment of guessing the beasts, and Tanya sat with her feet
tucked under her and clapped her frail little hands.  Thea's
profile, in the lamplight, teased his fancy.  Where had he
seen a head like it before?
     When dinner was announced, little Andor took Thea's
hand and walked to the dining-room with her.  The chil-
dren always had dinner with their parents and behaved
very nicely at table.  "Mamma," said Andor seriously as
he climbed into his chair and tucked his napkin into the
collar of his blouse, "Miss Kronborg's hands are every
kind of animal there is."
     His father laughed.  "I wish somebody would say that
about my hands, Andor."
     When Thea dined at the Harsanyis before, she noticed
that there was an intense suspense from the moment they
took their places at the table until the master of the house
had tasted the soup.  He had a theory that if the soup
went well, the dinner would go well; but if the soup was
poor, all was lost.  To-night he tasted his soup and smiled,
and Mrs. Harsanyi sat more easily in her chair and turned
her attention to Thea.  Thea loved their dinner table, be-
cause it was lighted by candles in silver candle-sticks,
and she had never seen a table so lighted anywhere else.
There were always flowers, too.  To-night there was a
little orange tree, with oranges on it, that one of Harsanyi's
pupils had sent him at Thanksgiving time.  After Harsanyi
had finished his soup and a glass of red Hungarian wine, he
lost his fagged look and became cordial and witty.  He
persuaded Thea to drink a little wine to-night.  The first
time she dined with them, when he urged her to taste the
glass of sherry beside her plate, she astonished them by
telling them that she "never drank."
     Harsanyi was then a man of thirty-two.  He was to have
a very brilliant career, but he did not know it then.
Theodore Thomas was perhaps the only man in Chicago
who felt that Harsanyi might have a great future.  Har-
sanyi belonged to the softer Slavic type, and was more like
a Pole than a Hungarian.  He was tall, slender, active, with
sloping, graceful shoulders and long arms.  His head was
very fine, strongly and delicately modelled, and, as Thea
put it, "so independent."  A lock of his thick brown hair
usually hung over his forehead.  His eye was wonderful;
full of light and fire when he was interested, soft and
thoughtful when he was tired or melancholy.  The mean-
ing and power of two very fine eyes must all have gone
into this one--the right one, fortunately, the one next
his audience when he played.  He believed that the glass
eye which gave one side of his face such a dull, blind look,
had ruined his career, or rather had made a career impos-
sible for him.  Harsanyi lost his eye when he was twelve
years old, in a Pennsylvania mining town where explo-
sives happened to be kept too near the frame shanties
in which the company packed newly arrived Hungarian
families.
     His father was a musician and a good one, but he had
cruelly over-worked the boy; keeping him at the piano for
six hours a day and making him play in cafes and dance
halls for half the night.  Andor ran away and crossed the
ocean with an uncle, who smuggled him through the port
as one of his own many children.  The explosion in which
Andor was hurt killed a score of people, and he was
thought lucky to get off with an eye.  He still had a clip-
ping from a Pittsburg paper, giving a list of the dead
and injured.  He appeared as "Harsanyi, Andor, left eye
and slight injuries about the head."  That was his first
American "notice"; and he kept it.  He held no grudge
against the coal company; he understood that the acci-
dent was merely one of the things that are bound to hap-
pen in the general scramble of American life, where every
one comes to grab and takes his chance.
     While they were eating dessert, Thea asked Harsanyi
if she could change her Tuesday lesson from afternoon to
morning.  "I have to be at a choir rehearsal in the after-
noon, to get ready for the Christmas music, and I expect
it will last until late."
     Harsanyi put down his fork and looked up.  "A choir
rehearsal?  You sing in a church?"
     "Yes.  A little Swedish church, over on the North
side."
     "Why did you not tell us?"
     "Oh, I'm only a temporary.  The regular soprano is not
well."
     "How long have you been singing there?"
     "Ever since I came.  I had to get a position of some
kind," Thea explained, flushing, "and the preacher took
me on.  He runs the choir himself.  He knew my father, and
I guess he took me to oblige."
     Harsanyi tapped the tablecloth with the ends of his
fingers.  "But why did you never tell us?  Why are you so
reticent with us?"
     Thea looked shyly at him from under her brows.  "Well,
it's certainly not very interesting.  It's only a little church.
I only do it for business reasons."
     "What do you mean?  Don't you like to sing?  Don't you
sing well?"
     "I like it well enough, but, of course, I don't know any-
thing about singing.  I guess that's why I never said any-
thing about it.  Anybody that's got a voice can sing in a
little church like that."
     Harsanyi laughed softly--a little scornfully, Thea
thought.  "So you have a voice, have you?"
     Thea hesitated, looked intently at the candles and then
at Harsanyi.  "Yes," she said firmly; "I have got some,
anyway."
     "Good girl," said Mrs. Harsanyi, nodding and smiling
at Thea.  "You must let us hear you sing after dinner."
     This remark seemingly closed the subject, and when the
coffee was brought they began to talk of other things.
Harsanyi asked Thea how she happened to know so much
about the way in which freight trains are operated, and
she tried to give him some idea of how the people in little
desert towns live by the railway and order their lives by the
coming and going of the trains.  When they left the dining-
room the children were sent to bed and Mrs. Harsanyi
took Thea into the studio.  She and her husband usually
sat there in the evening.
     Although their apartment seemed so elegant to Thea, it
was small and cramped.  The studio was the only spacious
room.  The Harsanyis were poor, and it was due to Mrs.
Harsanyi's good management that their lives, even in
hard times, moved along with dignity and order.  She
had long ago found out that bills or debts of any kind
frightened her husband and crippled his working power.
He said they were like bars on the windows, and shut out
the future; they meant that just so many hundred dollars'
worth of his life was debilitated and exhausted before he
got to it.  So Mrs. Harsanyi saw to it that they never
owed anything.  Harsanyi was not extravagant, though he
was sometimes careless about money.  Quiet and order
and his wife's good taste were the things that meant most
to him.  After these, good food, good cigars, a little good
wine.  He wore his clothes until they were shabby, until his
wife had to ask the tailor to come to the house and mea-
sure him for new ones.  His neckties she usually made her-
self, and when she was in shops she always kept her eye
open for silks in very dull or pale shades, grays and olives,
warm blacks and browns.
     When they went into the studio Mrs. Harsanyi took up
her embroidery and Thea sat down beside her on a low
stool, her hands clasped about her knees.  While his wife
and his pupil talked, Harsanyi sank into a CHAISE LONGUE in
which he sometimes snatched a few moments' rest between
his lessons, and smoked.  He sat well out of the circle of the
lamplight, his feet to the fire.  His feet were slender and
well shaped, always elegantly shod.  Much of the grace of
his movements was due to the fact that his feet were almost
as sure and flexible as his hands.  He listened to the con-
versation with amusement.  He admired his wife's tact
and kindness with crude young people; she taught them
so much without seeming to be instructing.  When the
clock struck nine, Thea said she must be going home.
     Harsanyi rose and flung away his cigarette.  "Not yet.
We have just begun the evening.  Now you are going to
sing for us.  I have been waiting for you to recover from
dinner.  Come, what shall it be?" he crossed to the piano.
     Thea laughed and shook her head, locking her elbows
still tighter about her knees.  "Thank you, Mr. Harsanyi,
but if you really make me sing, I'll accompany myself.
You couldn't stand it to play the sort of things I have to
sing."

     As Harsanyi still pointed to the chair at the piano, she
left her stool and went to it, while he returned to his CHAISE
LONGUE.  Thea looked at the keyboard uneasily for a mo-
ment, then she began "Come, ye Disconsolate," the hymn
Wunsch had always liked to hear her sing.  Mrs. Harsanyi
glanced questioningly at her husband, but he was looking
intently at the toes of his boots, shading his forehead with
his long white hand.  When Thea finished the hymn she
did not turn around, but immediately began "The Ninety
and Nine."  Mrs. Harsanyi kept trying to catch her hus-
band's eye; but his chin only sank lower on his collar.

          "There were ninety and nine that safely lay
             In the shelter of the fold,
           But one was out on the hills away,
             Far off from the gates of gold."

     Harsanyi looked at her, then back at the fire.

          "Rejoice, for the Shepherd has found his sheep."

     Thea turned on the chair and grinned.  "That's about
enough, isn't it?  That song got me my job.  The preacher
said it was sympathetic," she minced the word, remember-
ing Mr. Larsen's manner.
     Harsanyi drew himself up in his chair, resting his elbows
on the low arms.  "Yes?  That is better suited to your
voice.  Your upper tones are good, above G.  I must teach
you some songs.  Don't you know anything--pleasant?"
     Thea shook her head ruefully.  "I'm afraid I don't.  Let
me see--  Perhaps," she turned to the piano and put her
hands on the keys.  "I used to sing this for Mr. Wunsch a
long while ago.  It's for contralto, but I'll try it."  She
frowned at the keyboard a moment, played the few in-
troductory measures, and began

          "ACH, ICH HABE SIE VERLOREN,"

     She had not sung it for a long time, and it came back
like an old friendship.  When she finished, Harsanyi sprang
from his chair and dropped lightly upon his toes, a kind of
ENTRE-CHAT that he sometimes executed when he formed a
sudden resolution, or when he was about to follow a pure
intuition, against reason.  His wife said that when he gave
that spring he was shot from the bow of his ancestors, and
now when he left his chair in that manner she knew he was
intensely interested.  He went quickly to the piano.
     "Sing that again.  There is nothing the matter with
your low voice, my girl.  I will play for you.  Let your
voice out."  Without looking at her he began the accom-
paniment.  Thea drew back her shoulders, relaxed them
instinctively, and sang.
     When she finished the aria, Harsanyi beckoned her
nearer.  "Sing AH--AH for me, as I indicate."  He kept
his right hand on the keyboard and put his left to her
throat, placing the tips of his delicate fingers over her
larynx.  "Again,--until your breath is gone.--  Trill
between the two tones, always; good!  Again; excellent!--
Now up,--stay there.  E and F.  Not so good, is it?  F is
always a hard one.--  Now, try the half-tone.--  That's
right, nothing difficult about it.--  Now, pianissimo, AH--
AH.  Now, swell it, AH--AH.--  Again, follow my hand.--
Now, carry it down.--  Anybody ever tell you anything
about your breathing?"
     "Mr. Larsen says I have an unusually long breath,"
Thea replied with spirit.
     Harsanyi smiled.  "So you have, so you have.  That
was what I meant.  Now, once more; carry it up and then
down, AH--AH."  He put his hand back to her throat and
sat with his head bent, his one eye closed.  He loved to
hear a big voice throb in a relaxed, natural throat, and
he was thinking that no one had ever felt this voice vibrate
before.  It was like a wild bird that had flown into his
studio on Middleton Street from goodness knew how far!
No one knew that it had come, or even that it existed;
least of all the strange, crude girl in whose throat it beat
its passionate wings.  What a simple thing it was, he re-
flected; why had he never guessed it before?  Everything
about her indicated it,--the big mouth, the wide jaw and
chin, the strong white teeth, the deep laugh.  The machine
was so simple and strong, seemed to be so easily operated.
She sang from the bottom of herself.  Her breath came from
down where her laugh came from, the deep laugh which
Mrs. Harsanyi had once called "the laugh of the people."
A relaxed throat, a voice that lay on the breath, that had
never been forced off the breath; it rose and fell in the
air-column like the little balls which are put to shine in the
jet of a fountain.  The voice did not thin as it went up;
the upper tones were as full and rich as the lower, pro-
duced in the same way and as unconsciously, only with
deeper breath.
     At last Harsanyi threw back his head and rose.  "You
must be tired, Miss Kronborg."
     When she replied, she startled him; he had forgotten how
hard and full of burs her speaking voice was.  "No," she
said, "singing never tires me."
     Harsanyi pushed back his hair with a nervous hand.
"I don't know much about the voice, but I shall take
liberties and teach you some good songs.  I think you have
a very interesting voice."
     "I'm glad if you like it.  Good-night, Mr. Harsanyi."
Thea went with Mrs. Harsanyi to get her wraps.
     When Mrs. Harsanyi came back to her husband, she
found him walking restlessly up and down the room.
     "Don't you think her voice wonderful, dear?" she
asked.
     "I scarcely know what to think.  All I really know about
that girl is that she tires me to death.  We must not have
her often.  If I did not have my living to make, then--"
he dropped into a chair and closed his eyes.  "How tired
I am.  What a voice!"

