While Cather was basking in the glow of being a published poet, a momentous chain of events was taking place. H. H. McClure, head of the McClure Syndicate, passed through Lincoln scouting for talent, and Will Owen Jones urged him to look at the work of his former columnist. H. H. McClure told his cousin, S. S. McClure, the magazine editor and publisher, and that volatile genius wrote Cather inviting her to submit her stories for possible magazine and book publication. She mailed them to him in April but without much confidence that anything significant would happen. She already had submitted some of her stories to McClure's Magazine, and they had come back with rejection slips. A week after the parcel left Pittsburgh, however, she received a telegram from McClure summoning her to his office immediately. As soon as she could get away from her school, she took the train to New York and presented herself to McClure on the morning of May 1, 1903.

Life was never the same for her after that interview. She walked into the offices of McClure's on East Twenty-third Street at ten o'clock that morning not worrying much, she wrote Jones afterwards, about streetcar accidents and such; at one o'clock she left stepping carefully. She had become a valuable property and worth saving. McClure with characteristic enthusiasm for his discoveries had offered her the world. He would publish her stories in book form. He would use them first in his magazine, and those he could not use, he would place in other journals for her. He wanted to publish everything she wrote from that point on. When she told him that some of the stories already had been rejected by McClure's, he said he never had seen them and called in his manuscript readers and asked them in her presence to give an accounting of their stewardship. She wrote Jones: “I sat and held my chin high and thought my hour had struck.” A moment like that turned back the clock for her and made her feel as important as when she was editor of the Hesperian. There were even more plans in the wind, she said, but if she wrote of them she would be writing until midnight. She thanked him for getting her launched at last, and with a light heart signed herself faithfully always.

There was more to come after the interview in the magazine office. McClure took her out to his home at Ardsley in Westchester County to meet his wife and children and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, who was visiting the McClures. Mrs. Stevenson already had read the stories, and they talked them over together. McClure accepted the tales without any revisions and wanted to know all about his new discovery, who she was, where she came from, what she had done up to then. There was no circumstance of her life that he did not inquire into, and he began to plan her future for her. She said that if he had been a religious leader he would have had people going to the stake for him. What a genius he had for proselyting! He took a hold of one in such a personal way that business ceased to be a feature of one's relationship with him.

McClure urged her to stay with them until she had to return to Pittsburgh, but Cather could remain only a day because she had promised to visit the Canfields, who then lived in New York. When she left McClure, she was in a state of delirious excitement, his captive for life. Three years later she went to work for him, eleven years later wrote his autobiography, and in his old age, when she was rich and he was old and poor, contributed to his support. Next to her father and brothers he was the most important man in her life. Her devotion to McClure, however, was a hindrance to her career, for he kept her editing his magazine long after she should have been channeling all her creative energies into writing fiction.

Meantime, her future seemed assured, and her first volume of fiction would be published the following year. She was out in the current and moving swiftly at last, ten years after her debut as a newspaper columnist and drama critic. Though she still had a lot to learn about writing, she never again would have trouble placing her work. But she still had to return to Pittsburgh and her classroom. As it turned out, she would remain on the faculty of Allegheny High School for two more years. McClure was longer on promises than on performance and did not bring out her book until 1905. He also used only two of her stories in his magazine and did not find other magazines to take three more that had not been published previously. She never commented on his failure; she was happy enough to have a contract that assured publication.

Seven stories made up the collection that McClure, Phillips, and Company agreed to bring out. One, “‘A Death in the Desert,’” already had appeared in Scribner's the previous January; another, “A Wagner Matinee,” was published by Everybody's Magazine the following February and may have been placed there by McClure. Two more, “The Sculptor's Funeral” and “Paul's Case,” generally regarded as the two best tales in the group, came out in McClure's in 1905, the latter appearing actually a few weeks after the book. Given the title The Troll Garden, the collection was published in April. It carried on its title page a quotation from Charles Kingsley: “A fairy palace, with a fairy garden; … Inside the Trolls dwell, … Working at their magic forges, making and making always things rare and strange.” Across from the title page was another epigraph from Christina Rossetti's “The Goblin Market”: “We must not look at Goblin men, / We must not buy their fruits; / Who knows upon what soil they fed / Their hungry thirsty roots?” And the book was dedicated to Isabelle McClung.

All of the stories in The Troll Garden deal with art and artists. Readers of Cather's newspaper columns might have been surprised at these stories if they had remembered her writing in 1901, “The world is weary unto death of stories about artists and scholars and aesthetic freaks, and of studies of the ‘artistic temperament.’” Nevertheless she was interested in the lives of artists and musicians and continued writing stories about them for the next two decades. The East still had most of her attention, for five of the tales take place in Pittsburgh and New York, Boston and London. The Boston story is about the West, but only two are laid in Western towns.

There is overall design and meaning in the collection and a careful arrangement of stories to support the themes woven into the fabric of the text. The two epigraphs provide a clue to Cather's meaning. The quotation from Kingsley comes from The Roman and the Teuton and is part of a parable he tells to introduce a discussion of the invasion of Rome by the barbarians. The forest people, who represent the barbarians, are attracted to the troll garden (Rome), covet it, and finally overrun it, only to discover afterwards that they have destroyed the marvels they sought.

In Rossetti's poem two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, live innocently together in a fairy-tale cottage. Every morning and evening animal-like goblin men emerge from a sinister glen nearby hawking their luscious fruit. The girls know these are forbidden fruits, but Laura cannot resist the temptation and buys the fruit, paying with a golden curl. The dire consequences of this act are that Laura can no longer hear the seductive cries of the goblin men and goes into a physical decline. As she becomes prematurely old and haggard, Lizzie, who still can hear the tempting offers, sets about to save her sister. She confronts the goblin men with an offer to buy, but she will not taste. A dreadful fracas results, and the men smear the fruit over her. She rushes home, invites Laura to “eat me, drink me.” Laura kisses Lizzie hungrily but finds that the juices of the fruit are now bitter, repulsive. The outcome of this encounter, however, is the restoration to health and youth of the wayward sister.

In a column Cather wrote for the Journal in 1895 she quoted and summarized the poem, concluding, “Never has the purchase of pleasure, its loss in its own taking, the loathsomeness of our own folly in those we love, been put more quaintly and directly.” For her story collection she equated the fruits of the goblin men to the magical things rare and strange made by the trolls in their garden. In either case the possession was fraught with danger: things desired are not only delightful and marvelous but also dangerous and capable of corrupting. There is no evidence that Cather was aware of the sexual allegory here that contemporary feminist critics have read as the cry of a Victorian woman against the sexual politics of the nineteenth century.

In the arrangement of the stories, the first and the last, “Flavia and Her Artists” and “Paul's Case,” depict characters seduced by art. Flavia Hamilton, who operates a “hotel, habited by freaks,” as the ironical actress-commentator Miss Broadwood puts it, is pursuing false gods in her worship of art. Cather must have observed archetypal Flavias in her years as a music and drama critic in Pittsburgh when she attended soirées given by Pennsylvania matrons, wives of steel and coal moguls, who devoted themselves to lion hunting. Flavia Canfield was enough like the title character to cause a temporary estrangement between Cather and Dorothy Canfield. That Flavia cannot distinguish between the true and the false is overt enough in the talk, but her myopia is further accentuated by Cather's abundant use of Roman allusions, always ironically. Her house is a “temple to the gods of Victory, a sort of triumphal arch”; her relationship to her children is described as like that of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi; and the story ends with Arthur Hamilton, her husband, compared to Gaius Marius among the ruins of Carthage.

