style="margin-bottom: 1.00em" id="p0008">He rumpled his hair with a quick, excited gesture, which with him often announces a new determination, and I could see that my suggestion took hold of him. “Maybe I will, maybe I will!” he declared. He stared out of the window for a few moments, and when he turned to me again his eyes had the sudden clearness that comes from something the mind itself sees. “Of course,” he said, “I should have to do it in a direct way, and say a great deal about myself. It’s through myself that I knew and felt her, and I’ve had no practice in any other form of presentation.”

I told him that how he knew her and felt her was exactly what I most wanted to know about Ántonia. He had had opportunities that I, as a little girl who watched her come and go, had not.

Months afterward Jim Burden arrived at my apartment one stormy winter afternoon, with a bulging legal portfolio sheltered under his fur overcoat. He brought it into the sitting-room with him and tapped it with some pride as he stood warming his hands.

“I finished it last night—the thing about Ántonia,” he said. “Now, what about yours?”

[pg xiv]

I had to confess that mine had not gone beyond a few straggling notes.

“Notes? I did n’t make any.” He drank his tea all at once and put down the cup. “I did n’t arrange or rearrange. I simply wrote down what of herself and myself and other people Ántonia’s name recalls to me. I suppose it has n’t any form. It has n’t any title, either.” He went into the next room, sat down at my desk and wrote on the pinkish face of the portfolio the word, “Ántonia.” He frowned at this a moment, then prefixed another word, making it “My Ántonia.” That seemed to satisfy him.

“Read it as soon as you can,” he said, rising, “but don’t let it influence your own story.”

My own story was never written, but the following narrative is Jim’s manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me.