                                IV

     AFTER that evening Thea's work with Harsanyi
changed somewhat.  He insisted that she should
study some songs with him, and after almost every lesson
he gave up half an hour of his own time to practicing them
with her.  He did not pretend to know much about voice
production, but so far, he thought, she had acquired no
really injurious habits.  A healthy and powerful organ had
found its own method, which was not a bad one.  He
wished to find out a good deal before he recommended a
vocal teacher.  He never told Thea what he thought about
her voice, and made her general ignorance of anything
worth singing his pretext for the trouble he took.  That
was in the beginning.  After the first few lessons his own
pleasure and hers were pretext enough.  The singing came
at the end of the lesson hour, and they both treated it as
a form of relaxation.
     Harsanyi did not say much even to his wife about his
discovery.  He brooded upon it in a curious way.  He
found that these unscientific singing lessons stimulated
him in his own study.  After Miss Kronborg left him he
often lay down in his studio for an hour before dinner, with
his head full of musical ideas, with an effervescence in his
brain which he had sometimes lost for weeks together un-
der the grind of teaching.  He had never got so much back
for himself from any pupil as he did from Miss Kronborg.
From the first she had stimulated him; something in her
personality invariably affected him.  Now that he was
feeling his way toward her voice, he found her more in-
teresting than ever before.  She lifted the tedium of the
winter for him, gave him curious fancies and reveries.
Musically, she was sympathetic to him.  Why all this was
true, he never asked himself.  He had learned that one must
take where and when one can the mysterious mental ir-
ritant that rouses one's imagination; that it is not to be
had by order.  She often wearied him, but she never bored
him.  Under her crudeness and brusque hardness, he felt
there was a nature quite different, of which he never got so
much as a hint except when she was at the piano, or when
she sang.  It was toward this hidden creature that he was
trying, for his own pleasure, to find his way.  In short,
Harsanyi looked forward to his hour with Thea for the
same reason that poor Wunsch had sometimes dreaded
his; because she stirred him more than anything she did
could adequately explain.
     One afternoon Harsanyi, after the lesson, was standing
by the window putting some collodion on a cracked finger,
and Thea was at the piano trying over "Die Lorelei"
which he had given her last week to practice.  It was scarcely
a song which a singing master would have given her, but
he had his own reasons.  How she sang it mattered only to
him and to her.  He was playing his own game now, without
interference; he suspected that he could not do so always.
     When she finished the song, she looked back over her
shoulder at him and spoke thoughtfully.  "That wasn't
right, at the end, was it?"
     "No, that should be an open, flowing tone, something
like this,"--he waved his fingers rapidly in the air.  "You
get the idea?"
     "No, I don't.  Seems a queer ending, after the rest."
     Harsanyi corked his little bottle and dropped it into the
pocket of his velvet coat.  "Why so?  Shipwrecks come and
go, MARCHEN come and go, but the river keeps right on.
There you have your open, flowing tone."
     Thea looked intently at the music.  "I see," she said
dully.  "Oh, I see!" she repeated quickly and turned to
him a glowing countenance.  "It is the river.--  Oh, yes,
I get it now!"  She looked at him but long enough to catch
his glance, then turned to the piano again.  Harsanyi was
never quite sure where the light came from when her face
suddenly flashed out at him in that way.  Her eyes were
too small to account for it, though they glittered like green
ice in the sun.  At such moments her hair was yellower, her
skin whiter, her cheeks pinker, as if a lamp had suddenly
been turned up inside of her.  She went at the song again:

          "ICH WEISS NICHT, WAS SOLL ES BEDEUTEN,
              DAS ICH SO TRAURIG BIN."

     A kind of happiness vibrated in her voice.  Harsanyi no-
ticed how much and how unhesitatingly she changed her
delivery of the whole song, the first part as well as the last.
He had often noticed that she could not think a thing out
in passages.  Until she saw it as a whole, she wandered like
a blind man surrounded by torments.  After she once had
her "revelation," after she got the idea that to her--not
always to him--explained everything, then she went for-
ward rapidly.  But she was not always easy to help.  She
was sometimes impervious to suggestion; she would stare
at him as if she were deaf and ignore everything he told her
to do.  Then, all at once, something would happen  in her
brain and she would begin to do all that he had been for
weeks telling her to do, without realizing that he had ever
told her.
     To-night Thea forgot Harsanyi and his finger.  She
finished the song only to begin it with fresh enthusiasm.

          "UND DAS HAT MIT IHREM SINGEN
              DIE LORELEI GETHAN."

     She sat there singing it until the darkening room was so
flooded with it that Harsanyi threw open a window.
     "You really must stop it, Miss Kronborg.  I shan't be
able to get it out of my head to-night."
     Thea laughed tolerantly as she began to gather up her
music.  "Why, I thought you had gone, Mr. Harsanyi.  I
like that song."

     That evening at dinner Harsanyi sat looking intently
into a glass of heavy yellow wine; boring into it, indeed,
with his one eye, when his face suddenly broke into a
smile.
     "What is it, Andor?" his wife asked.
     He smiled again, this time at her, and took up the nut-
crackers and a Brazil nut.  "Do you know," he said in a
tone so intimate and confidential that he might have been
speaking to himself,--"do you know, I like to see Miss
Kronborg get hold of an idea.  In spite of being so talented,
she's not quick.  But when she does get an idea, it fills her
up to the eyes.  She had my room so reeking of a song this
afternoon that I couldn't stay there."
     Mrs. Harsanyi looked up quickly, "`Die Lorelei,' you
mean?  One couldn't think of anything else anywhere in
the house.  I thought she was possessed.  But don't you
think her voice is wonderful sometimes?"
     Harsanyi tasted his wine slowly.  "My dear, I've told
you before that I don't know what I think about Miss
Kronborg, except that I'm glad there are not two of her.
I sometimes wonder whether she is not glad.  Fresh as she
is at it all, I've occasionally fancied that, if she knew how,
she would like to--diminish."  He moved his left hand
out into the air as if he were suggesting a DIMINUENDO to
an orchestra.

                                 V
     BY the first of February Thea had been in Chicago al-
most four months, and she did not know much more
about the city than if she had never quitted Moonstone.
She was, as Harsanyi said, incurious.  Her work took most
of her time, and she found that she had to sleep a good
deal.  It had never before been so hard to get up in the
morning.  She had the bother of caring for her room, and
she had to build her fire and bring up her coal.  Her routine
was frequently interrupted by a message from Mr. Larsen
summoning her to sing at a funeral.  Every funeral took
half a day, and the time had to be made up.  When Mrs.
Harsanyi asked her if it did not depress her to sing at fu-
nerals, she replied that she "had been brought up to go
to funerals and didn't mind."
     Thea never went into shops unless she had to, and she
felt no interest in them.  Indeed, she shunned them, as
places where one was sure to be parted from one's money
in some way.  She was nervous about counting her change,
and she could not accustom herself to having her purchases
sent to her address.  She felt much safer with her bundles
under her arm.
     During this first winter Thea got no city consciousness.
Chicago was simply a wilderness through which one had to
find one's way.  She felt no interest in the general briskness
and zest of the crowds.  The crash and scramble of that
big, rich, appetent Western city she did not take in at all,
except to notice that the noise of the drays and street-cars
tired her.  The brilliant window displays, the splendid furs
and stuffs, the gorgeous flower-shops, the gay candy-shops,
she scarcely noticed.  At Christmas-time she did feel some
curiosity about the toy-stores, and she wished she held
Thor's little mittened fist in her hand as she stood before
the windows.  The jewelers' windows, too, had a strong
attraction for her--she had always liked bright stones.
When she went into the city she used to brave the biting
lake winds and stand gazing in at the displays of diamonds
and pearls and emeralds; the tiaras and necklaces and ear-
rings, on white velvet.  These seemed very well worth
while to her, things worth coveting.
     Mrs. Lorch and Mrs. Andersen often told each other
it was strange that Miss Kronborg had so little initiative
about "visiting points of interest."  When Thea came
to live with them she had expressed a wish to see two
places: Montgomery Ward and Company's big mail-order
store, and the packing-houses, to which all the hogs and
cattle that went through Moonstone were bound.  One
of Mrs. Lorch's lodgers worked in a packing-house, and
Mrs. Andersen brought Thea word that she had spoken to
Mr. Eckman and he would gladly take her to Packing-
town.  Eckman was a toughish young Swede, and he
thought it would be something of a lark to take a pretty
girl through the slaughter-houses.  But he was disap-
pointed.  Thea neither grew faint nor clung to the arm he
kept offering her.  She asked innumerable questions and
was impatient because he knew so little of what was going
on outside of his own department.  When they got off the
street-car and walked back to Mrs. Lorch's house in the
dusk, Eckman put her hand in his overcoat pocket--she
had no muff--and kept squeezing it ardently until she
said, "Don't do that; my ring cuts me."  That night he
told his roommate that he "could have kissed her as easy
as rolling off a log, but she wasn't worth the trouble."  As
for Thea, she had enjoyed the afternoon very much, and
wrote her father a brief but clear account of what she had
seen.
     One night at supper Mrs. Andersen was talking about
the exhibit of students' work she had seen at the Art In-
stitute that afternoon.  Several of her friends had sketches
in the exhibit.  Thea, who always felt that she was be-
hindhand in courtesy to Mrs. Andersen, thought that here
was an opportunity to show interest without committing
herself to anything.  "Where is that, the Institute?" she
asked absently.
     Mrs. Andersen clasped her napkin in both hands.  "The
Art Institute?  Our beautiful Art Institute on Michigan
Avenue?  Do you mean to say you have never visited it?"
     "Oh, is it the place with the big lions out in front?  I
remember; I saw it when I went to Montgomery Ward's.
Yes, I thought the lions were beautiful."
     "But the pictures!  Didn't you visit the galleries?"
     "No.  The sign outside said it was a pay-day.  I've al-
ways meant to go back, but I haven't happened to be
down that way since."
     Mrs. Lorch and Mrs. Andersen looked at each other.
The old mother spoke, fixing her shining little eyes upon
Thea across the table.  "Ah, but Miss Kronborg, there are
old masters!  Oh, many of them, such as you could not see
anywhere out of Europe."
     "And Corots," breathed Mrs. Andersen, tilting her
head feelingly.  "Such examples of the Barbizon school!"
This was meaningless to Thea, who did not read the art
columns of the Sunday INTER-OCEAN as Mrs. Andersen did.
     "Oh, I'm going there some day," she reassured them.
"I like to look at oil paintings."
     One bleak day in February, when the wind was blow-
ing clouds of dirt like a Moonstone sandstorm, dirt that
filled your eyes and ears and mouth, Thea fought her way
across the unprotected space in front of the Art Institute
and into the doors of the building.  She did not come out
again until the closing hour.  In the street-car, on the long
cold ride home, while she sat staring at the waistcoat but-
tons of a fat strap-hanger, she had a serious reckoning with
herself.  She seldom thought about her way of life, about
what she ought or ought not to do; usually there was but
one obvious and important thing to be done.  But that
afternoon she remonstrated with herself severely.  She told
herself that she was missing a great deal; that she ought to
be more willing to take advice and to go to see things.  She
was sorry that she had let months pass without going
to the Art Institute.  After this she would go once a week.
     The Institute proved, indeed, a place of retreat, as the
sand hills or the Kohlers' garden used to be; a place where
she could forget Mrs. Andersen's tiresome overtures of
friendship, the stout contralto in the choir whom she so
unreasonably hated, and even, for a little while, the torment
of her work.  That building was a place in which she could
relax and play, and she could hardly ever play now.  On
the whole, she spent more time with the casts than with
the pictures.  They were at once more simple and more
perplexing; and some way they seemed more important,
harder to overlook.  It never occurred to her to buy a
catalogue, so she called most of the casts by names she
made up for them.  Some of them she knew; the Dying
Gladiator she had read about in "Childe Harold" almost
as long ago as she could remember; he was strongly as-
sociated with Dr. Archie and childish illnesses.  The Venus
di Milo puzzled her; she could not see why people thought
her so beautiful.  She told herself over and over that she
did not think the Apollo Belvedere "at all handsome."
Better than anything else she liked a great equestrian
statue of an evil, cruel-looking general with an unpro-
nounceable name.  She used to walk round and round this
terrible man and his terrible horse, frowning at him, brood-
ing upon him, as if she had to make some momentous de-
cision about him.
     The casts, when she lingered long among them, always
made her gloomy.  It was with a lightening of the heart, a
feeling of throwing off the old miseries and old sorrows of
the world, that she ran up the wide staircase to the pic-
tures.  There she liked best the ones that told stories.
There was a painting by Gerome called "The Pasha's
Grief" which always made her wish for Gunner and Axel.
The Pasha was seated on a rug, beside a green candle al-
most as big as a telegraph pole, and before him was stretched
his dead tiger, a splendid beast, and there were pink roses
scattered about him.  She loved, too, a picture of some
boys bringing in a newborn calf on a litter, the cow walking
beside it and licking it.  The Corot which hung next to this
painting she did not like or dislike; she never saw it.
     But in that same room there was a picture--oh, that
was the thing she ran upstairs so fast to see!  That was
her picture.  She imagined that nobody cared for it but
herself, and that it waited for her.  That was a picture in-
deed.  She liked even the name of it, "The Song of the
Lark."  The flat country, the early morning light, the wet
fields, the look in the girl's heavy face--well, they were
all hers, anyhow, whatever was there.  She told herself that
that picture was "right."  Just what she meant by this, it
would take a clever person to explain.  But to her the word
covered the almost boundless satisfaction she felt when she
looked at the picture.