The Jamesian flavor of this story is obvious, for Cather was still in her Henry James phase, and the reason she never reprinted the story may well have been that it seemed later too much influenced by the master. But her attention to James's craftsmanship was important to her in developing narrative skill. The story is well told through the perspective of Imogen Willard, daughter of one of Flavia's old friends, who is invited to Flavia's menagerie because she has the odd distinction of being a woman who has earned a doctorate in philology. Imogen (perhaps suggested by Dorothy Canfield), because of her childhood friendship with Flavia's husband, can observe the relationship between the couple as Arthur's partisan. The invention of Miss Broadwood (much like the real actress Johnston Bennett), who doesn't take herself seriously, provides the running commentary on the “freaks” by one who is a real artist, not a stuffed shirt.

What Flavia does not know when she fills her house with artists is that her guests hold her in contempt. The story turns on the vicious profile of her that M. Roux, a famous French novelist, gives an interviewer after he leaves the house party. Flavia's indulgent, patient husband withholds knowledge of the interview from her and deliberately insults the guests in order to empty the house. The tale ends with her thinking that her husband is a barbarian incapable of appreciating art.

“Paul's Case,” perhaps Cather's best-known story, depicts a forest child destroyed by the forbidden fruit. Paul is a Pittsburgh schoolboy who cares nothing about Latin or math but lives for Carnegie Hall, where he has a job ushering, and for the theater, where he has friends among the local stock company. He hates his life in a prosaic, conventional, middle-class neighborhood. Paul's principal and his father decide that he must leave school, go to work, and stop hanging around the theater and Carnegie Hall. But Paul cannot stand life in a business office and steals a thousand dollars from his employer. He goes to New York, buys himself elegant clothes, rents a suite at the Waldorf, and lives for a while his dream life as a rich patron of the arts; then when his money is gone and his father is about to come after him, he goes to Newark and quietly drops under the wheels of an oncoming locomotive.

The story has been justly admired for its narrative skill and its psychological portraiture. It is the only important use Cather ever made of her experience as a Pittsburgh high school teacher and the only story she would allow to be anthologized towards the end of her life. It captures the tone of Pittsburgh in 1905 and was compounded, she remembered in 1943, of two elements: the first was a boy she once had in her Latin class, a nervous youth who was always trying to make himself interesting and to prove that he knew members of the local stock company; the other was herself, particularly the feelings she had about New York and the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel when she was teaching and occasionally visiting the city. Another ingredient that she never mentioned was the theft of an employer's money by two Pittsburgh boys who ran off to Chicago. They were found broke in a Chicago hotel a week later and brought back home, but not prosecuted because the families reimbursed the employer. The Pittsburgh papers were full of the story, reported the Bookman in a brief profile of Cather at the time The Troll Garden was published. Cather also had sat on disciplinary committees, such as the one Paul appears before at the outset of the story. Norman Foerster remembered being disciplined by a committee on which Cather sat for carrying a crib-sheet into an examination.

“‘A Death in the Desert,’” the first story to be published in a magazine, is the centerpiece of the book. Its chief character, Adriance Hilgarde, inspired by Nevin, the composer, never appears in the story but is the dominant influence on the other characters. Cather must have written the tale soon after Nevin's death, but she later would not admit that she had put him into the story. She did concede that if people saw him in it, something of his personality must have been there. He was the first artist she had ever known, she said, and made a deep impression on her. She remembered him as a figure full of charm and grace and was glad if the story recalled him to friends who had known and loved him.

The story takes place on a ranch near Cheyenne, where one can see from the ranch house “a blinding stretch of yellow, flat as the sea in dead calm, splotched here and there with deep purple shadows; and, beyond, the ragged blue outline of the mountains.” Katherine Gaylord, singer, is dying of tuberculosis on her brother's ranch. Onto the scene comes Everett Hilgarde, younger brother of the great composer Adriance, who stops in Cheyenne en route to the West Coast. He accidentally discovers that Katherine is there dying and stays with her several weeks until the end. Years before when she had been on her way to stardom and one of his brother's students, he had loved her with a schoolboy's passion.

Not much happens in the story. Everett and Katherine talk, mostly about Adriance, and in their talk the lives of all three are revealed. Adriance sends the score of his latest sonata, the greatest composition he has yet written. As Everett plays it for her, she dissolves: “This is my tragedy, as I lie here spent by the race-course, listening to the feet of the runners as they pass me.” Adriance, youthful, charming, and exuberantly creative, still leads the race. While Katherine is dying Everett reflects on his own life. If her life is tragedy, his is pathos. He had the bad luck to resemble his brother, to aspire to an artistic career, but to be endowed with mediocre talent. He has accepted his fate, however, and resolved “to beat no more at doors he would never enter.”

Cather placed this story in the middle of the collection because it presents three different artists and three different careers. Katherine is a forest child who has entered the garden only to be destroyed there. Everett, who is always being mistaken for his brilliant brother, is one who is denied entrance. Adriance enters and survives. But Katherine and Adriance are really two sides of the same coin: Nevin in his prime and Nevin who died at the age of thirty-eight. The story gains irony from its setting in the stark landscape of eastern Wyoming and from the title, which comes from a poem by Browning, a dramatic monologue delivered by the Apostle John as he dies in a Middle Eastern cave attended only by a few faithful friends.

The second and sixth stories in The Troll Garden are an appropriate pair, because they both deal with western characters whose lives end in defeat. “The Sculptor's Funeral” is one of Cather's best-known stories because for many years she allowed anthologists to reprint it. Then late in her life she decided it presented a false picture of prairie towns and withdrew permission to use it. The tale is set in a little town like Red Cloud, though she moved it to Kansas, doubtless to avoid the charge of satirizing the homefolks. It falls into the category of revolt-from-the-village literature and invites comparison with the earlier work of E. W. Howe or Hamlin Garland and, later, the fiction of Sinclair Lewis and the poems of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology. The opening scene comes from the memory that inspired the poem “The Night Express,” and the plot was suggested by the funeral of a Pittsburgh artist, Stanley Reinhart. Cather wrote in a newspaper column at the time that Reinhart's family had not appreciated him, that no one in Pittsburgh knew anything about him, or cared, and that it passed all understanding how he could have come out of that commercial city.

The story begins with the arrival in Sand City of the body of Harvey Merrick, world-famous sculptor, who is regarded by his fellow townsmen as one local boy who did not amount to much. As the various characters sit about the mean and tasteless Merrick house during the wake, Banker Phelps expresses the general sentiment: “What Harve needed, of all people, was a course in some first-class Kansas City business college.” Then he might have amounted to something and helped run the family farm; instead, his father had indulged him and sent him off East and to France to study art. One man in town, however, knew, loved, and appreciated the sculptor, and voices scathing denunciation of the mean-spirited and ignorant villagers. He is Jim Laird, the local lawyer, who never managed to get away from Philistia, and by the time the sculptor's body is brought home, has become an alcoholic. The contrasts are further heightened by the creation of Henry Steavens, student and follower of the sculptor, who accompanies the body and provides a sympathetic audience for Laird.

“A Wagner Matinee” reverses the situation in “The Sculptor's Funeral” by taking a Nebraska farm wife to Boston. The story fits into the overall design of The Troll Garden because the narrator's Aunt Georgiana is a former musician who has been denied for more than thirty years any possibility of entering the garden. She has been exiled to the barbarous environment of a bleak prairie farm, where she has toiled like a slave helping her husband wrest a living from the inhospitable land. Cather paints a grim picture of Nebraska farm life in the pioneering days through her description of Georgiana with her “ill-fitting false teeth, and her skin … as yellow as a Mongolian's from constant exposure to a pitiless wind and to the alkaline water” and her hands that once had played the piano at the Boston Conservatory now “stretched and twisted into mere tentacles to hold and lift and knead with.” When the aunt has to visit Boston to collect a legacy left her by a bachelor uncle, she stays with her nephew, a Nebraska farm boy who, like Hamlin Garland, has managed to shake the mud off his boots and get to Boston. The pathos of the tale is overwhelming as the narrator, with misguided kindness, takes his aunt to a symphony concert and reawakens in her the memory of the lost garden. This is an excellent story, lean and compact, narrated with skill from a young man's point of view, the same perspective Cather used later in My Ántonia and other works.

