adapted from The Garden Lodge
by Willa Cather
Caroline's coolness, her capableness, her general success, especially
exasperated people because they felt that she had made herself what she was,
that she had cold-bloodedly set about complying with the demands of life and
making her position comfortable 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, 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 her 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
she was unacquainted with other standards than her own or had never seen
the other side of life. She had grown up 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 especial need. His spirit was warped by bitter vindictiveness and puerile
self-commiseration, and he spent his days in scorn of the labor that brought him
bread and in pitiful devotion to the labor that brought him only disappointment
After her mother's death, Caroline assumed the management of that
bankrupt establishment, and she was barely twenty when she was called upon
to face this tangle of difficulties. The house had served its time at the shine of
idealism, ever since Caroline could remember, the law of the house had been
sort of a mystic worship of things distant, intangible, and unattainable, and the
family in successive Bares of generous enthusiasm, in talk of master and
masterpieces, only to come down to the cold facts of the case. All these
emotional pyrotechnics had ended in petty jealousies, in neglected duties, and
in cowardly fear of the little grocer on the comer
Which detail best shows that Caroline is a responsible person?
A. She distrusts everything that seems extravagant or expensive.
B. She takes over running the household after her mother's death.
C. She knows how to make her position comfortable and masterful
D. She deals with difficulties such as paying the bills from grocers
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