often demanded unreasonable service from her older brothers; that they
should sit up until after midnight to bring her home from parties when
she did not like the youth who had offered himself as her escort; or
that they should drive twelve miles into the country, on a winter night,
to take her to a ranch dance, after they had been working hard all day.
Gunner often got bored with his own clothes or stilts or sled, and
wanted Axel’s. But Thea, from the time she was a little thing, had her
own routine. She kept out of every one’s way, and was hard to manage
only when the other children interfered with her. Then there was trouble
indeed: bursts of temper which used to alarm Mrs. Kronborg. “You ought
to know enough to let Thea alone. She lets you alone,” she often said to
the other children.
One may have staunch friends in one’s own family, but one seldom has
admirers. Thea, however, had one in the person of her addle-pated aunt,
Tillie Kronborg. In older countries, where dress and opinions and
manners are not so thoroughly standardized as in our own West, there is
a belief that people who are foolish about the more obvious things of
life are apt to have peculiar insight into what lies beyond the obvious.
The old woman who can never learn not to put the kerosene can on the
stove, may yet be able to tell fortunes, to persuade a backward child to
grow, to cure warts, or to tell people what to do with a young girl who
has gone melancholy. Tillie’s mind was a curious machine; when she was
awake it went round like a wheel when the belt has slipped off, and when
she was asleep she dreamed follies. But she had intuitions. She knew,
for instance, that Thea was different from the other Kronborgs, worthy
though they all were. Her romantic imagination found possibilities in
her niece. When she was sweeping or ironing, or turning the ice-cream
freezer at a furious rate, she often built up brilliant futures for
Thea, adapting freely the latest novel she had read.
Tillie made enemies for her niece among the church people because, at
sewing societies and church suppers, she sometimes spoke vauntingly,
with a toss of her head, just as if Thea’s “wonderfulness” were an
accepted fact in Moonstone, like Mrs. Archie’s stinginess, or Mrs.
Livery Johnson’s duplicity. People declared that, on this subject,
Tillie made them tired.
Tillie belonged to a dramatic club that once a year performed in the
Moonstone Opera House such plays as “Among the Breakers,” and “The
Veteran of 1812.” Tillie played character parts, the flirtatious old
maid or the spiteful INTRIGANTE. She used to study her parts up in the
attic at home. While she was committing the lines, she got Gunner or
Anna to hold the book for her, but when she began “to bring out the
expression,” as she said, she used, very timorously, to ask Thea to hold
the book. Thea was usually—not always—agreeable about it. Her mother
had told her that, since she had some influence with Tillie, it would be
a good thing for them all if she could tone her down a shade and “keep
her from taking on any worse than need be.” Thea would sit on the foot
of Tillie’s bed, her feet tucked under her, and stare at the silly text.
“I wouldn’t make so much fuss, there, Tillie,” she would remark
occasionally; “I don’t see the point in it”; or, “What do you pitch your