“A Wagner Matinee” caused Cather a great deal of embarrassment when it came out in Everybody's in 1904. Will Owen Jones took her to task in the Journal: “The stranger to this state will associate Nebraska with the aunt's wretched figure, her ill-fitting false teeth, her skin yellowed by the weather. … If the writers of fiction who use western Nebraska as material would look up now and then and not keep their eyes and noses in the cattle yards, they might be more agreeable company.” Cather wrote Jones defending herself, denying that she had any intention of disparaging the state. She had placed the story back in pioneer times, she said, and thought that everyone admitted those were desolate days. She had thought she was paying tribute to those uncomplaining women, who weathered those times. Farm life was bad enough when she knew it, and what must it have been like before that? She had to admit, however, that she had used the farmhouse where she and her family had lived before they moved into Red Cloud and some of her recollections.

She also had to admit that her family felt insulted by the tale. Everyone assumed that her Aunt Franc had sat for the portrait of Aunt Georgiana, because Aunt Franc had graduated from Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary and had studied music before marrying George Cather in 1873 and moving to pioneer Nebraska. The family told her it was not nice to write about such things as she put into the description of Aunt Georgiana. Cather wrote a friend that the whole affair had been the nearest she ever had come to personal disgrace. She seemed to have done something horrid without realizing it, but someday she supposed it would seem funny. That she could not have intended cruelty to her aunt is perfectly clear from the warm, affectionate tone of all her letters to Aunt Franc. After visiting her aunt on the farm when she was in college, Cather wrote Mariel Gere that Aunt Franc had organized a literary society among the farm families at Catherton and she surely did her share of distributing manna in the wilderness.

The third and fifth stories in the collection are “The Garden Lodge” and “The Marriage of Phaedra,” one dealing with a musician and the other a painter. These are the poorest tales in the volume, stories that were not placed in magazines before book publication, and stories that Cather never reprinted. “The Garden Lodge” concerns Caroline Noble, who deliberately gives up a career as a concert pianist (as Cather's friend Ethel Litchfield had done) to marry a Wall Street tycoon. Caroline had grown up in an artistic household where there had been intense devotion to art but never enough money to pay the bills. “Caroline had served her apprenticeship to idealism and to all the embarrassing inconsistencies which it sometimes entails, and she decided to deny herself this diffuse, ineffectual answer to the sharp questions of life.”

After six years of marriage this practical, sensible woman is surrounded by children, wealth, and an indulgent, loving husband. One day she invites the great Wagnerian tenor Raymond d'Esquerré to stay with them, and they spend hours together in the garden lodge. He feels the need to get out of Klingsor's Garden occasionally and to work in a quiet place, and he knows Caroline Noble is no lion hunter but a serious, gifted nonprofessional artist. After he leaves, she goes to the garden lodge alone, plays the first act of Die Walküre, the last of his roles they had practiced together, and the memory of his presence overwhelms her. “It was not enough; this happy, useful, well-ordered life was not enough.” A storm breaks and rain beats in, as Caroline passes the night in a dark agony of the soul. The next morning, however, she awakes, despises herself for her self-indulgence, creeps back to the house from the garden lodge, and resumes her life.

“The Marriage of Phaedra” is about the sale of an unfinished masterpiece by the widow of a recently deceased artist. The barbarian in this story is the widow, who sells the painting against the deathbed wishes of the painter to a Jewish art dealer from Australia. This, in the mind of the point-of-view character, a young artist-admirer who wishes to write a biography of the master, is the equivalent of destroying the great painting. The tale was obviously suggested by Cather's visit to Burne-Jones's studio in London during her European trip. The valet James, who presides over the empty studio and was invented for Cather's travel letter to the Journal, is appropriately named, for this story is very Henry Jamesian in its narrative technique. The story develops as the artist-biographer researches his subject by striking up an acquaintance with the valet and interviewing the dead artist's sister-in-law and wife. The tale owes a further debt to James in its use of the painting, “The Marriage of Phaedra,” to give meaning. The marital difficulties of the painter of the story and his wife are suggested by the tangled affairs of the Greek myth in which Phaedra marries Theseus and then falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus.

McClure's enthusiasm for Cather's fiction notwithstanding, reviewers of The Troll Garden were not overwhelmed. The only long signed review in a national magazine appeared in the Bookman, but this reviewer, Bessie du Bois, was not enchanted. She called the book a “collection of freak stories that are either lurid, hysterical or unwholesome, and that remind one of nothing so much as the coloured supplement to the Sunday papers.” Except for Jim Laird in “The Sculptor's Funeral” and Paul in “Paul's Case,” she thought the characters all “mere dummies, with fancy names, on which to hang epigrams.” And the subject matter dealt with “the ash-heap of the human mind—the thoughts and feelings that come to all of us when the pressure of the will is low, the refuse and sweepings of the mental life.”

Other national reviewers treated the book among their brief notices. These were anonymous paragraphs that in general saw promise in Cather's work but were restrained. The New York Times thought the stories showed “deep feeling and ability,” but many were too ambitious and seemed “to be more the work of promise than fulfillment.” This reviewer probably had not read beyond the first story, for he called “Flavia and Her Artists” the best of the collection. The Independent reviewer would recommend the stories “strongly but not widely” among his friends, but he did select “The Sculptor's Funeral” and “Paul's Case” as the best. He rapped Cather on the knuckles for seeing only the ugly side of pioneer life. The Dial reviewer also seemed not to have read the entire book; the Critic found “real promise”; and the Reader Magazine described the tales as “singularly vivid, strong, true, original.”

When book buyers did not rush out to get The Troll Garden, McClure, Phillips, and Company did not reprint it, and there were still copies left in stock when the company sold its book business to Doubleday, Page and Company the next year. Cather took the book's lack of success philosophically and went on teaching high school. Witter Bynner, however, who then was fresh out of Harvard and McClure's office boy, had great faith in the book and tried to interest Henry James in it. He sent James a copy and followed it up with a letter. James replied that he had received the book but had had no intention of reading it until getting Bynner's letter. “Being now almost in my 100th year, and with a long and weary experience of such matters [receiving complimentary works of fiction] behind me, promiscuous fiction has become abhorrent to me, and I find it the hardest thing in the world to read almost any new novel. Any is hard enough, but the hardest from the innocent hands of young females, young American females perhaps above all.” But he added that in spite of these feelings he would do his best for Miss Cather. Bynner sent Cather a copy of the letter, to which she replied that it had given her a keen satisfaction. James's attitude was exactly the one she would have wished him to have, and she would have been very much hurt if he did not have the opinion he expressed about “promiscuous fiction.” She felt exactly the same as James about fiction by young females. His letter, she thought, was a kind of moral stimulant, and she promised Bynner she would stand up with good grace to whatever punishment James might mete out. There was, however, no further communication from James.

