"THE SONG OF THE LARK" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cather Willa Sibert)

an obstinate contender for proprieties and not always fair-
minded. To see the young Kronborgs headed for Sunday-
School was like watching a military drill. Mrs. Kronborg
let her children's minds alone. She did not pry into their
thoughts or nag them. She respected them as individuals,
and outside of the house they had a great deal of liberty.
But their communal life was definitely ordered.

In the winter the children breakfasted in the kitchen;
Gus and Charley and Anna first, while the younger chil-
dren were dressing. Gus was nineteen and was a clerk in
a dry-goods store. Charley, eighteen months younger,
worked in a feed store. They left the house by the kitchen
door at seven o'clock, and then Anna helped her Aunt
Tillie get the breakfast for the younger ones. Without the
help of this sister-in-law, Tillie Kronborg, Mrs. Kronborg's
life would have been a hard one. Mrs. Kronborg often
reminded Anna that "no hired help would ever have taken
the same interest."

Mr. Kronborg came of a poorer stock than his wife; from
a lowly, ignorant family that had lived in a poor part of
Sweden. His great-grandfather had gone to Norway to
work as a farm laborer and had married a Norwegian girl.
This strain of Norwegian blood came out somewhere in
each generation of the Kronborgs. The intemperance of
one of Peter Kronborg's uncles, and the religious mania
of another, had been alike charged to the Norwegian
grandmother. Both Peter Kronborg and his sister Tillie
were more like the Norwegian root of the family than
like the Swedish, and this same Norwegian strain was

strong in Thea, though in her it took a very different
character.

Tillie was a queer, addle-pated thing, as flighty as a girl
at thirty-five, and overweeningly fond of gay clothes--
which taste, as Mrs. Kronborg philosophically said, did
nobody any harm. Tillie was always cheerful, and her
tongue was still for scarcely a minute during the day. She
had been cruelly overworked on her father's Minnesota
farm when she was a young girl, and she had never been
so happy as she was now; had never before, as she said,
had such social advantages. She thought her brother the
most important man in Moonstone. She never missed a
church service, and, much to the embarrassment of the
children, she always "spoke a piece" at the Sunday-School
concerts. She had a complete set of "Standard Recita-