Page:Willa Cather - The Song of the Lark.djvu/474

 of those between seasons; the old singers are too old, and the new ones are too new. They might as well risk me as anybody. So I want good terms. The next five or six years are going to be my best."

"You 'll get what you demand, if you are uncompromising. I 'm safe in congratulating you now."

Thea laughed. "It 's a little early. I may not get it at all. They don't seem to be breaking their necks to meet me. I can go back to Dresden."

As they turned the curve and walked westward they got the wind from the side, and talking was easier.

Fred lowered his collar and shook the snow from his shoulders. "Oh, I don't mean on the contract particularly. I congratulate you on what you can do, Thea, and on all that lies behind what you do. On the life that 's led up to it, and on being able to care so much. That, after all, is the unusual thing."

She looked at him sharply, with a certain apprehension. "Care? Why should n't I care? If I did n't, I 'd be in a bad way. What else have I got?" She stopped with a challenging interrogation, but Ottenburg did not reply. "You mean," she persisted, "that you don't care as much as you used to?"

"I care about your success, of course." Fred fell into a slower pace. Thea felt at once that he was talking seriously and had dropped the tone of half-ironical exaggeration he had used with her of late years. "And I 'm grateful to you for what you demand from yourself, when you might get off so easily. You demand more and more all the time, and you 'll do more and more. One is grateful to anybody for that; it makes life in general a little less sordid. But as a matter of fact, I 'm not much interested in how anybody sings anything."

"That 's too bad of you, when I 'm just beginning to see what is worth doing, and how I want to do it!" Thea spoke in an injured tone.