During one of these revivals Thea’s sister Anna professed5 religion with, as Mrs. Kronborg said, “a good deal of fluster6.” While Anna was going up to the mourners’ bench nightly and asking for the prayers of the congregation, she disseminated7 general gloom throughout the household, and after she joined the church she took on an air of “set-apartness” that was extremely trying to her brothers and her sister, though they realized that Anna’s sanctimoniousness8 was perhaps a good thing for their father. A preacher ought to have one child who did more than merely acquiesce9 in religious observances, and Thea and the boys were glad enough that it was Anna and not one of themselves who assumed this obligation.
“Anna, she’s American,” Mrs. Kronborg used to say. The Scandinavian mould of countenance10, more or less marked in each of the other children, was scarcely discernible in her, and she looked enough like other Moonstone girls to be thought pretty. Anna’s nature was conventional, like her face. Her position as the minister’s eldest11 daughter was important to her, and she tried to live up to it. She read sentimental12 religious story-books and emulated13 the spiritual struggles and magnanimous behavior of their persecuted14 heroines. Everything had to be interpreted for Anna. Her opinions about the smallest and most commonplace things were gleaned15 from the Denver papers, the church weeklies, from sermons and Sunday-School addresses. Scarcely anything was attractive to her in its natural state—indeed, scarcely anything was decent until it was clothed by the opinion of some authority. Her ideas about habit, character, duty, love, marriage, were grouped under heads, like a book of popular quotations16, and were totally unrelated to the emergencies of human living. She discussed all these subjects with other Methodist girls of her age. They would spend hours, for instance, in deciding what they would or would not tolerate in a suitor or a husband, and the frailties17 of masculine nature were too often a subject of discussion among them. In her behavior Anna was a harmless girl, mild except where her prejudices were concerned, neat and industrious18, with no graver fault than priggishness; but her mind had really shocking habits of classification. The wickedness of Denver and of Chicago, and even of Moonstone, occupied her thoughts too much. She had none of the delicacy19 that goes with a nature of warm impulses, but the kind of fishy20 curiosity which justifies21 itself by an expression of horror.
Thea, and all Thea’s ways and friends, seemed indecorous to Anna. She not only felt a grave social discrimination against the Mexicans; she could not forget that Spanish Johnny was a drunkard and that “nobody knew what he did when he ran away from home.” Thea pretended, of course, that she liked the Mexicans because they were fond of music; but every one knew that music was nothing very real, and that it did not matter in a girl’s relations with people. What was real, then, and what did matter? Poor Anna!
Anna approved of Ray Kennedy as a young man of steady habits and blameless life, but she regretted that he was an atheist22, and that he was not a passenger conductor with brass23 buttons on his coat. On the whole, she wondered what such an exemplary young man found to like in Thea. Dr. Archie she treated respectfully because of his position in Moonstone, but she knew he had kissed the Mexican barytone’s pretty daughter, and she had a whole dossier of evidence about his behavior in his hours of relaxation24 in Denver. He was “fast,” and it was because he was “fast” that Thea liked him. Thea always liked that kind of people. Dr. Archie’s whole manner with Thea, Anna often told her mother, was too free. He was always putting his hand on Thea’s head, or holding her hand while he laughed and looked down at her. The kindlier manifestation25 of human nature (about which Anna sang and talked, in the interests of which she went to conventions and wore white ribbons) were never realities to her after all. She did not believe in them. It was only in attitudes of protest or reproof26, clinging to the cross, that human beings could be even temporarily decent.
Preacher Kronborg’s secret convictions were very much like Anna’s. He believed that his wife was absolutely good, but there was not a man or woman in his congregation whom he trusted all the way.
Mrs. Kronborg, on the other hand, was likely to find something to admire in almost any human conduct that was positive and energetic. She could always be taken in by the stories of tramps and runaway27 boys. She went to the circus and admired the bareback riders, who were “likely good enough women in their way.” She admired Dr. Archie’s fine physique and well-cut clothes as much as Thea did, and said she “felt it was a privilege to be handled by such a gentleman when she was sick.”
Soon after Anna became a church member she began to remonstrate28 with Thea about practicing—playing “secular music”—on Sunday. One Sunday the dispute in the parlor grew warm and was carried to Mrs. Kronborg in the kitchen. She listened judicially29 and told Anna to read the chapter about how Naaman the leper was permitted to bow down in the house of Rimmon. Thea went back to the piano, and Anna lingered to say that, since she was in the right, her mother should have supported her.
“No,” said Mrs. Kronborg, rather indifferently, “I can’t see it that way, Anna. I never forced you to practice, and I don’t see as I should keep Thea from it. I like to hear her, and I guess your father does. You and Thea will likely follow different lines, and I don’t see as I’m called upon to bring you up alike.”
Anna looked meek30 and abused. “Of course all the church people must hear her. Ours is the only noisy house on this street. You hear what she’s playing now, don’t you?”
Mrs. Kronborg rose from browning her coffee. “Yes; it’s the Blue Danube waltzes. I’m familiar with ’em. If any of the church people come at you, you just send ’em to me. I ain’t afraid to speak out on occasion, and I wouldn’t mind one bit telling the Ladies’ Aid a few things about standard composers.” Mrs. Kronborg smiled, and added thoughtfully, “No, I wouldn’t mind that one bit.”
Anna went about with a reserved and distant air for a week, and Mrs. Kronborg suspected that she held a larger place than usual in her daughter’s prayers; but that was another thing she didn’t mind.
Although revivals were merely a part of the year’s work, like examination week at school, and although Anna’s piety31 impressed her very little, a time came when Thea was perplexed32 about religion. A scourge33 of typhoid broke out in Moonstone and several of Thea’s schoolmates died of it. She went to their funerals, saw them put into the ground, and wondered a good deal about them. But a certain grim incident, which caused the epidemic34, troubled her even more than the death of her friends.
Early in July, soon after Thea’s fifteenth birthday, a particularly disgusting sort of tramp came into Moonstone in an empty box car. Thea was sitting in the hammock in the front yard when he first crawled up to the town from the depot35, carrying a bundle wrapped in dirty ticking under one arm, and under the other a wooden box with rusty36 screening nailed over one end. He had a thin, hungry face covered with black hair. It was just before suppertime when he came along, and the street smelled of fried potatoes and fried onions and coffee. Thea saw him sniffing37 the air greedily and walking slower and slower. He looked over the fence. She hoped he would not stop at their gate, for her mother never turned any one away, and this was the dirtiest and most utterly38 wretched-looking tramp she had ever seen. There was a terrible odor about him, too. She caught it even at that distance, and put her handkerchief to her nose. A moment later she was sorry, for she knew that he had noticed it. He looked away and shuffled40 a little faster.
A few days later Thea heard that the tramp had camped in an empty shack41 over on the east edge of town, beside the ravine, and was trying to give a miserable42
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