     Before Thea had any idea how fast the weeks were fly-
ing, before Mr. Larsen's "permanent" soprano had re-
turned to her duties, spring came; windy, dusty, strident,
shrill; a season almost more violent in Chicago than the
winter from which it releases one, or the heat to which it
eventually delivers one.  One sunny morning the apple
trees in Mrs. Lorch's back yard burst into bloom, and for
the first time in months Thea dressed without building a
fire.  The morning shone like a holiday, and for her it was
to be a holiday.  There was in the air that sudden, treacher-
ous softness which makes the Poles who work in the pack-
ing-houses get drunk.  At such times beauty is necessary,
and in Packingtown there is no place to get it except at the
saloons, where one can buy for a few hours the illusion of
comfort, hope, love,--whatever one most longs for.
     Harsanyi had given Thea a ticket for the symphony
concert that afternoon, and when she looked out at the
white apple trees her doubts as to whether she ought to go
vanished at once.  She would make her work light that
morning, she told herself.  She would go to the concert full
of energy.  When she set off, after dinner, Mrs. Lorch, who
knew Chicago weather, prevailed upon her to take her
cape.  The old lady said that such sudden mildness, so
early in April, presaged a sharp return of winter, and she
was anxious about her apple trees.
     The concert began at two-thirty, and Thea was in her
seat in the Auditorium at ten minutes after two--a fine
seat in the first row of the balcony, on the side, where she
could see the house as well as the orchestra.  She had been
to so few concerts that the great house, the crowd of
people, and the lights, all had a stimulating effect.  She
was surprised to see so many men in the audience, and
wondered how they could leave their business in the after-
noon.  During the first number Thea was so much inter-
ested in the orchestra itself, in the men, the instruments,
the volume of sound, that she paid little attention to what
they were playing.  Her excitement impaired her power
of listening.  She kept saying to herself, "Now I must
stop this foolishness and listen; I may never hear this
again"; but her mind was like a glass that is hard to
focus.  She was not ready to listen until the second num-
ber, Dvorak's Symphony in E minor, called on the pro-
gramme, "From the New World."  The first theme had
scarcely been given out when her mind became clear; in-
stant composure fell upon her, and with it came the power
of concentration.  This was music she could understand,
music from the New World indeed!  Strange how, as
the first movement went on, it brought back to her that
high tableland above Laramie; the grass-grown wagon
trails, the far-away peaks of the snowy range, the wind and
the eagles, that old man and the first telegraph message.
     When the first movement ended, Thea's hands and feet
were cold as ice.  She was too much excited to know any-
thing except that she wanted something desperately, and
when the English horns gave out the theme of the Largo,
she knew that what she wanted was exactly that.  Here
were the sand hills, the grasshoppers and locusts, all the
things that wakened and chirped in the early morning;
the reaching and reaching of high plains, the immeas-
urable yearning of all flat lands.  There was home in it,
too; first memories, first mornings long ago; the amaze-
ment of a new soul in a new world; a soul new and yet old,
that had dreamed something despairing, something glori-
ous, in the dark before it was born; a soul obsessed by what
it did not know, under the cloud of a past it could not re-
call.
     If Thea had had much experience in concert-going, and
had known her own capacity, she would have left the
hall when the symphony was over.  But she sat still,
scarcely knowing where she was, because her mind had
been far away and had not yet come back to her.  She was
startled when the orchestra began to play again--the
entry of the gods into Walhalla.  She heard it as people
hear things in their sleep.  She knew scarcely anything
about the Wagner operas.  She had a vague idea that
"Rhinegold" was about the strife between gods and men;
she had read something about it in Mr. Haweis's book long
ago.  Too tired to follow the orchestra with much under-
standing, she crouched down in her seat and closed her
eyes.  The cold, stately measures of the Walhalla music
rang out, far away; the rainbow bridge throbbed out into
the air, under it the wailing of the Rhine daughters and
the singing of the Rhine.  But Thea was sunk in twilight;
it was all going on in another world.  So it happened that
with a dull, almost listless ear she heard for the first time
that troubled music, ever-darkening, ever-brightening,
which was to flow through so many years of her life.
     When Thea emerged from the concert hall, Mrs. Lorch's
predictions had been fulfilled.  A furious gale was beating
over the city from Lake Michigan.  The streets were full of
cold, hurrying, angry people, running for street-cars and
barking at each other.  The sun was setting in a clear,
windy sky, that flamed with red as if there were a great
fire somewhere on the edge of the city.  For almost the
first time Thea was conscious of the city itself, of the con-
gestion of life all about her, of the brutality and power of
those streams that flowed in the streets, threatening to
drive one under.  People jostled her, ran into her, poked
her aside with their elbows, uttering angry exclamations.
She got on the wrong car and was roughly ejected by the
conductor at a windy corner, in front of a saloon.  She stood
there dazed and shivering.  The cars passed, screaming as
they rounded curves, but either they were full to the doors,
or were bound for places where she did not want to go.
Her hands were so cold that she took off her tight kid
gloves.  The street lights began to gleam in the dusk.  A
young man came out of the saloon and stood eyeing her
questioningly while he lit a cigarette.  "Looking for a
friend to-night?" he asked.  Thea drew up the collar of her
cape and walked on a few paces.  The young man shrugged
his shoulders and drifted away.
     Thea came back to the corner and stood there irreso-
lutely.  An old man approached her.  He, too, seemed to be
waiting for a car.  He wore an overcoat with a black fur
collar, his gray mustache was waxed into little points, and
his eyes were watery.  He kept thrusting his face up near
hers.  Her hat blew off and he ran after it--a stiff, pitiful
skip he had--and brought it back to her.  Then, while
she was pinning her hat on, her cape blew up, and he held
it down for her, looking at her intently.  His face worked
as if he were going to cry or were frightened.  He leaned
over and whispered something to her.  It struck her as
curious that he was really quite timid, like an old beggar.
"Oh, let me ALONE!" she cried miserably between her teeth.
He vanished, disappeared like the Devil in a play.  But
in the mean time something had got away from her; she
could not remember how the violins came in after the
horns, just there.  When her cape blew up, perhaps--  Why
did these men torment her?  A cloud of dust blew in her
face and blinded her.  There was some power abroad in the
world bent upon taking away from her that feeling with
which she had come out of the concert hall.  Everything
seemed to sweep down on her to tear it out from under
her cape.  If one had that, the world became one's enemy;
people, buildings, wagons, cars, rushed at one to crush it
under, to make one let go of it.  Thea glared round her
at the crowds, the ugly, sprawling streets, the long lines
of lights, and she was not crying now.  Her eyes were
brighter than even Harsanyi had ever seen them.  All
these things and people were no longer remote and negli-
gible; they had to be met, they were lined up against her,
they were there to take something from her.  Very well;
they should never have it.  They might trample her to
death, but they should never have it.  As long as she lived
that ecstasy was going to be hers.  She would live for it,
work for it, die for it; but she was going to have it, time
after time, height after height.  She could hear the crash
of the orchestra again, and she rose on the brasses.  She
would have it, what the trumpets were singing!  She
would have it, have it,--it!  Under the old cape she
pressed her hands upon her heaving bosom, that was a
little girl's no longer.

                                VI

     ONE afternoon in April, Theodore Thomas, the con-
ductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, had
turned out his desk light and was about to leave his office
in the Auditorium Building, when Harsanyi appeared in
the doorway.  The conductor welcomed him with a hearty
hand-grip and threw off the overcoat he had just put on.
He pushed Harsanyi into a chair and sat down at his bur-
dened desk, pointing to the piles of papers and railway
folders upon it.
     "Another tour, clear to the coast.  This traveling is the
part of my work that grinds me, Andor.  You know what
it means: bad food, dirt, noise, exhaustion for the men and
for me.  I'm not so young as I once was.  It's time I quit
the highway.  This is the last tour, I swear!"
     "Then I'm sorry for the `highway.'  I remember when I
first heard you in Pittsburg, long ago.  It was a life-line you
threw me.  It's about one of the people along your high-
way that I've come to see you.  Whom do you consider the
best teacher for voice in Chicago?"
     Mr. Thomas frowned and pulled his heavy mustache.
"Let me see; I suppose on the whole Madison Bowers is
the best.  He's intelligent, and he had good training.  I
don't like him."
     Harsanyi nodded.  "I thought there was no one else.
I don't like him, either, so I hesitated.  But I suppose he
must do, for the present."
     "Have you found anything promising?  One of your own
students?"
     "Yes, sir.  A young Swedish girl from somewhere in
Colorado.  She is very talented, and she seems to me to
have a remarkable voice."

     "High voice?"
     "I think it will be; though her low voice has a beauti-
ful quality, very individual.  She has had no instruction
in voice at all, and I shrink from handing her over to any-
body; her own instinct about it has been so good.  It is
one of those voices that manages itself easily, without
thinning as it goes up; good breathing and perfect relaxa-
tion.  But she must have a teacher, of course.  There is a
break in the middle voice, so that the voice does not all
work together; an unevenness."
     Thomas looked up.  "So?  Curious; that cleft often
happens with the Swedes.  Some of their best singers have
had it.  It always reminds me of the space you so often see
between their front teeth.  Is she strong physically?"
     Harsanyi's eye flashed.  He lifted his hand before him
and clenched it.  "Like a horse, like a tree!  Every time
I give her a lesson, I lose a pound.  She goes after what she
wants."
     "Intelligent, you say?  Musically intelligent?"
     "Yes; but no cultivation whatever.  She came to me like
a fine young savage, a book with nothing written in it.
That is why I feel the responsibility of directing her."
Harsanyi paused and crushed his soft gray hat over his
knee.  "She would interest you, Mr. Thomas," he added
slowly.  "She has a quality--very individual."
     "Yes; the Scandinavians are apt to have that, too.  She
can't go to Germany, I suppose?"
     "Not now, at any rate.  She is poor."
     Thomas frowned again "I don't think Bowers a really
first-rate man.  He's too petty to be really first-rate; in his
nature, I mean.  But I dare say he's the best you can do,
if you can't give her time enough yourself."
     Harsanyi waved his hand.  "Oh, the time is nothing--she
may have all she wants.  But I cannot teach her to sing."
     "Might not come amiss if you made a musician of her,
however," said Mr. Thomas dryly.

     "I have done my best.  But I can only play with a voice,
and this is not a voice to be played with.  I think she will
be a musician, whatever happens.  She is not quick, but
she is solid, real; not like these others.  My wife says that
with that girl one swallow does not make a summer."
     Mr. Thomas laughed.  "Tell Mrs. Harsanyi that her
remark conveys something to me.  Don't let yourself get
too much interested.  Voices are so often disappointing;
especially women's voices.  So much chance about it, so
many factors."
     "Perhaps that is why they interest one.  All the intelli-
gence and talent in the world can't make a singer.  The
voice is a wild thing.  It can't be bred in captivity.  It is
a sport, like the silver fox.  It happens."
     Mr. Thomas smiled into Harsanyi's gleaming eye.
"Why haven't you brought her to sing for me?"
     "I've been tempted to, but I knew you were driven to
death, with this tour confronting you."
     "Oh, I can always find time to listen to a girl who has a
voice, if she means business.  I'm sorry I'm leaving so
soon.  I could advise you better if I had heard her.  I can
sometimes give a singer suggestions.  I've worked so much
with them."
     "You're the only conductor I know who is not snobbish
about singers."  Harsanyi spoke warmly.
     "Dear me, why should I be?  They've learned from me,
and I've learned from them."  As they rose, Thomas took
the younger man affectionately by the arm.  "Tell me
about that wife of yours.  Is she well, and as lovely as ever?
And such fine children!  Come to see me oftener, when I get
back.  I miss it when you don't."
     The two men left the Auditorium Building together.
Harsanyi walked home.  Even a short talk with Thomas
always stimulated him.  As he walked he was recalling an
evening they once spent together in Cincinnati.
     Harsanyi was the soloist at one of Thomas's concerts
there, and after the performance the conductor had taken
him off to a RATHSKELLER where there was excellent German
cooking, and where the proprietor saw to it that Thomas
had the best wines procurable.  Thomas had been working
with the great chorus of the Festival Association and was
speaking of it with enthusiasm when Harsanyi asked him
how it was that he was able to feel such an interest in choral
directing and in voices generally.  Thomas seldom spoke of
his youth or his early struggles, but that night he turned
back the pages and told Harsanyi a long story.
     He said he had spent the summer of his fifteenth year
wandering about alone in the South, giving violin con-
certs in little towns.  He traveled on horseback.  When he
came into a town, he went about all day tacking up
posters announcing his concert in the evening.  Before the
concert, he stood at the door taking in the admission money
until his audience had arrived, and then he went on the
platform and played.  It was a lazy, hand-to-mouth ex-
istence, and Thomas said he must have got to like that
easy way of living and the relaxing Southern atmosphere.
At any rate, when he got back to New York in the fall, he
was rather torpid; perhaps he had been growing too fast.
From this adolescent drowsiness the lad was awakened by
two voices, by two women who sang in New York in 1851,
--Jenny Lind and Henrietta Sontag.  They were the first
great artists he had ever heard, and he never forgot his
debt to them.
     As he said, "It was not voice and execution alone.  There
was a greatness about them.  They were great women,
great artists.  They opened a new world to me."  Night
after night he went to hear them, striving to reproduce the
quality of their tone upon his violin.  From that time his
idea about strings was completely changed, and on his
violin he tried always for the singing, vibrating tone, in-
stead of the loud and somewhat harsh tone then prevalent
among even the best German violinists.  In later years he
often advised violinists to study singing, and singers to
study violin.  He told Harsanyi that he got his first con-
ception of tone quality from Jenny Lind.
     "But, of course," he added, "the great thing I got from
Lind and Sontag was the indefinite, not the definite, thing.
For an impressionable boy, their inspiration was incalcu-
lable.  They gave me my first feeling for the Italian style
--but I could never say how much they gave me.  At that
age, such influences are actually creative.  I always think
of my artistic consciousness as beginning then."
     All his life Thomas did his best to repay what he felt he
owed to the singer's art.  No man could get such singing
from choruses, and no man worked harder to raise the
standard of singing in schools and churches and choral
societies.

