The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: in the long Arctic night, and his mother, seized by a violent
horror of seafaring life, had followed her brother to America.
Eric was eighteen then, handsome as young Siegfried, a giant in
stature, with a skin singularly pure and delicate, like a Swede's;
hair as yellow as the locks of Tennyson's amorous Prince, and eyes
of a fierce, burning blue, whose flash was most dangerous to women.
He had in those days a certain pride of bearing, a certain
confidence of approach, that usually accompanies physical
perfection. It was even said of him then that he was in love with
life, and inclined to levity, a vice most unusual on the Divide.
But the sad history of those Norwegian exiles, transplanted in an
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |