music. Guess you’ll have to get somebody else.”
The club lifted its eyebrows. Several of Lily Fisher’s friends coughed.
Mr. Upping flushed. The stout woman who always played the injured wife
called Tillie’s attention to the fact that this would be a fine
opportunity for her niece to show what she could do. Her tone was
condescending.
Tillie threw up her head and laughed; there was something sharp and wild
about Tillie’s laugh—when it was not a giggle. “Oh, I guess Thea hasn’t
got time to do any showing off. Her time to show off ain’t come yet. I
expect she’ll make us all sit up when it does. No use asking her to take
the part. She’d turn her nose up at it. I guess they’d be glad to get
her in the Denver Dramatics, if they could.”
The company broke up into groups and expressed their amazement. Of
course all Swedes were conceited, but they would never have believed
that all the conceit of all the Swedes put together would reach such a
pitch as this. They confided to each other that Tillie was “just a
little off, on the subject of her niece,” and agreed that it would be as
well not to excite her further. Tillie got a cold reception at
rehearsals for a long while afterward, and Thea had a crop of new
enemies without even knowing it.
X
Wunsch and old Fritz and Spanish Johnny celebrated Christmas together,
so riotously that Wunsch was unable to give Thea her lesson the next
day. In the middle of the vacation week Thea went to the Kohlers’
through a soft, beautiful snowstorm. The air was a tender blue-gray,
like the color on the doves that flew in and out of the white dove-house
on the post in the Kohlers’ garden. The sand hills looked dim and
sleepy. The tamarisk hedge was full of snow, like a foam of blossoms
drifted over it. When Thea opened the gate, old Mrs. Kohler was just
coming in from the chicken yard, with five fresh eggs in her apron and a
pair of old top-boots on her feet. She called Thea to come and look at a
bantam egg, which she held up proudly. Her bantam hens were remiss in
zeal, and she was always delighted when they accomplished anything. She
took Thea into the sitting-room, very warm and smelling of food, and
brought her a plateful of little Christmas cakes, made according to old
and hallowed formulae, and put them before her while she warmed her
feet. Then she went to the door of the kitchen stairs and called: “Herr
Wunsch, Herr Wunsch!”
Wunsch came down wearing an old wadded jacket, with a velvet collar. The
brown silk was so worn that the wadding stuck out almost everywhere. He
avoided Thea’s eyes when he came in, nodded without speaking, and
pointed directly to the piano stool. He was not so insistent upon the
scales as usual, and throughout the little sonata of Mozart’s she was
studying, he remained languid and absent-minded. His eyes looked very
heavy, and he kept wiping them with one of the new silk handkerchiefs
Mrs. Kohler had given him for Christmas. When the lesson was over he did
not seem inclined to talk. Thea, loitering on the stool, reached for a
tattered book she had taken off the music-rest when she sat down. It was
a very old Leipsic edition of the piano score of Gluck’s “Orpheus.” She