In 1911 Elizabeth Sergeant bought a secondhand copy of the book and read it for the first time. She found “The Sculptor's Funeral,” “A Wagner Matinee,” and “Paul's Case” all exciting stories, full of passion and superbly executed and wrote Cather of her “joy and critical estimate.” Cather replied that she was pleased Sergeant had found something to enjoy, but the stories had been written so long ago “that they now hardly seemed to belong to her. She herself had outgrown the harsh mood that had inspired the Western ones. The starvation of a girl avid for a richer environment seemed to stick out, to deform, to make the picture one-sided.” When Cather was chiding Edward Wagenknecht for wanting to resuscitate her early fiction in 1936, she said that if he wanted evidence against her, wasn't “‘A Death in the Desert’” poor enough? There was a certain honest feeling in it, she thought, of a very young kind, but it was really flimsy enough to bring up as a reproach to any writer.

By the time she wrote that letter she had completely abandoned “‘A Death in the Desert’” and was omitting it from her collected works. She had cut a third of the story when she reprinted it in 1920 in Youth and the Bright Medusa and improved it substantially, so much so that Dorothy Canfield Fisher in reviewing the later version commented on the changes. She suggested that anyone who wanted to see how a real artist could “smooth away crudeness without rooting out the life” of a story should study the revisions. Cather, however, was never satisfied with the tale and apparently decided it would be impossible to rework it further. The story contains more obtrusive literary allusions and quotations than any of her other stories, and it is likely that a young artist's death in the desert no longer had the power to move her at the age of sixty-five that it had when she was twenty-nine.

The three stories that Sergeant liked particularly survived in the collected works. Cather touched up “The Sculptor's Funeral” and “Paul's Case” for the 1920 and 1937 reprintings but made no substantial changes. “A Wagner Matinee,” however, underwent a successive softening of the harsh portrait of Aunt Georgiana, as Cather revised the tale in 1920 and again in 1937. One should read the story in The Troll Garden version, for the author performed so much plastic surgery on her character that she transformed Aunt Georgiana from a cruelly used, worn-out farm wife from a harsh, isolated prairie farm into a quaint little old lady from the boondocks.

After the book came out and the 1905 school year ended, Cather and Isabelle McClung traveled west to spend two months in Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Black Hills of South Dakota. They spent a week with Douglass in Cheyenne and a week camping in the Black Hills with Roscoe. After that they returned to Red Cloud for a month and helped Cather's father fix up a new house he had bought. She wrote Mariel Gere that her sister Jessica had a dear little home of her own and was pregnant and happy and that she had seen a good deal of Mrs. Garber, who was as charming as ever but greatly aged and saddened by the death of her husband. Her younger siblings Jack and Elsie were now big children, though they still seemed little to her. She thoroughly enjoyed her visit and thought the West was where she wanted to live. She said she was planning to get home to Red Cloud for a year before very long. After they left Red Cloud, McClung returned to Pittsburgh, and Cather went on to New York to visit Edith Lewis, whom she had met in Lincoln in the summer of 1903 and had visited in New York the summer before.

While Cather was awaiting publication of her book, she apparently tried to write a novel. If McClure wanted to publish everything she wrote, she would take him at his word. Little is known about this attempt, but several notes appeared in the Journal during the summer of 1905 when Cather was visiting Nebraska. The paper reported that she had finished a novel that would be published in the fall. It was said to be “in an entirely different vein from any of her previous work. It is her first long story … but will not make a very heavy book as it was cut down one-third with the intention of adding to its strength. The scene is laid in Pittsburgh.” By the following February the enterprise was dead, the manuscript returned from McClure. Cather wrote Bynner, who had asked what she was doing with the novel, that she had not taken it out of the wrapper he had mailed it in until a few weeks before when she needed a piece of string. She had done absolutely nothing with it. It seemed not quite bad enough to throw away and not quite good enough to wrestle with again. Therefore it was reposing in her old hat box. Thus it was back to teaching for another year.

Even if McClure had decided her manuscript was unpublishable, he did not forget that she was one of his authors. He must have sent her an invitation to Mark Twain's seventieth birthday dinner held in the Red Room at Delmonico's in New York on December 5. She was one of 170 literary and quasi-literary notables who attended the banquet arranged by Colonel George Harvey, head of Harper and Brothers. Cather also was one of the 50 guests who got to meet Twain before the dinner. Twain and Howells were the celebrities on this occasion, but there were many lesser notables that Cather must have been excited to meet or at least to see: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Alice Brown, George Ade, Julian Hawthorne, and Owen Wister. Charles Major and Rex Beach were there too, but Cather disliked their writing. George Washington Cable and John Burroughs were present; so were Andrew Carnegie and Emily Post. Somehow Dorothy Canfield, who had not yet begun her literary career, managed an invitation. Viewed in retrospect, the only important writer at the dinner besides Twain and Howells was Cather. No one had thought E. A. Robinson, Edith Wharton, or Theodore Dreiser worth inviting. It was a glittering evening nonetheless, and Cather enjoyed it seated at a table between two editors, Edward Martin of the humor magazine Life and Frederick Duneka of Harpers. Cather had a high opinion of Twain's Mississippi River books, though Huck Finn one of the three most enduring American classics, and later when she was living in Greenwich Village followed up her acquaintance.

By the time the second semester began during the winter of 1905-6, Cather's years in Pittsburgh were rapidly drawing to a close. Sometime in the early spring McClure made a quick trip to Pittsburgh, went to see Cather at the McClungs' house, stayed for dinner, and enchanted everyone with his talk. His magazine was in a state of crisis; he needed new editors immediately. When he returned to New York, he had persuaded Cather to join his staff even before the school year ended. The high school paper reported in March: “When we return from our April vacation, we shall fail to see Miss Cather; but … we feel relieved in knowing that next September she will again be able to take her classes.” The canny McClure must have lured Cather to New York on a temporary basis, then after she arrived persuaded her to stay. The finality of her departure was made clear when the June issue of the paper printed her farewell letter, dated June 2:

Dear Boys and Girls:

Now that I find that I shall not return to the High School next fall, I have a word to say to you. A number of my pupils in various classes, and especially in my Reporting Class, asked me, when I came away, whether I should be with you next year. At that time I fully expected to be. The changes in my plans which will prevent my doing so have been sudden and unforeseen. I should hate to have you think that I had not answered you squarely when you were good enough to ask whether I should return, or to have you think that I put you off with an excuse.

I had made many plans for your Senior work next year and had hoped that we should enjoy that work together. I must now leave you to enjoy it alone. One always has to choose between good things it seems. So I turn to a work I love with very real regret that I must leave behind, for the time at least, a work I had come to love almost as well. But I much more regret having to take leave of so many students whom I feel are good friends of mine. As long as I stay in New York, I shall always be glad to see any of my students when they come to the city.

I wish you every success in your coming examinations and in your senior work next year.

Faithfully yours,

Willa S. Cather

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One month after Shadows on the Rock came out, while Cather was at Grand Manan, her mother died in California. It was a relief to have the long ordeal over, but the pain of parting was nonetheless agonizing. With both parents gone Cather now was a member of the generation next to death. With neither husband nor children to cling to, the loss of parents was a heavier blow to Cather than to most people. She had come to appreciate her mother more and more as she grew older, and the sharp clash of personalities that once had struck sparks had long since given way to mutual love and respect. Jennie Cather, however, had remained an imperious, demanding mother to the end, and during the many months that she lay paralyzed in Pasadena, her daughter dared not revisit Red Cloud for fear of arousing her jealousy. Cather did not try to return to California for the funeral, nor did she go back to Nebraska when the body was brought to Red Cloud for burial.

