Page:Willa Cather - The Song of the Lark.djvu/25

 She blushed and looked at him suspiciously. "I like 'There was a sound of revelry,'" she muttered.

The doctor laughed and closed the book. It was clumsily bound in padded leather and had been presented to the Reverend Peter Kronborg by his Sunday-School class as an ornament for his parlor table.

"Come into the office some day, and I 'll lend you a nice book. You can skip the parts you don't understand. You can read it in vacation. Perhaps you 'll be able to understand all of it by then."

Thea frowned and looked fretfully toward the piano. "In vacation I have to practice four hours every day, and then there 'll be Thor to take care of." She pronounced it "Tor."

"Thor? Oh, you 've named the baby Thor?" exclaimed the doctor.

Thea frowned again, still more fiercely, and said quickly, "That 's a nice name, only maybe it 's a little—old-fashioned." She was very sensitive about being thought a foreigner, and was proud of the fact that, in town, her father always preached in English; very bookish English, at that, one might add.

Born in an old Scandinavian colony in Minnesota, Peter Kronborg had been sent to a small divinity school in Indiana by the women of a Swedish evangelical mission, who were convinced of his gifts and who skimped and begged and gave church suppers to get the long, lazy youth through the seminary. He could still speak enough Swedish to exhort and to bury the members of his country church out at Copper Hole, and he wielded in his Moonstone pulpit a somewhat pompous English vocabulary he had learned out of books at college. He always spoke of "the infant Saviour," "our Heavenly Father," etc. The poor man had no natural, spontaneous human speech. If he had his sincere moments, they were perforce inarticulate. Probably a good deal of his pretentiousness was due