                                VII

     All through the lesson Thea had felt that Harsanyi
was restless and abstracted.  Before the hour was
over, he pushed back his chair and said resolutely, "I am
not in the mood, Miss Kronborg.  I have something on my
mind, and I must talk to you.  When do you intend to go
home?"
     Thea turned to him in surprise.  "The first of June,
about.  Mr. Larsen will not need me after that, and I have
not much money ahead.  I shall work hard this summer,
though."
     "And to-day is the first of May; May-day."  Harsanyi
leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands locked
between them.  "Yes, I must talk to you about something.
I have asked Madison Bowers to let me bring you to him
on Thursday, at your usual lesson-time.  He is the best
vocal teacher in Chicago, and it is time you began to work
seriously with your voice."
     Thea's brow wrinkled.  "You mean take lessons of
Bowers?"
     Harsanyi nodded, without lifting his head.
     "But I can't, Mr. Harsanyi.  I haven't got the time,
and, besides--" she blushed and drew her shoulders up
stiffly--"besides, I can't afford to pay two teachers."
Thea felt that she had blurted this out in the worst possi-
ble way, and she turned back to the keyboard to hide her
chagrin.
     "I know that.  I don't mean that you shall pay two
teachers.  After you go to Bowers you will not need me.  I
need scarcely tell you that I shan't be happy at losing
you."
     Thea turned to him, hurt and angry.  "But I don't want
to go to Bowers.  I don't want to leave you.  What's the
matter?  Don't I work hard enough?  I'm sure you teach
people that don't try half as hard."
     Harsanyi rose to his feet.  "Don't misunderstand me,
Miss Kronborg.  You interest me more than any pupil I
have.  I have been thinking for months about what you
ought to do, since that night when you first sang for me."
He walked over to the window, turned, and came toward
her again.  "I believe that your voice is worth all that you
can put into it.  I have not come to this decision rashly.  I
have studied you, and I have become more and more con-
vinced, against my own desires.  I cannot make a singer of
you, so it was my business to find a man who could.  I
have even consulted Theodore Thomas about it."
     "But suppose I don't want to be a singer?  I want to
study with you.  What's the matter?  Do you really think
I've no talent?  Can't I be a pianist?"
     Harsanyi paced up and down the long rug in front of
her.  "My girl, you are very talented.  You could be a
pianist, a good one.  But the early training of a pianist,
such a pianist as you would want to be, must be something
tremendous.  He must have had no other life than music.
At your age he must be the master of his instrument.
Nothing can ever take the place of that first training.  You
know very well that your technique is good, but it is not
remarkable.  It will never overtake your intelligence.  You
have a fine power of work, but you are not by nature a stu-
dent.  You are not by nature, I think, a pianist.  You
would never find yourself.  In the effort to do so, I'm
afraid your playing would become warped, eccentric."
He threw back his head and looked at his pupil intently
with that one eye which sometimes seemed to see deeper
than any two eyes, as if its singleness gave it privileges.
"Oh, I have watched you very carefully, Miss Kronborg.
Because you had had so little and had yet done so much for
yourself, I had a great wish to help you.  I believe that the
strongest need of your nature is to find yourself, to emerge
AS yourself.  Until I heard you sing I wondered how you
were to do this, but it has grown clearer to me every
day."
     Thea looked away toward the window with hard, nar-
row eyes.  "You mean I can be a singer because I haven't
brains enough to be a pianist."
     "You have brains enough and talent enough.  But to do
what you will want to do, it takes more than these--it
takes vocation.  Now, I think you have vocation, but for
the voice, not for the piano.  If you knew,"--he stopped
and sighed,--"if you knew how fortunate I sometimes
think you.  With the voice the way is so much shorter, the
rewards are more easily won.  In your voice I think Na-
ture herself did for you what it would take you many years
to do at the piano.  Perhaps you were not born in the
wrong place after all.  Let us talk frankly now.  We have
never done so before, and I have respected your reticence.
What you want more than anything else in the world is to
be an artist; is that true?"
     She turned her face away from him and looked down at
the keyboard.  Her answer came in a thickened voice.
"Yes, I suppose so."
     "When did you first feel that you wanted to be an
artist?"
     "I don't know.  There was always--something."
     "Did you never think that you were going to sing?"
     "Yes."
     "How long ago was that?"
     "Always, until I came to you.  It was you who made me
want to play piano."  Her voice trembled.  "Before, I
tried to think I did, but I was pretending."
     Harsanyi reached out and caught the hand that was
hanging at her side.  He pressed it as if to give her some-
thing.  "Can't you see, my dear girl, that was only be-
cause I happened to be the first artist you have ever known?
If I had been a trombone player, it would have been the
same; you would have wanted to play trombone.  But all
the while you have been working with such good-will,
something has been struggling against me.  See, here we
were, you and I and this instrument,"--he tapped the
piano,--"three good friends, working so hard.  But all
the while there was something fighting us: your gift, and
the woman you were meant to be.  When you find your
way to that gift and to that woman, you will be at peace.
In the beginning it was an artist that you wanted to be;
well, you may be an artist, always."
     Thea drew a long breath.  Her hands fell in her lap.
"So I'm just where I began.  No teacher, nothing done.
No money."
     Harsanyi turned away.  "Feel no apprehension about
the money, Miss Kronborg.  Come back in the fall and we
shall manage that.  I shall even go to Mr. Thomas if neces-
sary.  This year will not be lost.  If you but knew what an
advantage this winter's study, all your study of the piano,
will give you over most singers.  Perhaps things have come
out better for you than if we had planned them knowingly."
     "You mean they have IF I can sing."
     Thea spoke with a heavy irony, so heavy, indeed, that
it was coarse.  It grated upon Harsanyi because he felt
that it was not sincere, an awkward affectation.
     He wheeled toward her.  "Miss Kronborg, answer me
this.  YOU KNOW THAT YOU CAN SING, do you not?  You have
always known it.  While we worked here together you
sometimes said to yourself, `I have something you know
nothing about; I could surprise you.'  Is that also true?"
     Thea nodded and hung her head.
     "Why were you not frank with me?  Did I not deserve
it?"
     She shuddered.  Her bent shoulders trembled.  "I don't
know," she muttered.  "I didn't mean to be like that.  I
couldn't.  I can't.  It's different."

     "You mean it is very personal?" he asked kindly.
     She nodded.  "Not at church or funerals, or with people
like Mr. Larsen.  But with you it was--personal.  I'm
not like you and Mrs. Harsanyi.  I come of rough people.
I'm rough.  But I'm independent, too.  It was--all I had.
There is no use my talking, Mr. Harsanyi.  I can't tell
you."
     "You needn't tell me.  I know.  Every artist knows."
Harsanyi stood looking at his pupil's back, bent as if she
were pushing something, at her lowered head.  "You can
sing for those people because with them you do not com-
mit yourself.  But the reality, one cannot uncover THAT
until one is sure.  One can fail one's self, but one must not
live to see that fail; better never reveal it.  Let me help
you to make yourself sure of it.  That I can do better than
Bowers."
     Thea lifted her face and threw out her hands.
     Harsanyi shook his head and smiled.  "Oh, promise
nothing!  You will have much to do.  There will not be
voice only, but French, German, Italian.  You will have
work enough.  But sometimes you will need to be under-
stood; what you never show to any one will need com-
panionship.  And then you must come to me."  He peered
into her face with that searching, intimate glance.  "You
know what I mean, the thing in you that has no business
with what is little, that will have to do only with beauty
and power."
     Thea threw out her hands fiercely, as if to push him
away.  She made a sound in her throat, but it was not
articulate.  Harsanyi took one of her hands and kissed
it lightly upon the back.  His salute was one of greeting,
not of farewell, and it was for some one he had never
seen.
     When Mrs. Harsanyi came in at six o'clock, she found
her husband sitting listlessly by the window.  "Tired?"
she asked.

     "A little.  I've just got through a difficulty.  I've sent
Miss Kronborg away; turned her over to Bowers, for
voice."
     "Sent Miss Kronborg away?  Andor, what is the matter
with you?"
     "It's nothing rash.  I've known for a long while I ought
to do it.  She is made for a singer, not a pianist."
     Mrs. Harsanyi sat down on the piano chair.  She spoke
a little bitterly: "How can you be sure of that?  She was,
at least, the best you had.  I thought you meant to have
her play at your students' recital next fall.  I am sure she
would have made an impression.  I could have dressed her
so that she would have been very striking.  She had so
much individuality."
     Harsanyi bent forward, looking at the floor.  "Yes, I
know.  I shall miss her, of course."
     Mrs. Harsanyi looked at her husband's fine head against
the gray window.  She had never felt deeper tenderness
for him than she did at that moment.  Her heart ached for
him.  "You will never get on, Andor," she said mourn-
fully.
     Harsanyi sat motionless.  "No, I shall never get on,"
he repeated quietly.  Suddenly he sprang up with that
light movement she knew so well, and stood in the window,
with folded arms.  "But some day I shall be able to look
her in the face and laugh because I did what I could for
her.  I believe in her.  She will do nothing common.  She is
uncommon, in a common, common world.  That is what
I get out of it.  It means more to me than if she played at
my concert and brought me a dozen pupils.  All this
drudgery will kill me if once in a while I cannot hope some-
thing, for somebody!  If I cannot sometimes see a bird fly
and wave my hand to it."
     His tone was angry and injured.  Mrs. Harsanyi under-
stood that this was one of the times when his wife was a
part of the drudgery, of the "common, common world."
He had let something he cared for go, and he felt bitterly
about whatever was left.  The mood would pass, and he
would be sorry.  She knew him.  It wounded her, of course,
but that hurt was not new.  It was as old as her love for
him.  She went out and left him alone.