She stayed on Grand Manan until the beginning of October, taking her daily walks along the solitary cliffs and adjusting to her new condition of life. She wrote Blanche Knopf three weeks after her mother's death that she was trying to get used to the strange feeling of having nobody behind her, nobody to report to. Helpless as her mother was, she expected an account of her children's activities, and Cather was glad her mind had not dimmed, as it would have in time. The next few months would be hard, Cather thought, and she didn't know just what she would do after leaving New Brunswick. She probably would go to Jaffrey, but then she might visit Virginia, where she had not been for nearly two decades. At any event, she was back in New York at the Grosvenor by the end of October 1931. She sent a note to Mrs. Canby on the thirtieth saying she wanted to see her as soon as she pulled herself together, but at that moment she felt unanchored, purposeless, and didn't know where to turn. The following year Cather wrote Zoë Akins that after forty-five it simply rains death and after fifty the storms grow fiercer. It seemed that she never opened a newspaper any more without reading of the death of someone she used to know. When she first knew Akins in her McClure days, she added, people didn't used to die at all.

During November she was sufficiently collected to make plans and decided to organize a family reunion in Red Cloud. At the end of the month she took a train west for her last visit to Nebraska. As soon as she reached Red Cloud, she plunged into the task of opening and cleaning her parents' house, which had been closed since her father died nearly four years before. She also had the roof reshingled and arranged for her mother's former maid, Lizzie Huffmann, to come from Colorado to keep house during the reunion. The family gathering was a great success, and Cather had a strong feeling of her mother's presence during the holiday season. With both parents gone her old ties of affection for her brothers must have seemed doubly precious. Her love for her brothers never had wavered since childhood, and she thought brother-sister relationships “the strongest and most satisfactory relation of human life.” In an essay she wrote in 1897, commenting on the love of Tom and Maggie Tulliver for each other in The Mill on the Floss, she had observed that the world didn't realize how strong this love can be that “sometimes exists between a brother and sister, a boy and girl who have laughed and sorrowed and learned the world together … who have entered into each other's lives and minds more completely than ever man or woman can again.”

The family reunion was good therapy. When Cather wrote Blanche Knopf to thank her for the gift of a gorgeous dressing gown, she reported having a wonderful Christmas season. She had been flying about in the car with her family seeing old friends, and the little town decked out with candles and Christmas trees was a beautiful sight under a full winter moon. They were having glorious weather, and she was feeling great affection for her patria, which to most people seemed so unattractive. Her parents' home was full of greens from New England and California and flowers from everywhere. She was planning a children's party on Holy Innocents' Day and had engaged the Grace Church choir boys to sing carols. She also had a lovely crèche with thirty figures that Isabelle Hambourg had sent her from France. This was her first real Christmas since her father's last Christmas in 1928.

Cather was almost totally unproductive in 1932. The only thing she wrote was her essay “A Chance Meeting,” which she published in the Atlantic Monthly early the next year. She returned from Red Cloud in January and in February went to bed with the flu. During the spring she read proof on her next book, Obscure Destinies, a collection of three stories she had written while at work on Shadows on the Rock, but apparently the next novel had not yet been conceived. The deepening Depression troubled her, though she was getting rich from her royalties. She had lost money on gilt-edged bonds; her old farm friends in Nebraska were in real trouble; and some of her friends and relatives had lost their jobs. When Mary Austin asked her to donate to a favorite charity, she declined on grounds that she already was helping keep half a dozen families and had loaned money to others who were in such dire straits she was sure they never could repay her. She continued her private benefactions throughout the Depression, and when her old friends on the farm were burned out during the terrible droughts of the thirties, she helped them survive. She even paid some of the taxes for the Pavelkas so that they would not lose their farm. She wrote Greenslet that she was willing to sell the movie rights to The Song of the Lark provided he could get a good price. Nothing came of this, however, but she did serialize her next novel, something she hated to do, in order to raise more money to assist people she loved.

The bright spot in her life at this time was the growing friendship with Yehudi Menuhin and his family. The meeting in Paris in 1930 quickly developed into a close relationship. Yehudi, who was fifteen in 1931, made a West Coast concert tour when she was visiting her mother in Pasadena, and she was able to attend his performances and spend some time with him. She was so taken with the Menuhin children, Yehudi and his sisters Yaltah and Hephzibah, that she wanted to dedicate Shadows on the Rock to them. She was talked out of this by a friend of the family, who thought the Menuhim parents were overly sensitive to the lionizing of their children and would have taken offense. In New York after the Red Cloud reunion Cather saw Yehudi several times. She recovered from the flu in time to have dinner with him and attend one of his concerts, and the day before he sailed for Europe they had breakfast together and then spent the entire morning in the park. She wrote Carrie Sherwood that his whole nature was as beautiful as his face and his talent. According to his nephew, Cather was one of the few outsiders who penetrated the defenses the elder Menuhins placed around their prodigies. When she decided people were worth her affection, she had a talent for friendship, and neither the Menuhin parents nor their children could resist her.

Lewis remembered: “She loved the Menuhin family as a whole, and each separate member of it individually.” Yehudi, of course, was the star, but she admired the mother and “found the two little girls—Yaltah was about seven, and Hephzibah a year or two older—endlessly captivating, amusing, and endearing.” “They were not only the most gifted children Willa Cather had ever known … they were also extremely lovable, affectionate, and unspoiled; in some ways funnily naive, in others sensitive and discerning far beyond their years. They had an immense capacity for admiration and hero-worship, and Willa Cather became, I think, their greatest hero.” Lewis called this friendship a “rare, devoted, and unclouded” relationship “that lighted all the years that followed.”

Obscure Destinies was published by Knopf in August 1932, even before all three of the stories in the collection had been serialized. The first of the trio, “Neighbour Rosicky,” had appeared in the Woman's Home Companion in April and May 1930, and the third tale, “Two Friends,” ran in the same magazine the month before book publication. “Old Mrs. Harris,” however, did not come out in the Ladies' Home Journal until September, October, and November 1932. All three stories return to Nebraska and old memories, and for some of Cather's public her abandonment of historical fiction came as a relief. Her father's death and her mother's long illness turned her mind to family and friends of her youth. The months she spent in Red Cloud both before and after her father died rekindled her enthusiasm for her adopted state. She wrote “Neighbour Rosicky” in New York before the end of 1928, “Two Friends” in Pasadena during her last visit to her mother, and “Old Mrs. Harris” at Grand Manan about the time her mother died.

“Neighbour Rosicky” is one of Cather's best known and most admired stories; best known because she allowed Whit Burnett to anthologize it in This Is My Best (1942), and Knopf subsequently let it be reprinted ten times in the two decades after her death; most admired because it ranks with “Coming, Aphrodite!” “Uncle Valentine,” “Old Mrs. Harris,” and “Tom Outland's Story” as the cream of her short fiction. The story is in a sense a sequel to My Ántonia, for Annie Pavelka's husband sat for the portrait of the Bohemian farmer Rosicky; but the emotional power of the tale derives from Cather's feelings about her father, and the title character's death by heart failure parallels the death of Charles Cather. She infused her memories of her father into Anton Rosicky much more successfully than she did into the apothecary Auclair in Shadows on the Rock. This story rarely fails to move even the most blasé reader.

At the outset of the tale one recognizes Ántonia's family some ten years after Jim Burden left them prospering on their farm. The children that Jim saw running up the stairs of the fruit cave, “a veritable explosion of life out of the dark cave into sunlight,” now are between twelve and twenty. Ántonia here is called Mary, an even more appropriate name for the Madonna of the Wheat Fields. The relationship between father and sons, husband and wife, is devoted and sympathetic, and the human equation in the Rosicky family always takes precedence over the economic one. Mary would rather put roses in her children's cheeks than sell her cream in town, and Rosicky, like Cuzak in My Ántonia, is an easygoing, good-natured husband. Rosicky is much less affluent than some of his neighbors, who are reminiscent of Nat Wheeler in One of Ours, but he owns his own land unencumbered and enjoys life.

