“What are you reading?” The doctor reached under the covers and pulled out a book of Byron’s poems. “Do you like this?”
She looked confused, turned over a few pages rapidly, and pointed to “My native land, good-night.” “That,” she said sheepishly.
“How about ‘Maid of Athens’?”
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 to the fact that he habitually expressed himself in a book learned language, wholly remote from anything personal, native, or homely. Mrs. Kronborg spoke Swedish to her own sisters and to her sister-in-law Tillie, and colloquial English to her neighbors. Thea, who had a rather sensitive ear, until she went to school never spoke at all, except in monosyllables, and her mother was convinced that she was tongue-tied. She was still inept in speech for a child so intelligent. Her ideas were usually clear, but she seldom attempted to explain them, even at school, where she excelled in “written work” and never did more than mutter a reply.