                               VIII

     ONE warm damp June night the Denver Express was
speeding westward across the earthy-smelling plains
of Iowa.  The lights in the day-coach were turned low and
the ventilators were open, admitting showers of soot and
dust upon the occupants of the narrow green plush chairs
which were tilted at various angles of discomfort.  In each
of these chairs some uncomfortable human being lay drawn
up, or stretched out, or writhing from one position to an-
other.  There were tired men in rumpled shirts, their necks
bare and their suspenders down; old women with their
heads tied up in black handkerchiefs; bedraggled young
women who went to sleep while they were nursing their
babies and forgot to button up their dresses; dirty boys
who added to the general discomfort by taking off their
boots.  The brakeman, when he came through at midnight,
sniffed the heavy air disdainfully and looked up at the
ventilators.  As he glanced down the double rows of con-
torted figures, he saw one pair of eyes that were wide open
and bright, a yellow head that was not overcome by the
stupefying heat and smell in the car.  "There's a girl for
you," he thought as he stopped by Thea's chair.
     "Like to have the window up a little?" he asked.
     Thea smiled up at him, not misunderstanding his friend-
liness.  "The girl behind me is sick; she can't stand a draft.
What time is it, please?"
     He took out his open-faced watch and held it before her
eyes with a knowing look.  "In a hurry?" he asked.  "I'll
leave the end door open and air you out.  Catch a wink;
the time'll go faster."
     Thea nodded good-night to him and settled her head
back on her pillow, looking up at the oil lamps.  She was
going back to Moonstone for her summer vacation, and
she was sitting up all night in a day-coach because that
seemed such an easy way to save money.  At her age dis-
comfort was a small matter, when one made five dollars a
day by it.  She had confidently expected to sleep after the
car got quiet, but in the two chairs behind her were a sick
girl and her mother, and the girl had been coughing steadily
since ten o'clock.  They had come from somewhere in
Pennsylvania, and this was their second night on the road.
The mother said they were going to Colorado "for her
daughter's lungs."  The daughter was a little older than
Thea, perhaps nineteen, with patient dark eyes and curly
brown hair.  She was pretty in spite of being so sooty and
travel-stained.  She had put on an ugly figured satine
kimono over her loosened clothes.  Thea, when she boarded
the train in Chicago, happened to stop and plant her
heavy telescope on this seat.  She had not intended to
remain there, but the sick girl had looked up at her with
an eager smile and said, "Do sit there, miss.  I'd so much
rather not have a gentleman in front of me."
     After the girl began to cough there were no empty seats
left, and if there had been Thea could scarcely have changed
without hurting her feelings.  The mother turned on her
side and went to sleep; she was used to the cough.  But the
girl lay wide awake, her eyes fixed on the roof of the car, as
Thea's were.  The two girls must have seen very different
things there.
     Thea fell to going over her winter in Chicago.  It was
only under unusual or uncomfortable conditions like these
that she could keep her mind fixed upon herself or her own
affairs for any length of time.  The rapid motion and the
vibration of the wheels under her seemed to give her
thoughts rapidity and clearness.  She had taken twenty
very expensive lessons from Madison Bowers, but she did
not yet know what he thought of her or of her ability.  He
was different from any man with whom she had ever had
to do.  With her other teachers she had felt a personal
relation; but with him she did not.  Bowers was a cold,
bitter, avaricious man, but he knew a great deal about
voices.  He worked with a voice as if he were in a labora-
tory, conducting a series of experiments.  He was conscien-
tious and industrious, even capable of a certain cold fury
when he was working with an interesting voice, but Har-
sanyi declared that he had the soul of a shrimp, and could
no more make an artist than a throat specialist could.
Thea realized that he had taught her a great deal in twenty
lessons.
     Although she cared so much less for Bowers than for
Harsanyi, Thea was, on the whole, happier since she had
been studying with him than she had been before.  She
had always told herself that she studied piano to fit her-
self to be a music teacher.  But she never asked herself
why she was studying voice.  Her voice, more than any
other part of her, had to do with that confidence, that sense
of wholeness and inner well-being that she had felt at mo-
ments ever since she could remember.
     Of this feeling Thea had never spoken to any human
being until that day when she told Harsanyi that "there
had always been--something."  Hitherto she had felt
but one obligation toward it--secrecy; to protect it even
from herself.  She had always believed that by doing all
that was required of her by her family, her teachers, her
pupils, she kept that part of herself from being caught up
in the meshes of common things.  She took it for granted
that some day, when she was older, she would know a
great deal more about it.  It was as if she had an appoint-
ment to meet the rest of herself sometime, somewhere.
It was moving to meet her and she was moving to meet
it.  That meeting awaited her, just as surely as, for the
poor girl in the seat behind her, there awaited a hole in
the earth, already dug.
     For Thea, so much had begun with a hole in the earth.
Yes, she reflected, this new part of her life had all begun that
morning when she sat on the clay bank beside Ray Ken-
nedy, under the flickering shade of the cottonwood tree.
She remembered the way Ray had looked at her that
morning.  Why had he cared so much?  And Wunsch, and
Dr. Archie, and Spanish Johnny, why had they?  It was
something that had to do with her that made them care,
but it was not she.  It was something they believed in, but
it was not she.  Perhaps each of them concealed another
person in himself, just as she did.  Why was it that they
seemed to feel and to hunt for a second person in her and
not in each other?  Thea frowned up at the dull lamp in
the roof of the car.  What if one's second self could some-
how speak to all these second selves?  What if one could
bring them out, as whiskey did Spanish Johnny's?  How
deep they lay, these second persons, and how little one
knew about them, except to guard them fiercely.  It was
to music, more than to anything else, that these hidden
things in people responded.  Her mother--even her mo-
ther had something of that sort which replied to music.
     Thea found herself listening for the coughing behind
her and not hearing it.  She turned cautiously and looked
back over the head-rest of her chair.  The poor girl had
fallen asleep.  Thea looked at her intently.  Why was she so
afraid of men?  Why did she shrink into herself and avert
her face whenever a man passed her chair?  Thea thought
she knew; of course, she knew.  How horrible to waste
away like that, in the time when one ought to be growing
fuller and stronger and rounder every day.  Suppose there
were such a dark hole open for her, between to-night and
that place where she was to meet herself?  Her eyes nar-
rowed.  She put her hand on her breast and felt how
warm it was; and within it there was a full, powerful
pulsation.  She smiled--though she was ashamed of it
--with the natural contempt of strength for weakness,
with the sense of physical security which makes the savage
merciless.  Nobody could die while they felt like that in-
side.  The springs there were wound so tight that it would
be a long while before there was any slack in them.  The
life in there was rooted deep.  She was going to have a few
things before she died.  She realized that there were a great
many trains dashing east and west on the face of the con-
tinent that night, and that they all carried young people
who meant to have things.  But the difference was that
SHE WAS GOING TO GET THEM!  That was all.  Let people try to
stop her!  She glowered at the rows of feckless bodies that
lay sprawled in the chairs.  Let them try it once!  Along
with the yearning that came from some deep part of her,
that was selfless and exalted, Thea had a hard kind of
cockiness, a determination to get ahead.  Well, there are
passages in life when that fierce, stubborn self-assertion
will stand its ground after the nobler feeling is over-
whelmed and beaten under.
     Having told herself once more that she meant to grab a
few things, Thea went to sleep.
     She was wakened in the morning by the sunlight, which
beat fiercely through the glass of the car window upon her
face.  She made herself as clean as she could, and while the
people all about her were getting cold food out of their
lunch-baskets she escaped into the dining-car.  Her thrift
did not go to the point of enabling her to carry a lunch-
basket.  At that early hour there were few people in the
dining-car.  The linen was white and fresh, the darkies were
trim and smiling, and the sunlight gleamed pleasantly upon
the silver and the glass water-bottles.  On each table there
was a slender vase with a single pink rose in it.  When Thea
sat down she looked into her rose and thought it the most
beautiful thing in the world; it was wide open, recklessly
offering its yellow heart, and there were drops of water on
the petals.  All the future was in that rose, all that one
would like to be.  The flower put her in an absolutely regal
mood.  She had a whole pot of coffee, and scrambled eggs
with chopped ham, utterly disregarding the astonishing
price they cost.  She had faith enough in what she could
do, she told herself, to have eggs if she wanted them.  At
the table opposite her sat a man and his wife and little boy
--Thea classified them as being "from the East."  They
spoke in that quick, sure staccato, which Thea, like Ray
Kennedy, pretended to scorn and secretly admired.  Peo-
ple who could use words in that confident way, and who
spoke them elegantly, had a great advantage in life, she
reflected.  There were so many words which she could not
pronounce in speech as she had to do in singing.  Lan-
guage was like clothes; it could be a help to one, or it
could give one away.  But the most important thing was
that one should not pretend to be what one was not.
     When she paid her check she consulted the waiter.
"Waiter, do you suppose I could buy one of those roses?
I'm out of the day-coach, and there is a sick girl in there.
I'd like to take her a cup of coffee and one of those flowers."
     The waiter liked nothing better than advising travelers
less sophisticated than himself.  He told Thea there were
a few roses left in the icebox and he would get one.  He
took the flower and the coffee into the day-coach.  Thea
pointed out the girl, but she did not accompany him.  She
hated thanks and never received them gracefully.  She
stood outside on the platform to get some fresh air into
her lungs.  The train was crossing the Platte River now,
and the sunlight was so intense that it seemed to quiver
in little flames on the glittering sandbars, the scrub wil-
lows, and the curling, fretted shallows.
     Thea felt that she was coming back to her own land.
She had often heard Mrs. Kronborg say that she "believed
in immigration," and so did Thea believe in it.  This earth
seemed to her young and fresh and kindly, a place where
refugees from old, sad countries were given another chance.
The mere absence of rocks gave the soil a kind of amia-
bility and generosity, and the absence of natural bound-
aries gave the spirit a wider range.  Wire fences might mark
the end of a man's pasture, but they could not shut in his
thoughts as mountains and forests can.  It was over flat
lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun, that the
larks sang--and one's heart sang there, too.  Thea was
glad that this was her country, even if one did not learn to
speak elegantly there.  It was, somehow, an honest coun-
try, and there was a new song in that blue air which had
never been sung in the world before.  It was hard to tell
about it, for it had nothing to do with words; it was like
the light of the desert at noon, or the smell of the sagebrush
after rain; intangible but powerful.  She had the sense of
going back to a friendly soil, whose friendship was some-
how going to strengthen her; a naive, generous country
that gave one its joyous force, its large-hearted, childlike
power to love, just as it gave one its coarse, brilliant
flowers.
     As she drew in that glorious air Thea's mind went back
to Ray Kennedy.  He, too, had that feeling of empire; as
if all the Southwest really belonged to him because he had
knocked about over it so much, and knew it, as he said,
"like the blisters on his own hands."  That feeling, she
reflected, was the real element of companionship between
her and Ray.  Now that she was going back to Colorado,
she realized this as she had not done before.


