anything in his thoughts, he harmed it. He had taught in music schools
in St. Louis and Kansas City, where the shallowness and complacency of
the young misses had maddened him. He had encountered bad manners and
bad faith, had been the victim of sharpers of all kinds, was dogged by
bad luck. He had played in orchestras that were never paid and wandering
opera troupes which disbanded penniless. And there was always the old
enemy, more relentless than the others. It was long since he had wished
anything or desired anything beyond the necessities of the body. Now
that he was tempted to hope for another, he felt alarmed and shook his
head.
It was his pupil’s power of application, her rugged will, that
interested him. He had lived for so long among people whose sole
ambition was to get something for nothing that he had learned not to
look for seriousness in anything. Now that he by chance encountered it,
it recalled standards, ambitions, a society long forgot. What was it she
reminded him of? A yellow flower, full of sunlight, perhaps. No; a thin
glass full of sweet-smelling, sparkling Moselle wine. He seemed to see
such a glass before him in the arbor, to watch the bubbles rising and
breaking, like the silent discharge of energy in the nerves and brain,
the rapid florescence in young blood—Wunsch felt ashamed and dragged
his slippers along the path to the kitchen, his eyes on the ground.
V
The children in the primary grades were sometimes required to make
relief maps of Moonstone in sand. Had they used colored sands, as the
Navajo medicine men do in their sand mosaics, they could easily have
indicated the social classifications of Moonstone, since these conformed
to certain topographical boundaries, and every child understood them
perfectly.
The main business street ran, of course, through the center of the town.
To the west of this street lived all the people who were, as Tillie
Kronborg said, “in society.” Sylvester Street, the third parallel with
Main Street on the west, was the longest in town, and the best dwellings
were built along it. Far out at the north end, nearly a mile from the
court-house and its cottonwood grove, was Dr. Archie’s house, its big
yard and garden surrounded by a white paling fence. The Methodist Church
was in the center of the town, facing the court-house square. The
Kronborgs lived half a mile south of the church, on the long street that
stretched out like an arm to the depot settlement. This was the first
street west of Main, and was built up only on one side. The preacher’s
house faced the backs of the brick and frame store buildings and a draw
full of sunflowers and scraps of old iron. The sidewalk which ran in
front of the Kronborgs’ house was the one continuous sidewalk to the
depot, and all the train men and roundhouse employees passed the front
gate every time they came uptown. Thea and Mrs. Kronborg had many
friends among the railroad men, who often paused to chat across the
fence, and of one of these we shall have more to say.
In the part of Moonstone that lay east of Main Street, toward the deep
ravine which, farther south, wound by Mexican Town, lived all the
humbler citizens, the people who voted but did not run for office. The
