Ántonia’s success at the tent had its consequences. The iceman lingered too long now, when he came into the covered porch to fill the refrigerator. The delivery boys hung about the kitchen when they brought the groceries. Young farmers who were in town for Saturday came tramping through the yard to the back door to engage dances, or to invite Tony to parties and picnics. Lena and Norwegian Anna dropped in to help her with her work, so that she could get away early. The boys who brought her home after the dances sometimes laughed at the back gate and wakened Mr. Harling from his first sleep. A crisis was inevitable.
One Saturday night Mr. Harling had gone down to the cellar for beer. As he came up the stairs in the dark, he heard scuffling on the back porch, and then the sound of a vigorous slap. He looked out through the side door in time to see a pair of long legs vaulting over the picket fence. Ántonia was standing there, angry and excited. Young Harry Paine, who was to marry his employer’s daughter on Monday, had come to the tent with a crowd of friends and danced all evening. Afterward, he begged Ántonia to let him walk home with her. She said she supposed he was a nice young man, as he was one of Miss Frances’s friends, and she didn’t mind. On the back porch he tried to kiss her, and when she protested—because he was going to be married on Monday—he caught her and kissed her until she got one hand free and slapped him.
Mr. Harling put his beer-bottles down on the table. ‘This is what I’ve been expecting, Ántonia. You’ve been going with girls who have a reputation for being free and easy, and now you’ve got the same reputation. I won’t have this and that fellow tramping about my back yard all the time. This is the end of it, tonight. It stops, short. You can quit going to these dances, or you can hunt another place. Think it over.’
The next morning when Mrs. Harling and Frances tried to reason with Ántonia, they found her agitated but determined. ‘Stop going to the tent?’ she panted. ‘I wouldn’t think of it for a minute! My own father couldn’t make me stop! Mr. Harling ain’t my boss outside my work. I won’t give up my friends, either. The boys I go with are nice fellows. I thought Mr. Paine was all right, too, because he used to come here. I guess I gave him a red face for his wedding, all right!’ she blazed out indignantly.
‘You’ll have to do one thing or the other, Ántonia,’ Mrs. Harling told her decidedly. ‘I can’t go back on what Mr. Harling has said. This is his house.’
‘Then I’ll just leave, Mrs. Harling. Lena’s been wanting me to get a place closer to her for a long while. Mary Svoboda’s going away from the Cutters’ to work at the hotel, and I can have her place.’
Mrs. Harling rose from her chair. ‘Ántonia, if you go to the Cutters’ to work, you cannot come back to this house again. You know what that man is. It will be the ruin of you.’
Tony snatched up the teakettle and began to pour boiling water over the glasses, laughing excitedly. ‘Oh, I can take care of myself! I’m a lot stronger than Cutter is. They pay four dollars there, and there’s no children. The work’s nothing; I can have every evening, and be out a lot in the afternoons.’
‘I thought you liked children. Tony, what’s come over you?’
‘I don’t know, something has.’ Ántonia tossed her head and set her jaw. ‘A girl like me has got to take her good times when she can. Maybe there won’t be any tent next year. I guess I want to have my fling, like the other girls.’