The tone of “Neighbour Rosicky” is retrospective and elegiac and the story in Cather's usual fashion has little plot. It begins with Rosicky learning from his doctor that he has a bad heart and must take it easy for the rest of his life. This presents no problem because his five sons are old enough and willing to take over management of the farm. The conflict, which supplies what plot there is, concerns Rosicky's efforts to keep his oldest son from leaving the farm to work in the city. As an immigrant who had come to America from the slums of Europe, Rosicky has a horror of city life. Owning the land he has cultivated lovingly is for him the summum bonum. His son Rudolph, however, has married a town girl of native stock who is dissatisfied with farm life. Through a series of small incidents Cather draws Rosicky and his daughter-in-law Polly together, and at the conclusion when the old farmer dies he knows that Polly has become an integral part of his family. She is carrying his first grandchild, who will carry on the tradition, and he ends his life happy and fulfilled.

Rosicky is one of Cather's memorable characters. At the beginning and end he is observed through the eyes of Dr. Burleigh, and at key intervals in the narrative Cather inserts flashbacks to account for his life and attitudes up to the point at which the story begins. He also is seen in dramatic situations with the doctor, town merchants, Mary, and his children. On occasion the third-person narrative slips into Rosicky's consciousness to convey his ideas, and Cather's physical descriptions of the old man are highly evocative. All of these narrative strategies serve to create a fully developed, three-dimensional character. To accomplish this in a piece of short fiction requires the greatest artistry.

In the first of the small incidents that move the story along Rosicky asks his four boys who still live at home if they would be willing to forego driving into town Saturday night. He wants to take the Ford over to Rudolph and Polly so that they can go to the movies alone. The boys are disappointed, but Rosicky explains: “Polly ain't lookin' so good. I don't like to see nobody lookin' so sad. It comes hard fur a town girl to be a farmer's wife. I don't want no trouble to start in Rudolph's family. When it starts, it ain't so easy to stop. An American girl don't git used to our ways all at once.” He takes the car to Rudolph's nearby farm, insists that Polly leave washing the dishes to him while she gets fixed up for town. Polly is rather aloof at this point, still calls her father-in-law “Mr. Rosicky.”

Later Rudolph, Polly, and the rest of the family are together at Christmas. They discuss the outlook for crops the next summer. The last year was dry, and it looks as if the next one will be equally dry. The prospect is dismal, and Rudolph talks about getting a job in the city. At that point Mary tells about hard times when the children were little. It was one blistering day in July when a hot wind burned up the crops completely. Rosicky came in from the fields and announced that he was knocking off for the day. They were going to have a picnic in the orchard. He killed two chickens to fry and Mary prepared their supper. While they were eating, he announced that the crops had been ruined that day. There would be no corn at all that year. “That's why we're havin' a picnic. We might as well enjoy what we got.” Mary tells the children: “An' that's how your father behaved, when all the neighbours was so discouraged they couldn't look you in the face. An' we enjoyed ourselves that year, poor as we was, an' our neighbours wasn't a bit better off for bein' miserable.”

Following Mary's story, Rosicky tells of hard times when he was a young man. He had drifted from his native Bohemia to London where he apprenticed himself to a poor tailor. He boarded with his employer and his family, and none of them ever had enough to eat. One Christmas Eve the tailor's wife, who had been saving so she could have a goose for Christmas dinner, hid the roast goose in the cubby hole where Rosicky slept. He came in to bed late, smelled the goose, and was so hungry he ate half of it before he could stop. Later he was rescued from poverty in London by affluent Czechs, who helped him get to New York, where he made good wages as a journeyman tailor and for some years enjoyed a carefree bachelor life. Eventually he realized that city life was a dead end, went west to Nebraska, and became a farmer. After hearing this affecting story, Polly decides to invite all the Rosickys to her house for New Year's Eve.

The weather continues dry, but nonetheless Rudolph's alfalfa field comes up beautifully green in the spring. Rosicky worries that the Russian thistles blown in during the winter will take root and ruin the alfalfa, symbolically important because the field lies between parent and child. Because Rudolph is too busy to rake out the thistles, Rosicky does it without telling anyone. The work is too strenuous for him, and he has a heart attack. Polly finds him leaning against the windmill, gets him into the house, ministers to him, and the attack passes. She tells him before anyone else that she is pregnant, and as Polly sits beside him, she thinks: “Nobody in the world, not her mother, not Rudolph, or anyone really loved her as much as old Rosicky did. It perplexed her. She sat frowning and trying to puzzle it out. It was as if Rosicky had a special gift for loving people, something that was like an ear for music or an eye for colour. It was quiet, unobtrusive; it was merely there. You saw it in his eyes.”

Shortly thereafter Rosicky has his fatal attack. The doctor is out of town when Rosicky dies, but several weeks later when his practice takes him into the country, he passes the graveyard adjacent to the Rosicky farm. He realizes that the old Bohemian farmer is no longer over on the hill where he sees red lamp light but here in the moonlight. He stops his car and sits there for a while. It strikes him that the graveyard is a beautiful place, unlike urban cemeteries, which are cities of the dead. “This was open and free, this little square of long grass which the wind for ever stirred. Nothing but the sky overhead, and the many-coloured fields running on until they met the sky.” Rosicky's mowing machine stands nearby where one of his boys was cutting hay that afternoon; neighbors pass by the graveyard on their way to town, and in the cornfield over yonder Rosicky's own cattle will be eating fodder in the winter. “Nothing could be more undeathlike than this place; nothing could be more right for a man who had helped do the work of great cities and had always longed for the open country and had got it at last. Rosicky's life seemed to him complete and beautiful.”

“Old Mrs. Harris” is a major accomplishment, perhaps the best story Cather ever wrote. It actually is longer than My Mortal Enemy and could have been published separately, but it fits in well with the other two stories in Obscure Destinies. All of them deal with humble individuals, “their homely joys and destiny obscure,” as Gray puts it in his famous “Elegy.” Anton Rosicky, Grandma Harris, and the two friends of the third story exist “Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife” in Webster County, Nebraska. Old Mrs. Harris, who was inspired by Cather's grandmother Boak, is the most unforgettable character of all—as memorable as Ántonia Shimerda or Marian Forrester. When Cather sent the manuscript of “Old Mrs. Harris” and “Two Friends” to her publisher at the end of the summer of 1931, Blanche Knopf wrote that the former seemed to her one of the great stories of all time. “I have never before read anything that got right inside me as that did.” She said she would never cease to wonder at Cather's ability to depict both atmosphere and people “in such a way that they become a good deal more real than the landscape outside the window or the person sitting across the table.” Cather herself thought she had done well in “Old Mrs. Harris.” When Akins wrote praising the story, she replied that the right things had come together in the right combination. It was the best story of the three.

“Old Mrs. Harris” appeared in the Ladies' Home Journal as “Three Women,” a title that the editors perhaps thought more appealing to the magazine's audience. Nevertheless, its focus is on Grandma Harris, although it also deals with two other generations: young Vickie Templeton, fifteen, and her mother Victoria, who is about to have her sixth child. The story's autobiographical elements, which already have been discussed, give the tale the antique, nostalgic flavor of Cather's best Nebraska fiction. The setting is Skyline, Colorado, which in actuality is Red Cloud once more. There also is a fourth important woman character in Mrs. Rosen, the neighbor modeled after Mrs. Wiener in real life, and the servant Mandy, one recalls, is another fictional portrait of Marjorie Anderson.