                                IX
     THEA reached Moonstone in the late afternoon, and all
the Kronborgs were there to meet her except her two
older brothers.  Gus and Charley were young men now,
and they had declared at noon that it would "look silly if
the whole bunch went down to the train."  "There's no use
making a fuss over Thea just because she's been to Chi-
cago," Charley warned his mother.  "She's inclined to
think pretty well of herself, anyhow, and if you go treating
her like company, there'll be no living in the house with
her."  Mrs. Kronborg simply leveled her eyes at Charley,
and he faded away, muttering.  She had, as Mr. Kronborg
always said with an inclination of his head, good control
over her children.  Anna, too, wished to absent herself
from the party, but in the end her curiosity got the better
of her.  So when Thea stepped down from the porter's
stool, a very creditable Kronborg representation was
grouped on the platform to greet her.  After they had all
kissed her (Gunner and Axel shyly), Mr. Kronborg hurried
his flock into the hotel omnibus, in which they were to be
driven ceremoniously home, with the neighbors looking
out of their windows to see them go by.
     All the family talked to her at once, except Thor,--
impressive in new trousers,-- who was gravely silent and
who refused to sit on Thea's lap.  One of the first things
Anna told her was that Maggie Evans, the girl who used to
cough in prayer meeting, died yesterday, and had made
a request that Thea sing at her funeral.
     Thea's smile froze.  "I'm not going to sing at all this
summer, except my exercises.  Bowers says I taxed my
voice last winter, singing at funerals so much.  If I begin
the first day after I get home, there'll be no end to it.
You can tell them I caught cold on the train, or some-
thing."
     Thea saw Anna glance at their mother.  Thea remem-
bered having seen that look on Anna's face often before,
but she had never thought anything about it because she
was used to it.  Now she realized that the look was dis-
tinctly spiteful, even vindictive.  She suddenly realized
that Anna had always disliked her.
     Mrs. Kronborg seemed to notice nothing, and changed
the trend of the conversation, telling Thea that Dr. Archie
and Mr. Upping, the jeweler, were both coming in to see
her that evening, and that she had asked Spanish Johnny
to come, because he had behaved well all winter and ought
to be encouraged.
     The next morning Thea wakened early in her own room
up under the eaves and lay watching the sunlight shine
on the roses of her wall-paper.  She wondered whether she
would ever like a plastered room as well as this one lined
with scantlings.  It was snug and tight, like the cabin of a
little boat.  Her bed faced the window and stood against the
wall, under the slant of the ceiling.  When she went away
she could just touch the ceiling with the tips of her fingers;
now she could touch it with the palm of her hand.  It was
so little that it was like a sunny cave, with roses running
all over the roof.  Through the low window, as she lay
there, she could watch people going by on the farther side
of the street; men, going downtown to open their stores.
Thor was over there, rattling his express wagon along
the sidewalk.  Tillie had put a bunch of French pinks in a
tumbler of water on her dresser, and they gave out a pleas-
ant perfume.  The blue jays were fighting and screeching
in the cottonwood tree outside her window, as they always
did, and she could hear the old Baptist deacon across
the street calling his chickens, as she had heard him do
every summer morning since she could remember.  It was
pleasant to waken up in that bed, in that room, and to feel
the brightness of the morning, while light quivered about
the low, papered ceiling in golden spots, refracted by the
broken mirror and the glass of water that held the pinks.
"IM LEUCHTENDEN SOMMERMORGEN"; those lines, and the face
of her old teacher, came back to Thea, floated to her out of
sleep, perhaps.  She had been dreaming something pleas-
ant, but she could not remember what.  She would go to
call upon Mrs. Kohler to-day, and see the pigeons washing
their pink feet in the drip under the water tank, and flying
about their house that was sure to have a fresh coat of white
paint on it for summer.  On the way home she would stop
to see Mrs. Tellamantez.  On Sunday she would coax
Gunner to take her out to the sand hills.  She had missed
them in Chicago; had been homesick for their brilliant
morning gold and for their soft colors at evening.  The
Lake, somehow, had never taken their place.
     While she lay planning, relaxed in warm drowsiness, she
heard a knock at her door.  She supposed it was Tillie, who
sometimes fluttered in on her before she was out of bed to
offer some service which the family would have ridiculed.
But instead, Mrs. Kronborg herself came in, carrying a
tray with Thea's breakfast set out on one of the best white
napkins.  Thea sat up with some embarrassment and pulled
her nightgown together across her chest.  Mrs. Kronborg
was always busy downstairs in the morning, and Thea
could not remember when her mother had come to her
room before.
     "I thought you'd be tired, after traveling, and might
like to take it easy for once."  Mrs. Kronborg put the tray
on the edge of the bed.  "I took some thick cream for you
before the boys got at it.  They raised a howl."  She
chuckled and sat down in the big wooden rocking chair.
Her visit made Thea feel grown-up, and, somehow, im-
portant.
     Mrs. Kronborg asked her about Bowers and the Har-
sanyis.  She felt a great change in Thea, in her face and in
her manner.  Mr. Kronborg had noticed it, too, and had
spoken of it to his wife with great satisfaction while they
were undressing last night.  Mrs. Kronborg sat looking at
her daughter, who lay on her side, supporting herself on
her elbow and lazily drinking her coffee from the tray be-
fore her.  Her short-sleeved nightgown had come open at
the throat again, and Mrs. Kronborg noticed how white
her arms and shoulders were, as if they had been dipped in
new milk.  Her chest was fuller than when she went away,
her breasts rounder and firmer, and though she was so
white where she was uncovered, they looked rosy through
the thin muslin.  Her body had the elasticity that comes of
being highly charged with the desire to live.  Her hair,
hanging in two loose braids, one by either cheek, was just
enough disordered to catch the light in all its curly ends.
     Thea always woke with a pink flush on her cheeks, and
this morning her mother thought she had never seen her
eyes so wide-open and bright; like clear green springs in the
wood, when the early sunlight sparkles in them.  She would
make a very handsome woman, Mrs. Kronborg said to
herself, if she would only get rid of that fierce look she had
sometimes.  Mrs. Kronborg took great pleasure in good
looks, wherever she found them.  She still remembered
that, as a baby, Thea had been the "best-formed" of any
of her children.
     "I'll have to get you a longer bed," she remarked, as she
put the tray on the table.  "You're getting too long for
that one."
     Thea looked up at her mother and laughed, dropping
back on her pillow with a magnificent stretch of her whole
body.  Mrs. Kronborg sat down again.
     "I don't like to press you, Thea, but I think you'd
better sing at that funeral to-morrow.  I'm afraid you'll
always be sorry if you don't.  Sometimes a little thing like
that, that seems nothing at the time, comes back on one
afterward and troubles one a good deal.  I don't mean the
church shall run you to death this summer, like they used
to.  I've spoken my mind to your father about that, and
he's very reasonable.  But Maggie talked a good deal about
you to people this winter; always asked what word we'd
had, and said how she missed your singing and all.  I guess
you ought to do that much for her."
     "All right, mother, if you think so."  Thea lay looking
at her mother with intensely bright eyes.
     "That's right, daughter."  Mrs. Kronborg rose and
went over to get the tray, stopping to put her hand on
Thea's chest.  "You're filling out nice," she said, feeling
about.  "No, I wouldn't bother about the buttons.  Leave
'em stay off.  This is a good time to harden your chest."
     Thea lay still and heard her mother's firm step receding
along the bare floor of the trunk loft.  There was no sham
about her mother, she reflected.  Her mother knew a great
many things of which she never talked, and all the church
people were forever chattering about things of which they
knew nothing.  She liked her mother.
     Now for Mexican Town and the Kohlers!  She meant to
run in on the old woman without warning, and hug her.

                                 X

     SPANISH JOHNNY had no shop of his own, but he
kept a table and an order-book in one corner of the
drug store where paints and wall-paper were sold, and he
was sometimes to be found there for an hour or so about
noon.  Thea had gone into the drug store to have a friendly
chat with the proprietor, who used to lend her books from
his shelves.  She found Johnny there, trimming rolls of
wall-paper for the parlor of Banker Smith's new house.
She sat down on the top of his table and watched him.
     "Johnny," she said suddenly, "I want you to write
down the words of that Mexican serenade you used to sing;
you know, `ROSA DE NOCHE.'  It's an unusual song.  I'm
going to study it.  I know enough Spanish for that."
     Johnny looked up from his roller with his bright, affable
smile.  "SI, but it is low for you, I think; VOZ CONTRALTO.
It is low for me."
     "Nonsense.  I can do more with my low voice than I
used to.  I'll show you.  Sit down and write it out for
me, please."  Thea beckoned him with the short yellow
pencil tied to his order-book.
     Johnny ran his fingers through his curly black hair.
"If you wish.  I do not know if that SERENATA all right for
young ladies.  Down there it is more for married ladies.
They sing it for husbands--or somebody else, may-bee."
Johnny's eyes twinkled and he apologized gracefully with
his shoulders.  He sat down at the table, and while Thea
looked over his arm, began to write the song down in a
long, slanting script, with highly ornamental capitals.
Presently he looked up.  "This-a song not exactly Mexi-
can," he said thoughtfully.  "It come from farther down;
Brazil, Venezuela, may-bee.  I learn it from some fellow
down there, and he learn it from another fellow.  It is-a
most like Mexican, but not quite."  Thea did not release
him, but pointed to the paper.  There were three verses
of the song in all, and when Johnny had written them
down, he sat looking at them meditatively, his head on
one side.  "I don' think for a high voice, SENORITA," he
objected with polite persistence.  "How you accompany
with piano?"
     "Oh, that will be easy enough."
     "For you, may-bee!"  Johnny smiled and drummed on
the table with the tips of his agile brown fingers.  "You
know something?  Listen, I tell you."  He rose and sat
down on the table beside her, putting his foot on the chair.
He loved to talk at the hour of noon.  "When you was a
little girl, no bigger than that, you come to my house one
day 'bout noon, like this, and I was in the door, playing
guitar.  You was barehead, barefoot; you run away from
home.  You stand there and make a frown at me an' listen.
By 'n by you say for me to sing.  I sing some lil' ting, and
then I say for you to sing with me.  You don' know no
words, of course, but you take the air and you sing it just-
a beauti-ful!  I never see a child do that, outside Mexico.
You was, oh, I do' know--seven year, may-bee.  By 'n
by the preacher come look for you and begin for scold.  I
say, `Don' scold, Meester Kronborg.  She come for hear
guitar.  She gotta some music in her, that child.  Where
she get?'  Then he tell me 'bout your gran'papa play
oboe in the old country.  I never forgetta that time."
Johnny chuckled softly.
     Thea nodded.  "I remember that day, too.  I liked your
music better than the church music.  When are you going
to have a dance over there, Johnny?"
     Johnny tilted his head.  "Well, Saturday night the
Spanish boys have a lil' party, some DANZA.  You know
Miguel Ramas?  He have some young cousins, two boys,
very nice-a, come from Torreon.  They going to Salt Lake
for some job-a, and stay off with him two-three days, and
he mus' have a party.  You like to come?"
     That was how Thea came to go to the Mexican ball.
Mexican Town had been increased by half a dozen new
families during the last few years, and the Mexicans had
put up an adobe dance-hall, that looked exactly like one
of their own dwellings, except that it was a little longer,
and was so unpretentious that nobody in Moonstone knew
of its existence.  The "Spanish boys" are reticent about
their own affairs.  Ray Kennedy used to know about all
their little doings, but since his death there was no one
whom the Mexicans considered SIMPATICO.
     On Saturday evening after supper Thea told her mother
that she was going over to Mrs. Tellamantez's to watch
the Mexicans dance for a while, and that Johnny would
bring her home.
     Mrs. Kronborg smiled.  She noticed that Thea had put
on a white dress and had done her hair up with unusual
care, and that she carried her best blue scarf.  "Maybe
you'll take a turn yourself, eh?  I wouldn't mind watching
them Mexicans.  They're lovely dancers."
     Thea made a feeble suggestion that her mother might
go with her, but Mrs. Kronborg was too wise for that.  She
knew that Thea would have a better time if she went alone,
and she watched her daughter go out of the gate and down
the sidewalk that led to the depot.
     Thea walked slowly.  It was a soft, rosy evening.  The
sand hills were lavender.  The sun had gone down a glow-
ing copper disk, and the fleecy clouds in the east were a
burning rose-color, flecked with gold.  Thea passed the
cottonwood grove and then the depot, where she left the
sidewalk and took the sandy path toward Mexican Town.
She could hear the scraping of violins being tuned, the
tinkle of mandolins, and the growl of a double bass.  Where
had they got a double bass?  She did not know there was
one in Moonstone.  She found later that it was the pro-
perty of one of Ramas's young cousins, who was taking it
to Utah with him to cheer him at his "job-a."
     The Mexicans never wait until it is dark to begin to
dance, and Thea had no difficulty in finding the new hall,
because every other house in the town was deserted.  Even
the babies had gone to the ball; a neighbor was always
willing to hold the baby while the mother danced.  Mrs.
Tellamantez came out to meet Thea and led her in.  Johnny
bowed to her from the platform at the end of the room,
where he was playing the mandolin along with two fiddles
and the bass.  The hall was a long low room, with white-
washed walls, a fairly tight plank floor, wooden benches
along the sides, and a few bracket lamps screwed to the
frame timbers.  There must have been fifty people there,
counting the children.  The Mexican dances were very
much family affairs.  The fathers always danced again
and again with their little daughters, as well as with their
wives.  One of the girls came up to greet Thea, her dark
cheeks glowing with pleasure and cordiality, and intro-
duced her brother, with whom she had just been dancing.
"You better take him every time he asks you," she whis-
pered.  "He's the best dancer here, except Johnny."
     Thea soon decided that the poorest dancer was herself.
Even Mrs. Tellamantez, who always held her shoulders
so stiffly, danced better than she did.  The musicians did
not remain long at their post.  When one of them felt like
dancing, he called some other boy to take his instrument,
put on his coat, and went down on the floor.  Johnny, who
wore a blousy white silk shirt, did not even put on his coat.
     The dances the railroad men gave in Firemen's Hall
were the only dances Thea had ever been allowed to go to,
and they were very different from this.  The boys played
rough jokes and thought it smart to be clumsy and to run
into each other on the floor.  For the square dances there
was always the bawling voice of the caller, who was also
the county auctioneer.

