cow.'

'He doesn't talk about the fifteen dollars,' I exclaimed indignantly.
'He doesn't find fault with people.'

'He say I break his saw when we build, and I never,' grumbled Ambrosch.

I knew he had broken the saw, and then hid it and lied about it. I began
to wish I had not stayed for supper. Everything was disagreeable to
me. Antonia ate so noisily now, like a man, and she yawned often at
the table and kept stretching her arms over her head, as if they ached.
Grandmother had said, 'Heavy field work'll spoil that girl. She'll lose
all her nice ways and get rough ones.' She had lost them already.

After supper I rode home through the sad, soft spring twilight. Since
winter I had seen very little of Antonia. She was out in the fields from
sunup until sundown. If I rode over to see her where she was ploughing,
she stopped at the end of a row to chat for a moment, then gripped
her plough-handles, clucked to her team, and waded on down the furrow,
making me feel that she was now grown up and had no time for me. On
Sundays she helped her mother make garden or sewed all day. Grandfather
was pleased with Antonia. When we complained of her, he only smiled and
said, 'She will help some fellow get ahead in the world.'

Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but the prices of things, or how
much she could lift and endure. She was too proud of her strength. I
knew, too, that Ambrosch put upon her some chores a girl ought not to
do, and that the farm-hands around the country joked in a nasty way
about it. Whenever I saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her beasts,
sunburned, sweaty, her dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest
dust-plastered, I used to think of the tone in which poor Mr. Shimerda,
who could say so little, yet managed to say so much when he exclaimed,
'My Antonia!'

XVIII

AFTER I BEGAN TO go to the country school, I saw less of the Bohemians.
We were sixteen pupils at the sod schoolhouse, and we all came on
horseback and brought our dinner. My schoolmates were none of them very
interesting, but I somehow felt that, by making comrades of them, I
was getting even with Antonia for her indifference. Since the father's
death, Ambrosch was more than ever the head of the house, and he seemed
to direct the feelings as well as the fortunes of his womenfolk. Antonia
often quoted his opinions to me, and she let me see that she admired
him, while she thought of me only as a little boy. Before the spring