The story begins when Mrs. Rosen, carrying a pot of coffee and a coffee cake, crosses her lawn to the Templeton house to see Grandma Harris. She waits until she sees Victoria leave dressed for town because she wants to visit with the old woman alone. She admires Mrs. Harris a great deal and feels that her daughter and grandchildren take her too much for granted. A fine dramatic scene follows in which a great deal is revealed about the Templeton family and the grandmother. The setting for this tête-à-tête is the little Cather home in Red Cloud where Charles and Jennie Cather lived with their seven children, Grandmother Boak, and Marjorie Anderson. Grandma Harris occupies a queer little room, more like a hall than a bedroom, furnished with a sewing machine, a rocking horse, a wash stand, a curtained-off area for a closet, and a wooden lounge where Grandma Harris sleeps. The old woman is ill at ease having a caller who comes while her daughter is out and insists on her leaving before Victoria returns.

The next scene, also dramatically rendered, takes place that night and introduces Vickie, the other children, and Mandy, “the bound girl they had brought with them from the South.” Old Mrs. Harris is feeling poorly, her breath comes short, and her feet and legs are swollen. While Vickie reads to the smaller children, her grandmother darns stockings for the boys. Before she goes to bed, Mandy offers to rub her feet and legs and performs, as the third-person narrator says, “one of the oldest rites of compassion.” Then Grandma Harris retires to her lounge, which has no springs and “only a thin cotton mattress between her and the wooden slats.”

The following episode belongs to Vickie, who goes to the Rosens to borrow a book from their well-stocked library. Vickie, who is in her last year of high school, is a bright, attractive, self-centered youngster, eager for knowledge. Mrs. Rosen doesn't wholly approve of her, but the two carry on a conversation about books. Vickie opens an illustrated German edition of Faust and wishes she could read it. Soon she runs across the text of Dies Irae, which she can read, and translates the Latin haltingly. Mrs. Rosen says that she will try to get an English translation of Faust for Vickie the next time she goes to Chicago, but Vickie replies: “What I want is to pick up any of these books and just read them, like you and Mr. Rosen do.” This pleases Mrs. Rosen: “Vickie never paid compliments, absolutely never; but if she really admired anyone, something in her voice betrayed it so convincingly that one felt flattered.”

From this relationship between Vickie and the Rosens follows one strand of the slight plot. Vickie desperately wants to go to college, but her parents can't afford to send her. Encouraged by the Rosens, she studies hard and wins a special scholarship to the University of Michigan. But the award is not enough to pay all her expenses, and she is bitterly disappointed. As far as the Templetons are concerned, this is the end of the matter. Vickie's parents have no particular respect for education and expect their daughter to hang around Skyline until she finds a husband. Grandma Harris, however, knows what an education means to Vickie and surreptitiously asks the Rosens to lend her enough so that she can accept the scholarship. They do so, and Vickie prepares to leave for Ann Arbor.

Much of the story is seen through the eyes of Mrs. Rosen, who keeps the next-door Templetons under steady surveillance. Her central European Jewish background gives her a perspective from which to view her neighbors. She doesn't condone their easygoing Southern ways, but she likes to go to their house: “There was something easy, cordial, and carefree in the parlour that never smelled of being shut up, and the ugly furniture looked hospitable. One felt a pleasantness in the human relationships.” The Templetons don't know there is such a thing as exactness or competition in the world, and they are always glad to see people. When Mrs. Rosen first met Victoria, they had struggled home together in a blizzard from a card party in the north end of town. Victoria had invited her in to get warm and dry. As she sat with her feet on the base of the stove, Victoria disappeared into her bedroom, changed into a negligee, and brought out the baby. While they visited, she nursed the child. Mrs. Rosen, who never had been able to have children, was charmed by the scene of domestic intimacy, Victoria's warmth, and the baby's beauty.

The story develops through a succession of small incidents. The Rosens attend a Methodist lawn party in June where they observe the generous side of Victoria's character. They are pleased at her conduct towards the poor children of their laundress, who hang longingly over the fence. She invites them to the party, gives each a dime, and instructs Vickie to see that they get plenty of ice cream and cake. The next scene concerns Blue Boy, the children's pet cat, who gets distemper. The children are upset, but they go unthinkingly about their daily routine while Grandma Harris nurses the cat. She knows the cat will die; she's seen it all happen before. When Albert wants to know why Blue Boy has to suffer so much, she replies: “Everything that's alive has got to suffer.” Yet she who “had seen so much misery” wondered “why it hurt so to see her tom-cat die.” After the death of Blue Boy, the children have a backyard circus, Vickie wins the scholarship, and Victoria discovers she is pregnant once more. This is traumatic for her, and she takes to her bed while her husband conveniently leaves town to inspect a farm he owns. With five children already and a daughter ready for college, she can't bear the thought of another baby. She feels abused and put upon. “Why must she be for ever shut up in a little cluttered house with children and fresh babies and an old woman and a stupid bound girl and a husband who wasn't very successful? Life hadn't brought her what she expected.”

The second strand of plot ends with the death of old Mrs. Harris as Vickie is getting ready to leave for college. One morning Mandy finds the old woman unconscious on her lounge. “Then there was a great stir and bustle; Victoria, and even Vickie, were startled out of their intense self-absorption. Mrs. Harris was hastily carried out of the play-room and laid in Victoria's bed, put into one of Victoria's best nightgowns.” But grandmother was out of it all and never knew “she was the object of so much attention and excitement,” which in life she never had had. The self-effacing grandmother dies as she has lived, quietly and unobtrusively. The third-person narrator summarizes in the final paragraph: “Thus Mrs. Harris slipped out of the Templeton's story; but Victoria and Vickie had still to go on, to follow the long road that leads through things unguessed at and unforeseeable. When they are old, they will come closer and closer to Grandma Harris. They will think a great deal about her, and remember things they never noticed; and their lot will be more or less like hers. They will regret that they heeded her so little; but they, too, will look into the eager unseeing eyes of young people and feel themselves alone. They will say to themselves: ‘I was heartless, because I was young and strong and wanted things so much. But now I know.’”

This was Cather's mood as her mother was dying and she looked back over her life in her fifty-eighth year. She had been thoughtless and self-absorbed in her youth, as she wrote to Irene Weisz, and in this story she was laying out some of the wisdom she had acquired. Although both “Neighbour Rosicky” and “Old Mrs. Harris” end in the deaths of the title characters, they affirm life. Cather wrote Akins at this time that biologically speaking, life was rather a failure, but something rather nice happens in the mind as one grows older. A kind of golden light comes as a compensation for many losses. With this attitude Cather faced the fifteen years she had left to live, and while her physical strength steadily diminished and she gradually contracted the world she moved in, her spirit remained resolute.

The final story in Obscure Destinies, “Two Friends,” is the slightest of the three as well as the shortest. It is a small drama of memory built out of the effect two Red Cloud businessmen had had on Cather when she was between ten and thirteen. The Mr. Dillon of the story is based on the father of the Miner sisters, and Mr. Trueman on William N. Richardson, Red Cloud livestock dealer. The two friends used to sit on the boardwalk outside Dillon's store on pleasant evenings and carry on long conversations. The first-person narrator, an adolescent girl, loves to eavesdrop on the two friends: “I liked to listen to those two because theirs was the only ‘conversation’ one could hear about the streets. The older men talked of nothing but politics and their business, and the very young men's talk was entirely what they called ‘josh’; very personal, supposed to be funny, and really not funny at all. It was scarcely speech, but noises, snorts, giggles, yawns, sneezes, with a few abbreviated words and slang expressions which stood for a hundred things.” Dillon and Trueman, however, talked about everything: weather, planting, cattle, farmers, plays they had seen in the city. They had wide interests and their talks opened a window on the world for the young narrator. She found many pretexts for lingering near them and they never seemed to mind having her about. “I was very quiet. I often sat on the edge of the sidewalk with my feet hanging down and played jacks by the hour when there was moonlight. On dark nights I sometimes perched on top of one of the big goods-boxes.”

