“Come, Mädchen,” he wheedled and I knew, because he used that tender word, that he was not cross. Perhaps he regretted his harshness and had realized my innocence. Still, I did not move, and he continued to come closer. He crouched down on the floor beside me. “There. There.” He followed the dirty meanders of the tears on my cheeks with his forefinger. “Maybe they’ll freeze there like icicles, ni’t? The kids at school will call you a cry baby girl.” Grieved at his mistake and not trying to make up for it by caresses, as my mother would have done, he had a dignity which I was bound to admire, and at last I smiled at him. “Jawohl!” he cried in genuine pleasure and then, in imitation of the friendly rancher of the Saturday night movies, he awkwardly offered me his hand and said, “Put ’er there, pardner!”

The cold from the windows laid metallic ribbons across my back. I was sickened to think of my aunts and uncles trudging, whimpering, in the Russian night, and in a glow of relief at my better fortune, I grasped the extended hand. In a meditative way, with his head bowed, my father began to finger my hand, pressing the ball of his into the hollow of my palm, lacing our fingers together, feeling the knuckles.

“Sonie,” he said after a time. “What is it you want to do when you grow up?”

I could not tell him that my only ambition was to live with Miss Pride, for I did not want him to know that I preferred her to himself. But I said, “I guess I want to live in Boston.”

“Boston? Is that all you want to do? Why, I thought you wanted to be a school teacher at least.”

“Oh, no!”

“I guess I haven’t done anything right. You should want to be a school teacher, I think. How far are you in your Latin now?”

“We don’t start Latin till the eighth grade,” I told him and then, because I saw how curiously he looked at me, I added, “I’m in the seventh now.”

“It would be a comfort for a man to know what he used to know,” he mused. Then, to include me he said with a spurt of good spirits, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Sonie, we’ll go west some day to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Wouldn’t you like to ride a little wild horse?”

I said I would in much sincerity, but because I was unschooled in both the scenery and the customs of the west, I did not immediately seat myself astride a horse or envisage Cheyenne, but instead, heard Miss Pride say to a friend, as I entered the drawing room, “Here is our cow girl. You know she and her father own several thousand wild roan stallions.”