     This Mexican dance was soft and quiet.  There was no
calling, the conversation was very low, the rhythm of the
music was smooth and engaging, the men were graceful
and courteous.  Some of them Thea had never before seen
out of their working clothes, smeared with grease from the
round-house or clay from the brickyard.  Sometimes, when
the music happened to be a popular Mexican waltz song,
the dancers sang it softly as they moved.  There were three
little girls under twelve, in their first communion dresses,
and one of them had an orange marigold in her black hair,
just over her ear.  They danced with the men and with
each other.  There was an atmosphere of ease and friendly
pleasure in the low, dimly lit room, and Thea could not
help wondering whether the Mexicans had no jealousies
or neighborly grudges as the people in Moonstone had.
There was no constraint of any kind there to-night, but a
kind of natural harmony about their movements, their
greetings, their low conversation, their smiles.
     Ramas brought up his two young cousins, Silvo and
Felipe, and presented them.  They were handsome, smil-
ing youths, of eighteen and twenty, with pale-gold skins,
smooth cheeks, aquiline features, and wavy black hair,
like Johnny's.  They were dressed alike, in black velvet
jackets and soft silk shirts, with opal shirt-buttons and
flowing black ties looped through gold rings.  They had
charming manners, and low, guitar-like voices.  They
knew almost no English, but a Mexican boy can pay a
great many compliments with a very limited vocabulary.
The Ramas boys thought Thea dazzlingly beautiful.  They
had never seen a Scandinavian girl before, and her hair
and fair skin bewitched them.  "BLANCO Y ORO, SEMEJANTE LA
PASCUA!"  (White and gold, like Easter!) they exclaimed
to each other.  Silvo, the younger, declared that he
could never go on to Utah; that he and his double
bass had reached their ultimate destination.  The elder
was more crafty; he asked Miguel Ramas whether there
would be "plenty more girls like that _A_ Salt Lake, may-
bee?"
     Silvo, overhearing, gave his brother a contemptuous
glance.  "Plenty more A PARAISO may-bee!" he retorted.
When they were not dancing with her, their eyes followed
her, over the coiffures of their other partners.  That was
not difficult; one blonde head moving among so many dark
ones.
     Thea had not meant to dance much, but the Ramas
boys danced so well and were so handsome and adoring
that she yielded to their entreaties.  When she sat out a
dance with them, they talked to her about their family
at home, and told her how their mother had once punned
upon their name.  RAMA, in Spanish, meant a branch, they
explained.  Once when they were little lads their mother
took them along when she went to help the women deco-
rate the church for Easter.  Some one asked her whether
she had brought any flowers, and she replied that she had
brought her "ramas."  This was evidently a cherished
family story.
     When it was nearly midnight, Johnny announced that
every one was going to his house to have "some lil' ice-
cream and some lil' MUSICA."  He began to put out the
lights and Mrs. Tellamantez led the way across the square
to her CASA.  The Ramas brothers escorted Thea, and as
they stepped out of the door, Silvo exclaimed, "HACE
FRIO!" and threw his velvet coat about her shoulders.
     Most of the company followed Mrs. Tellamantez, and
they sat about on the gravel in her little yard while she
and Johnny and Mrs. Miguel Ramas served the ice-cream.
Thea sat on Felipe's coat, since Silvo's was already about
her shoulders.  The youths lay down on the shining gravel
beside her, one on her right and one on her left.  Johnny
already called them "LOS ACOLITOS," the altar-boys.  The
talk all about them was low, and indolent.  One of the
girls was playing on Johnny's guitar, another was picking
lightly at a mandolin.  The moonlight was so bright that
one could see every glance and smile, and the flash of
their teeth.  The moonflowers over Mrs. Tellamantez's
door were wide open and of an unearthly white.  The
moon itself looked like a great pale flower in the sky.
     After all the ice-cream was gone, Johnny approached
Thea, his guitar under his arm, and the elder Ramas boy
politely gave up his place.  Johnny sat down, took a long
breath, struck a fierce chord, and then hushed it with his
other hand.  "Now we have some lil' SERENATA, eh?  You
wan' a try?"
     When Thea began to sing, instant silence fell upon the
company.  She felt all those dark eyes fix themselves upon
her intently.  She could see them shine.  The faces came
out of the shadow like the white flowers over the door.
Felipe leaned his head upon his hand.  Silvo dropped
on his back and lay looking at the moon, under the
impression that he was still looking at Thea.  When
she finished the first verse, Thea whispered to Johnny,
"Again, I can do it better than that."
     She had sung for churches and funerals and teachers, but
she had never before sung for a really musical people, and
this was the first time she had ever felt the response that
such a people can give.  They turned themselves and all
they had over to her.  For the moment they cared about
nothing in the world but what she was doing.  Their faces
confronted her, open, eager, unprotected.  She felt as if
all these warm-blooded people debouched into her.  Mrs.
Tellamantez's fateful resignation, Johnny's madness, the
adoration of the boy who lay still in the sand; in an instant
these things seemed to be within her instead of without,
as if they had come from her in the first place.
     When she finished, her listeners broke into excited mur-
mur.  The men began hunting feverishly for cigarettes.
Famos Serranos the barytone bricklayer, touched Johnny's
arm, gave him a questioning look, then heaved a deep
sigh.  Johnny dropped on his elbow, wiping his face and
neck and hands with his handkerchief.  "SENORITA," he
panted, "if you sing like that once in the City of Mexico,
they just-a go crazy.  In the City of Mexico they ain't-a
sit like stumps when they hear that, not-a much!  When
they like, they just-a give you the town."
     Thea laughed.  She, too, was excited.  "Think so,
Johnny?  Come, sing something with me.  EL PARRENO; I
haven't sung that for a long time."
     Johnny laughed and hugged his guitar.  "You not-a
forget him?"  He began teasing his strings.  "Come!"  He
threw back his head, "ANOCHE-E-E--"

          "ANOCHE ME CONFESSE
           CON UN PADRE CARMELITE,
           Y ME DIO PENITENCIA
           QUE BESARAS TU BOQUITA."
          (Last night I made confession
           With a Carmelite father,
           And he gave me absolution
           For the kisses you imprinted.)

     Johnny had almost every fault that a tenor can have.
His voice was thin, unsteady, husky in the middle tones.
But it was distinctly a voice, and sometimes he managed
to get something very sweet out of it.  Certainly it made
him happy to sing.  Thea kept glancing down at him as he
lay there on his elbow.  His eyes seemed twice as large as
usual and had lights in them like those the moonlight
makes on black, running water.  Thea remembered the
old stories about his "spells."  She had never seen him
when his madness was on him, but she felt something to-
night at her elbow that gave her an idea of what it might
be like.  For the first time she fully understood the cryptic
explanation that Mrs. Tellamantez had made to Dr.
Archie, long ago.  There were the same shells along the
walk; she believed she could pick out the very one.  There
was the same moon up yonder, and panting at her elbow
was the same Johnny--fooled by the same old things!
     When they had finished, Famos, the barytone, mur-
mured something to Johnny; who replied, "Sure we can
sing `Trovatore.'  We have no alto, but all the girls can
sing alto and make some noise."
     The women laughed.  Mexican women of the poorer
class do not sing like the men.  Perhaps they are too in-
dolent.  In the evening, when the men are singing their
throats dry on the doorstep, or around the camp-fire be-
side the work-train, the women usually sit and comb their
hair.
     While Johnny was gesticulating and telling everybody
what to sing and how to sing it, Thea put out her foot and
touched the corpse of Silvo with the toe of her slipper.
"Aren't you going to sing, Silvo?" she asked teasingly.
     The boy turned on his side and raised himself on his
elbow for a moment.  "Not this night, SENORITA," he pleaded
softly, "not this night!"  He dropped back again, and lay
with his cheek on his right arm, the hand lying passive
on the sand above his head.
     "How does he flatten himself into the ground like that?"
Thea asked herself.  "I wish I knew.  It's very effective,
somehow."
     Across the gulch the Kohlers' little house slept among
its trees, a dark spot on the white face of the desert.  The
windows of their upstairs bedroom were open, and Paulina
had listened to the dance music for a long while before she
drowsed off.  She was a light sleeper, and when she woke
again, after midnight, Johnny's concert was at its height.
She lay still until she could bear it no longer.  Then she
wakened Fritz and they went over to the window and
leaned out.  They could hear clearly there.
     "DIE THEA," whispered Mrs. Kohler; "it must be.  ACH,
WUNDERSCHON!"
     Fritz was not so wide awake as his wife.  He grunted and
scratched on the floor with his bare foot.  They were lis-
tening to a Mexican part-song; the tenor, then the soprano,
then both together; the barytone joins them, rages, is
extinguished; the tenor expires in sobs, and the soprano
finishes alone.  When the soprano's last note died away,
Fritz nodded to his wife.  "JA," he said; "SCHON."
     There was silence for a few moments.  Then the guitar
sounded fiercely, and several male voices began the sextette
from "Lucia."  Johnny's reedy tenor they knew well, and
the bricklayer's big, opaque barytone; the others might be
anybody over there--just Mexican voices.  Then at the
appointed, at the acute, moment, the soprano voice, like
a fountain jet, shot up into the light.  "HORCH!  HORCH!" the
old people whispered, both at once.  How it leaped from
among those dusky male voices!  How it played in and
about and around and over them, like a goldfish darting
among creek minnows, like a yellow butterfly soaring above
a swarm of dark ones.  "Ah," said Mrs. Kohler softly, "the
dear man; if he could hear her now!"