The denouement of the story comes after Mr. Dillon goes to Chicago on a buying trip for his store and happens to be there at the time of the Democratic National Convention of 1896. This was the occasion when Bryan delivered his electrifying “Cross of Gold” speech. Dillon, a lifelong Democrat, is on hand for the speech, is thrilled by it, and returns home full of Bryan. “We've found a great leader in this country, and a great orator,” he tells Mr. Trueman, who is a life-long Republican. “Great windbag!” mutters Trueman, and from this exchange ensues a heated political discussion that the narrator listens to with breathless interest. The debate, however, grows into a bitter quarrel, and the two friends part for good. Several years later Mr. Dillon dies and Mr. Trueman goes west to settle in San Francisco. This story is the unique exhibit in the canon of Cather's fiction in which politics provides plot.

After the story came out, Cather wrote Carrie Sherwood, Mr. Dillon's daughter, hoping that she and her sister Mary, who also lived in Red Cloud, liked the tale, or at least saw nothing in it that struck a false note. It was not meant to be a portrait of the two men, she said, but a picture of something that they suggested to a child. In a later letter she explained further that it was not really made out of the two friends at all but was just a memory. A story is made out of an emotion or an excitement and not out of the legs and arms and faces of one's friends, she added. This story, like the others in Obscure Destinies, has the nostalgic, retrospective mood of her best work, but Cather did not like to be told this. Several years later when Carl Van Vechten threw the word “nostalgic” at her, intending to be complimentary, she bridled. Everyone uses that term, she said, so don't you. Moreover, they used it about every book she wrote, and, my God, she wasn't always homesick. But she had to admit that one got sentimental when writing about old delights.

Cather's return to Nebraska in Obscure Destinies pleased the reviewers enormously. The critical reaction was similar to the sighs of relief that greeted A Lost Lady after One of Ours had been savaged in some of its notices. Again the chorus of praise was nearly unanimous. Michael Williams in Commonweal was typical of the enthusiastic reception. He was convinced that Cather possessed in a degree unique “among all contemporary American writers two supremely important qualities of the creative writer: sympathetic imagination, and mastery of language.” And he went on to rhapsodize: “How marvelously Willa Cather has restored the virtue of words to serve in the conveyance of an artist's sense of the wonder, and pity, and beauty, and mystery of human life is amply demonstrated in her latest book.” Even though all the characters die at the ends of their stories, Williams thought they would continue to live in this book “as long as authentic literature possesses any power in America. For there can be no stinting of one's statement concerning Willa Cather's work. She is permanently great.”

When the notices began appearing, Cather was again hidden away in her cottage on Grand Manan. She went to Canada in June and remained until September. She continued to delight in her island retreat and took pleasure that summer in having her niece Mary Virginia Auld visit her, but she was between literary projects and perhaps somewhat at loose ends. Even though she was beginning to slow down, work was her habit of a lifetime. She returned to New York after a short stay at Jaffrey, and by October was once again at the Grosvenor. She still professed to hate New York and to say that it was becoming ever less attractive as a place to live, but she couldn't bring herself to leave. She had written Akins earlier in the year, after her old friend had gotten married in middle age, that she envied Akins's willingness to take chances and her natural power of enjoying life. She was taking a chance on matrimony, but if anyone could make it go, she could. She had come to New York at the right time, left at the right time, and bought a house at the right time. Cather wrote that if she had enough courage she would leave New York for San Francisco. But this was only talk. It was, however, time to end her five-year bivouac at the Grosvenor Hotel.

She spent November house-hunting and by the end of the month had found an apartment she was willing to lease. It was on Park Avenue, number 570, at Sixty-third Street in a building with a uniformed doorman, a rather ritzy address for a person with Cather's distaste for ostentation. She had been persuaded by someone, perhaps Blanche Knopf, that this would be the right place for her, and after she moved in, she was pleased with her new quarters and the convenience of the location. After five years at the Grosvenor Hotel with all her own things in storage, she was happy to be surrounded once more by the books and furnishings she formerly had on Bank Street. She and Lewis moved into the new apartment before Christmas and spent the next few weeks getting settled. She wrote Irene Weisz in January that she now had a home, a somewhat glorified Bank Street, and best of all Josephine was back. She was the old original Josephine, somewhat subdued by misfortune, but with all her bubbling southern nature still in force. She was an even better cook than before, and oh what good meals they were having!

Sergeant went to see Cather soon after she moved into 570 Park Avenue and found the new apartment depressing. She then lived in a shabby part of New York and wrote potboilers to stay alive in the Depression. She rather resented the snobbish elegance of Park Avenue. As she entered the lobby of the apartment building, she couldn't help remembering all of Cather's previous comments about the hostility of comfortable, self-satisfied people to any serious efforts of the artist. She felt that the uniformed personnel guarding the building were there chiefly to keep out undesirable characters and wondered if Neighbour Rosicky or Grandma Harris would even have been allowed into the building. When she reached Cather's apartment, however, her old friend opened the door herself “and met me in the eager, warm, unchanged way with which she greeted old friends.”

She led Sergeant down a long hall to her bedroom at the back to dispose of her coat. That room seemed bright and attractive. Cather's bed was covered with a calico patchwork counterpane that must have been made in Red Cloud. Sergeant thought Cather might be able to work in that room, but she didn't see how she could work in the “luxurious sheltered cave of connecting rooms—spacious but not spatial. Noiseless but with no view of the sun.” All the windows of the apartment faced the blank north wall of the Colony Club. Cather, however, liked the quiet and had taken the apartment because there were no distractions. The walls and floor were thick, the windows far from the roar of Park Avenue; there was no one tramping about in high heels overhead, no radios to be heard. Cather told Marion King, librarian of the Society Library, that she had sat for hours in the apartment to test its quiet before signing the lease.

In the drawing room there was a fireplace, but it was not a hearth one could draw up chairs to, and the new furniture that supplemented the Bank Street pieces were more formal than the old things. There were many familiar objects, however: the orange tree, the freesias, the George Sand engraving, the bust of Keats. Something new Sergeant saw was “a melting, angelic photograph of young Yehudi Menuhin.” Cather went into the dining room, brought back glasses and served her guest sherry. They drank it in the drawing room, which was large enough for a party of thirty, and talked over Obscure Destinies, which Sergeant greatly admired. This reunion of old friends turned out to be a very satisfactory meeting, but they had to stay away from politics, because Sergeant was an ardent New Dealer and Cather disapproved of both Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt.

Once settled in, Cather's creative energy began to return, and she was ready to start working again, but the new apartment was something of a cocoon. It sheltered her from the horrendous events taking place in the nation and in the world. Her letters reflect no preoccupation with the rise of Hitler to power in January, 1933, the closing of the banks in the United States, or even the end of Prohibition. She was much worried over the economic distress of friends and relatives, but she was, as always, apolitical, and it was not until the signs of World War II became unmistakable that her correspondence expressed larger concerns. She withdrew into a small circle of friends and found her recreation in music. In January the Menuhin family returned to New York, and Myra Hess, whom she knew through the Knopfs, also arrived from England for a concert tour. The Knopfs gave her a Capehart phonograph, then the Rolls Royce of sound reproduction, which afforded her many hours of enjoyment, and Yehudi presented her with recordings he had made. Her old Pittsburgh friend, Ethel Litchfield, whose husband had died, moved to New York to be close to her, and through her Cather met pianist Joseph Lhevinne, whose concerts she hardly ever missed. Lewis believed that “it was in part the happiness of living again in an atmosphere of music—she heard scarcely any music during the Grosvenor period—that gave Willa Cather the theme of Lucy Gayheart,” her next novel.