By the first of February Thea had been in Chicago almost 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 funerals, 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 shunned¹ 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 accustom² 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 wilderness³ through which one had to find one’s way. She felt no interest in the general briskness⁴ and zest⁵ of the crowds. The crash and scramble⁶ 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 mittened⁷ 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 earrings⁸, on white velvet⁹. These seemed very well worth while to her, things worth coveting¹⁰.
 
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 Ward¹¹ and Company’s big mail-order store, and the packing-houses, to which all the hogs¹² and cattle that went through Moonstone were bound. One of Mrs. Lorch’s lodgers¹³ 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 Packingtown. Eckman was a toughish young Swede, and he thought it would be something of a lark¹⁵ to take a pretty girl through the slaughter-houses. But he was disappointed. 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 ardently¹⁶ 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 Institute that afternoon. Several of her friends had sketches¹⁷ in the exhibit. Thea, who always felt that she was behindhand 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 always 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 spoke¹⁴, 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, tilting¹⁸ 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 reassured¹⁹ them. “I like to look at oil paintings.”
 
One bleak²⁰ day in February, when the wind was blowing 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 buttons 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 remonstrated²¹ with herself severely²². 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 tiresome²³ overtures²⁴ of friendship, the stout²⁵ contralto in the choir²⁶ whom she so unreasonably²⁷ hated, and even, for a little while, the torment²⁸ 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 associated 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 equestrian²⁹ statue of an evil, cruel-looking general with an unpronounceable name. She used to walk round and round this terrible man and his terrible horse, frowning at him, brooding upon him, as if she had to make some momentous³⁰ decision 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 miseries³¹ and old sorrows of the world, that she ran up the wide staircase to the pictures. There she liked best the ones that told stories. There was a painting by Gérôme 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 almost as big as a telegraph pole, and before him was stretched his dead tiger, a splendid beast, and there were pink roses scattered³² about him. She loved, too, a picture of some boys bringing in a newborn calf³³ 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 indeed. 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 boundless³⁴ satisfaction she felt when she looked at the picture.
 
Before Thea had any idea how fast the weeks were flying, before Mr. Larsen’s &ldquo............