shayna ♡’s Reviews > The Song of the Lark > Status Update

If you hurry things, you always get left in the end.

She kept out of everyone’s way, and was hard to manage only when the other children interferes with her. Then there was trouble indeed: bursts of temper which used to alarm Mrs. Kronborg. “You ought to know enough to let Thea alone. She lets you alone,” she often said to the other children.

Thea asked Mrs. Johnson… Mrs. Johnson, with an eagerness which told how she had waited for this moment, replied… As she delivered this thrust, her eyes glittered more than the Ancient Mariner's, Thea thought... She so enjoyed an opportunity to rebuke Thea, that, tightly corseted as she was, she could scarcely control her breathing, and her lace and her gold watch-chain rose and fell "with short, uneasy motion."

From the preface:

She seemed wholly at the mercy of accident; but to persons of her vitality and honesty, fortunate accidents will always happen.

Certainly her husband had never been able to make her out. Such little, mean natures are among the darkest and most baffling of created things. There is no law by which they can be explained. The ordinary incentives of pain and pleasure do not account for their behaviour. They live like insects, absorbed in petty activities that seem to have nothing to do with any genial aspect of human life.

He would even have cherished hopes for her, except that he had become superstitious. He believed that whatever he hoped for was destined not to be; that his affection brought ill fortune…; that if he held anything in his thoughts, he harmed it… And there was always the old enemy, more relentless than the others. It was long since he had wished anything or desired anything beyond the necessities of the body.

“I don’t care,” he muttered, stirring his coffee; “they oughtn’t to make boys speak. It’s all right for girls. They like to show off.”

Mrs. Kronborg let her children’s minds alone. She did not pry into their thoughts or nag them. She respected them as individuals…