Willa Cather

The Song of the Lark Willa Cather

For the next four days it seemed to Dr. Archie that his patient might slip through his hands, dowhat he might. But she did not. On the contrary, after that she recovered very rapidly. As her fatherremarked, she must have inherited the "constitution" which he was never tired of admiring in hermother. One afternoon, when her new brother was a week old, the doctor found Thea very comfortableand happy in her bed in the parlor. The sunlight was pouring in over her shoulders, the baby wasasleep on a pillow in a big rocking-chair beside her. Whenever he stirred, she put out her hand androcked him. Nothing of him was visible but a flushed, puffy forehead and an uncompromisingly big, bald cranium. The door into her mother's room stood open, and Mrs. Kronborg was sitting up inbed darning stockings. She was a short, stalwart woman, with a short neck and a determined-lookinghead. Her skin was very fair, her face calm and unwrinkled, and her yellow hair, braided down herback as she lay in bed, still looked like a girl's. She was a woman whom Dr. Archie respected; active, practical, unruffled; goodhumored, but determined. Exactly the sort of woman to take care of aflighty preacher. She had brought her husband some property, too, -one fourth of her father'sbroad acres in Nebraska, -but this she kept in her own name. She had profound respect for herhusband's erudition and eloquence. She sat under his preaching with deep humility, and was as muchtaken in by his stiff shirt and white neckties as if she had not ironed them herself by lamplight thenight before they appeared correct and spotless in the pulpit. But for all this, she had no confidencein his administration of worldly affairs. She looked to him for morning prayers and grace at table;she expected him to name the babies and to supply whatever parental sentiment there was in thehouse, to remember birthdays and anniversaries, to point the children to moral and patriotic ideals. It was her work to keep their bodies, their clothes, and their conduct in some sort of order, and thisshe accomplished with a success that was a source of wonder to her neighbors. As she used toremark, and her husband admiringly to echo, she "had never lost one." With all his flightiness, PeterKronborg appreciated the matter-of-fact, punctual way in which his wife got her children into theworld and along in it. He believed, and he was right in believing, that the sovereign State ofColorado was much indebted to Mrs. Kronborg and women like her. Mrs. Kronborg believed that the size of every family was decided in heaven. More modern viewswould not have startled her; they would simply have seemed foolish-thin chatter, like the boasts ofthe men who built the tower of Babel, or like Axel's plan to breed ostriches in the chicken yard. From what evidence Mrs. Kronborg formed her opinions on this and other matters, it would havebeen difficult to say, but once formed, they were unchangeable. She would no more have questionedher convictions than she would have questioned revelation. Calm and even tempered, naturally kind, she was capable of strong prejudices, and she never for