                                XI

     MRS. KRONBORG had said that Thea was not to be
disturbed on Sunday morning, and she slept until
noon.  When she came downstairs the family were just
sitting down to dinner, Mr. Kronborg at one end of the
long table, Mrs. Kronborg at the other.  Anna, stiff and
ceremonious, in her summer silk, sat at her father's right,
and the boys were strung along on either side of the table.
There was a place left for Thea between her mother and
Thor.  During the silence which preceded the blessing,
Thea felt something uncomfortable in the air.  Anna and
her older brothers had lowered their eyes when she came
in.  Mrs. Kronborg nodded cheerfully, and after the bless-
ing, as she began to pour the coffee, turned to her.
     "I expect you had a good time at that dance, Thea.  I
hope you got your sleep out."
     "High society, that," remarked Charley, giving the
mashed potatoes a vicious swat.  Anna's mouth and eye-
brows became half-moons.
     Thea looked across the table at the uncompromising
countenances of her older brothers.  "Why, what's the
matter with the Mexicans?" she asked, flushing.  "They
don't trouble anybody, and they are kind to their families
and have good manners."
     "Nice clean people; got some style about them.  Do
you really like that kind, Thea, or do you just pretend to?
That's what I'd like to know."  Gus looked at her with
pained inquiry.  But he at least looked at her.
     "They're just as clean as white people, and they have
a perfect right to their own ways.  Of course I like 'em.
I don't pretend things."
     "Everybody according to their own taste," remarked
Charley bitterly.  "Quit crumbing your bread up, Thor.
Ain't you learned how to eat yet?"
     "Children, children!" said Mr. Kronborg nervously,
looking up from the chicken he was dismembering.  He
glanced at his wife, whom he expected to maintain har-
mony in the family.
     "That's all right, Charley.  Drop it there," said Mrs.
Kronborg.  "No use spoiling your Sunday dinner with
race prejudices.  The Mexicans suit me and Thea very
well.  They are a useful people.  Now you can just talk
about something else."
     Conversation, however, did not flourish at that dinner.
Everybody ate as fast as possible.  Charley and Gus said
they had engagements and left the table as soon as they
finished their apple pie.  Anna sat primly and ate with
great elegance.  When she spoke at all she spoke to her
father, about church matters, and always in a commiserat-
ing tone, as if he had met with some misfortune.  Mr.
Kronborg, quite innocent of her intentions, replied kindly
and absent-mindedly.  After the dessert he went to take his
usual Sunday afternoon nap, and Mrs. Kronborg carried
some dinner to a sick neighbor.  Thea and Anna began to
clear the table.
     "I should think you would show more consideration for
father's position, Thea," Anna began as soon as she and her
sister were alone.
     Thea gave her a sidelong glance.  "Why, what have I
done to father?"
     "Everybody at Sunday-School was talking about you
going over there and singing with the Mexicans all night,
when you won't sing for the church.  Somebody heard you,
and told it all over town.  Of course, we all get the blame
for it."
     "Anything disgraceful about singing?" Thea asked with
a provoking yawn.
     "I must say you choose your company!  You always
had that streak in you, Thea.  We all hoped that going
away would improve you.  Of course, it reflects on father
when you are scarcely polite to the nice people here and
make up to the rowdies."
     "Oh, it's my singing with the Mexicans you object to?"
Thea put down a tray full of dishes.  "Well, I like to sing
over there, and I don't like to over here.  I'll sing for them
any time they ask me to.  They know something about
what I'm doing.  They're a talented people."
     "Talented!"  Anna made the word sound like escaping
steam.  "I suppose you think it's smart to come home and
throw that at your family!"
     Thea picked up the tray.  By this time she was as white
as the Sunday tablecloth.  "Well," she replied in a cold,
even tone, "I'll have to throw it at them sooner or later.
It's just a question of when, and it might as well be now
as any time."  She carried the tray blindly into the kitchen.
     Tillie, who was always listening and looking out for her,
took the dishes from her with a furtive, frightened glance
at her stony face.  Thea went slowly up the back stairs to
her loft.  Her legs seemed as heavy as lead as she climbed
the stairs, and she felt as if everything inside her had solidi-
fied and grown hard.
     After shutting her door and locking it, she sat down on
the edge of her bed.  This place had always been her refuge,
but there was a hostility in the house now which this door
could not shut out.  This would be her last summer in that
room.  Its services were over; its time was done.  She rose
and put her hand on the low ceiling.  Two tears ran down
her cheeks, as if they came from ice that melted slowly.
She was not ready to leave her little shell.  She was being
pulled out too soon.  She would never be able to think
anywhere else as well as here.  She would never sleep so
well or have such dreams in any other bed; even last night,
such sweet, breathless dreams--  Thea hid her face in the
pillow.  Wherever she went she would like to take that little
bed with her.  When she went away from it for good, she
would leave something that she could never recover; mem-
ories of pleasant excitement, of happy adventures in her
mind; of warm sleep on howling winter nights, and joyous
awakenings on summer mornings.  There were certain
dreams that might refuse to come to her at all except in a
little morning cave, facing the sun--where they came to
her so powerfully, where they beat a triumph in her!
     The room was hot as an oven.  The sun was beating
fiercely on the shingles behind the board ceiling.  She un-
dressed, and before she threw herself upon her bed in her
chemise, she frowned at herself for a long while in her look-
ing-glass.  Yes, she and It must fight it out together.  The
thing that looked at her out of her own eyes was the only
friend she could count on.  Oh, she would make these
people sorry enough!  There would come a time when they
would want to make it up with her.  But, never again!  She
had no little vanities, only one big one, and she would
never forgive.
     Her mother was all right, but her mother was a part of
the family, and she was not.  In the nature of things, her
mother had to be on both sides.  Thea felt that she had
been betrayed.  A truce had been broken behind her back.
She had never had much individual affection for any of her
brothers except Thor, but she had never been disloyal,
never felt scorn or held grudges.  As a little girl she had
always been good friends with Gunner and Axel, whenever
she had time to play.  Even before she got her own room,
when they were all sleeping and dressing together, like
little cubs, and breakfasting in the kitchen, she had led an
absorbing personal life of her own.  But she had a cub
loyalty to the other cubs.  She thought them nice boys and
tried to make them get their lessons.  She once fought a
bully who "picked on" Axel at school.  She never made
fun of Anna's crimpings and curlings and beauty-rites.
     Thea had always taken it for granted that her sister and
brothers recognized that she had special abilities, and that
they were proud of it.  She had done them the honor, she
told herself bitterly, to believe that though they had no
particular endowments, THEY WERE OF HER KIND, and not of
the Moonstone kind.  Now they had all grown up and be-
come persons.  They faced each other as individuals, and
she saw that Anna and Gus and Charley were among the
people whom she had always recognized as her natural
enemies.  Their ambitions and sacred proprieties were
meaningless to her.  She had neglected to congratulate
Charley upon having been promoted from the grocery de-
partment of Commings's store to the drygoods depart-
ment.  Her mother had reproved her for this omission.  And
how was she to know, Thea asked herself, that Anna ex-
pected to be teased because Bert Rice now came and sat in
the hammock with her every night?  No, it was all clear
enough.  Nothing that she would ever do in the world
would seem important to them, and nothing they would
ever do would seem important to her.
     Thea lay thinking intently all through the stifling after-
noon.  Tillie whispered something outside her door once,
but she did not answer.  She lay on her bed until the second
church bell rang, and she saw the family go trooping up
the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, Anna
and her father in the lead.  Anna seemed to have taken
on a very story-book attitude toward her father; pat-
ronizing and condescending, it seemed to Thea.  The older
boys were not in the family band.  They now took their
girls to church.  Tillie had stayed at home to get supper.
Thea got up, washed her hot face and arms, and put on
the white organdie dress she had worn last night; it was
getting too small for her, and she might as well wear it out.
After she was dressed she unlocked her door and went cau-
tiously downstairs.  She felt as if chilling hostilities might
be awaiting her in the trunk loft, on the stairway, almost
anywhere.  In the dining-room she found Tillie, sitting by
the open window, reading the dramatic news in a Denver
Sunday paper.  Tillie kept a scrapbook in which she pasted
clippings about actors and actresses.
     "Come look at this picture of Pauline Hall in tights,
Thea," she called.  "Ain't she cute?  It's too bad you
didn't go to the theater more when you was in Chicago;
such a good chance!  Didn't you even get to see Clara
Morris or Modjeska?"
     "No; I didn't have time.  Besides, it costs money,
Tillie," Thea replied wearily, glancing at the paper Tillie
held out to her.
     Tillie looked up at her niece.  "Don't you go and be
upset about any of Anna's notions.  She's one of these
narrow kind.  Your father and mother don't pay any atten-
tion to what she says.  Anna's fussy; she is with me, but
I don't mind her."
     "Oh, I don't mind her.  That's all right, Tillie.  I guess
I'll take a walk."
     Thea knew that Tillie hoped she would stay and talk to
her for a while, and she would have liked to please her.
But in a house as small as that one, everything was too
intimate and mixed up together.  The family was the
family, an integral thing.  One couldn't discuss Anna there.
She felt differently toward the house and everything in it,
as if the battered old furniture that seemed so kindly, and
the old carpets on which she had played, had been nour-
ishing a secret grudge against her and were not to be
trusted any more.
     She went aimlessly out of the front gate, not know-
ing what to do with herself.  Mexican Town, somehow, was
spoiled for her just then, and she felt that she would hide
if she saw Silvo or Felipe coming toward her.  She walked
down through the empty main street.  All the stores were
closed, their blinds down.  On the steps of the bank some
idle boys were sitting, telling disgusting stories because
there was nothing else to do.  Several of them had gone
to school with Thea, but when she nodded to them they
hung their heads and did not speak.  Thea's body was
often curiously expressive of what was going on in her
mind, and to-night there was something in her walk and
carriage that made these boys feel that she was "stuck
up."  If she had stopped and talked to them, they would
have thawed out on the instant and would have been
friendly and grateful.  But Thea was hurt afresh, and
walked on, holding her chin higher than ever.  As she
passed the Duke Block, she saw a light in Dr. Archie's
office, and she went up the stairs and opened the door into
his study.  She found him with a pile of papers and account-
books before him.  He pointed her to her old chair at the
end of his desk and leaned back in his own, looking at
her with satisfaction.  How handsome she was growing!
     "I'm still chasing the elusive metal, Thea,"--he pointed
to the papers before him,--"I'm up to my neck in mines,
and I'm going to be a rich man some day."
     "I hope you will; awfully rich.  That's the only thing
that counts."  She looked restlessly about the consulting-
room.  "To do any of the things one wants to do, one has
to have lots and lots of money."
     Dr. Archie was direct.  "What's the matter?  Do you
need some?"
     Thea shrugged.  "Oh, I can get along, in a little way."
She looked intently out of the window at the arc street-
lamp that was just beginning to sputter.  "But it's silly to
live at all for little things," she added quietly.  "Living's
too much trouble unless one can get something big out of
it."
     Dr. Archie rested his elbows on the arms of his chair,
dropped his chin on his clasped hands and looked at her.
"Living is no trouble for little people, believe me!" he
exclaimed.  "What do you want to get out of it?"
     "Oh--so many things!" Thea shivered.
     "But what?  Money?  You mentioned that.  Well, you
can make money, if you care about that more than any-
thing else."  He nodded prophetically above his interlacing
fingers.
     "But I don't.  That's only one thing.  Anyhow, I
couldn't if I did."  She pulled her dress lower at the neck as
if she were suffocating.  "I only want impossible things,"
she said roughly.  "The others don't interest me."
     Dr. Archie watched her contemplatively, as if she were
a beaker full of chemicals working.  A few years ago, when
she used to sit there, the light from under his green lamp-
shade used to fall full upon her broad face and yellow pig-
tails.  Now her face was in the shadow and the line of light
fell below her bare throat, directly across her bosom.  The
shrunken white organdie rose and fell as if she were strug-
gling to be free and to break out of it altogether.  He felt
that her heart must be laboring heavily in there, but he was
afraid to touch her; he was, indeed.  He had never seen her
like this before.  Her hair, piled high on her head, gave her
a commanding look, and her eyes, that used to be so in-
quisitive, were stormy.
     "Thea," he said slowly, "I won't say that you can have
everything you want--that means having nothing, in
reality.  But if you decide what it is you want most, YOU
CAN GET IT."  His eye caught hers for a moment.  "Not every-
body can, but you can.  Only, if you want a big thing,
you've got to have nerve enough to cut out all that's easy,
everything that's to be had cheap."  Dr. Archie paused.
He picked up a paper-cutter and, feeling the edge of it
softly with his fingers, he added slowly, as if to himself:--

          "He either fears his fate too much,
             Or his deserts are small,
           Who dares not put it to the touch
             To win . . . or lose it all."

     Thea's lips parted; she looked at him from under a frown,
searching his face.  "Do you mean to break loose, too, and
--do something?" she asked in a low voice.

     "I mean to get rich, if you call that doing anything.
I've found what I can do without.  You make such bar-
gains in your mind, first."
     Thea sprang up and took the paper-cutter he had put
down, twisting it in her hands.  "A long while first, some-
times," she said with a short laugh.  "But suppose one
can never get out what they've got in them?  Suppose they
make a mess of it in the end; then what?"  She threw the
paper-cutter on the desk and took a step toward the doctor,
until her dress touched him.  She stood looking down at
him.  "Oh, it's easy to fail!"  She was breathing through
her mouth and her throat was throbbing with excitement.
     As he looked up at her, Dr. Archie's hands tightened on
the arms of his chair.  He had thought he knew Thea Kron-
borg pretty well, but he did not know the girl who was
standing there.  She was beautiful, as his little Swede had
never been, but she frightened him.  Her pale cheeks, her
parted lips, her flashing eyes, seemed suddenly to mean one
thing--he did not know what.  A light seemed to break
upon her from far away--or perhaps from far within.  She
seemed to grow taller, like a scarf drawn out long; looked
as if she were pursued and fleeing, and--yes, she looked
tormented.  "It's easy to fail," he heard her say again, "and
if I fail, you'd better forget about me, for I'll be one of the
worst women that ever lived.  I'll be an awful woman!"
     In the shadowy light above the lampshade he caught her
glance again and held it for a moment.  Wild as her eyes
were, that yellow gleam at the back of them was as hard
as a diamond drill-point.  He rose with a nervous laugh
and dropped his hand lightly on her shoulder.  "No, you
won't.  You'll be a splendid one!"
     She shook him off before he could say anything more,
and went out of his door with a kind of bound.  She left so
quickly and so lightly that he could not even hear her foot-
step in the hallway outside.  Archie dropped back into his
chair and sat motionless for a long while.

     So it went; one loved a quaint little girl, cheerful, in-
dustrious, always on the run and hustling through her
tasks; and suddenly one lost her.  He had thought he knew
that child like the glove on his hand.  But about this tall
girl who threw up her head and glittered like that all over,
he knew nothing.  She was goaded by desires, ambitions,
revulsions that were dark to him.  One thing he knew: the
old highroad of life, worn safe and easy, hugging the sunny
slopes, would scarcely hold her again.
     After that night Thea could have asked pretty much
anything of him.  He could have refused her nothing.
Years ago a crafty little bunch of hair and smiles had shown
him what she wanted, and he had promptly married her.
To-night a very different sort of girl--driven wild by
doubts and youth, by poverty and riches--had let him
see the fierceness of her nature.  She went out still dis-
traught, not knowing or caring what she had shown him.
But to Archie knowledge of that sort was obligation.  Oh,
he was the same old Howard Archie!

     That Sunday in July was the turning-point; Thea's peace
of mind did not come back.  She found it hard even to
practice at home.  There was something in the air there
that froze her throat.  In the morning, she walked as far
as she could walk.  In the hot afternoons she lay on her
bed in her nightgown, planning fiercely.  She haunted the
post-office.  She must have worn a path in the sidewalk
that led to the post-office, that summer.  She was there
the moment the mail-sacks came up from the depot,
morning and evening, and while the letters were being
sorted and distributed she paced up and down outside,
under the cottonwood trees, listening to the thump,
thump, thump of Mr. Thompson's stamp.  She hung upon
any sort of word from Chicago; a card from Bowers, a
letter from Mrs. Harsanyi, from Mr. Larsen, from her
landlady,--anything to reassure her that Chicago was
still there.  She began to feel the same restlessness that
had tortured her the last spring when she was teaching in
Moonstone.  Suppose she never got away again, after all?
Suppose one broke a leg and had to lie in bed at home for
weeks, or had pneumonia and died there.  The desert was
so big and thirsty; if one's foot slipped, it could drink
one up like a drop of water.
     This time, when Thea left Moonstone to go back to
Chicago, she went alone.  As the train pulled out, she
looked back at her mother and father and Thor.  They were
calm and cheerful; they did not know, they did not un-
derstand.  Something pulled in her--and broke.  She
cried all the way to Denver, and that night, in her berth,
she kept sobbing and waking herself.  But when the sun
rose in the morning, she was far away.  It was all behind
her, and she knew that she would never cry like that again.
People live through such pain only once; pain comes again,
but it finds a tougher surface.  Thea remembered how she
had gone away the first time, with what confidence in
everything, and what pitiful ignorance.  Such a silly!  She
felt resentful toward that stupid, good-natured child.  How
much older she was now, and how much harder!  She
was going away to fight, and she was going away forever.