THE GARDEN LODGE by WILLA CATHER

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their favorite podcasts with Libsyn ads. Go to LibsynAds.com that's L-I-B-S-Y-N, ads.com today. Welcome back everyone to 1001 Greatest Love Stories. This is our first Willa Cather story, so I wanted to give you a little brief on this

accomplished author so that you can know her a little better. She was born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia on a small farm that had been in her family for six generations. Soon after she was born, her father moved them to Nebraska. This was 1883, and Nebraska was pioneer territory. She wanted to go to college, and it was rare

for women to go to college in those days. Her family believed in her, and they borrowed the money to send her to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she honed her skills in writing and journalism. And upon graduation, she moved first to Pittsburgh and then to New York City, where she went to work for McClure's magazine.

Her early writing efforts were inspired by writers like M.R. James and Sherwood Anderson, and when she began writing stories about the prairie and prairie life, she gained a lot of attention, soon winning the Pulitzer Prize for the story, One of Ours. She devoted a lifetime to writing and her many stories and novels are easy to find

and enjoyable to read and listen to today. I know we'll be covering her again soon. One of her famous quotes, There's nothing so dangerous as sitting still.

You've only got one life, one youth, and you can let it slip through your fingers if you want to. Nothing easier. Most people do that.

And now our story. The Garden Lodge by Willa Cather, published in Cather's short story collection, The Troll Garden in 1905. When Caroline Noble's friends learned that Raymond Desquare was to spend a month at her

place on the sound before he sailed to fill his engagement for the London Opera season, they considered it another striking instance of the perversity of things. That the month was May and the most mild and fluorescent of all the blue and white maze the middle-coasted known in years, but added to their sense of wrong. Desquare, they

learned, was ensconced in the lodge in the apple orchard, just beyond Caroline's glorious garden, and report went that at almost any hour the sound of the tenor's voice and of Caroline's crashing accompaniment could be heard floating through the open windows, out among the snowy apple-bows. The sound, steel-blue and dotted with white sails,

splendidly seen from the windows of the lodge. The garden to the left and the orchard to the right had never been so riotous with spring, and had burst into impassioned bloom, as if to accommodate Caroline, though she was certainly the last woman to whom the witchery of Freya could be attributed. The last woman, as her friends affirmed, to it all adequately appreciate

and make the most of such a setting for the great tenor. Of course, they admitted Caroline was musical. Well she ought to be. But in that, as in everything, she was paramountly cool-headed, slow of impulse, and disgustingly

practical. In that, as in everything else, she had herself so provokingly well in hand. Of course it would be she, always mistress of herself in any situation. She who would never be lifted one inch from the ground by it, and who would go on superintending

her gardeners and workmen as usual. It would be she who got him. Perhaps some of them suspected that this was exactly why she did get him, and it netted them even more. Caroline's coolness, her capabilities, her general success, especially exasperated people, because they felt that, for the most part, she had made herself what she was, that she

had cold-bloodily set about complying with the demands of life and making her position uncomfortable and masterful. That was why, everyone said, she had married Howard Noble. Women who did not get through life so well as Caroline, who could not make such good terms either with fortune or their husbands, who did not find their health so unfailingly

good or hold their looks so well or manage their children so easily or give such distinction to all they did, were fond of stamping Caroline as a materialist, and called her Hard. The impression of cold calculation, of having a definite policy which Caroline gave, was far from a false one.

But there was this to be said for her, that there were extenuating circumstances which your friends could not know. If Caroline held determinedly to the middle course, if she was apt to regard with distrust everything which inclined toward extravagance. It was not because he was unacquainted with

other standards than her own, or had never seen another side of life. She had grown up in Brooklyn, in a shabby little house under the vacillating administration of her father, a music teacher who usually neglected his duties to write orchestral compositions for which the world seemed to have no special need. His spirit was warped by bitter vindictiveness

and prairie self commiseration, and he spent his days in scorn of the labour that brought him bread and in pitiful devotion to the labour that brought him only disappointment, writing interminable scores which demanded of the orchestra everything under heaven except melody. It was not a cheerful home for a girl to grow up in.

The mother who idolized her husband as the music lord of the future was left to a a lifelong battle with broom and dustpan, to never-ending conciliatory overtures to