Professor's House, The

Professor's House, The, novel by Willa Cather, published in 1925.

Godfrey St. Peter, professor at a Midwestern university, on reaching middle age completes his great work on the Spanish adventures in America. He is now well‐to‐do, but does not desire material comfort, and, when he and his pleasure‐loving wife Lillian move to a beautiful new home, he keeps the homely old house whose garret study he has long shared as a workroom with the German seamstress Augusta. His daughters have grown away from him since their marriages. Rosamond to Louie Marsellus, a lavish, enterprising Jew, and Kathleen to Scott McGregor, a journalist who suppresses his artistic leanings to write “glad” pieces for a living. Marsellus is rich, having marketed a gas patent bequeathed to his wife by her former fiancé, Tom Outland, the professor's favorite student, who died in World War I. The story of Outland's exploration, with his companion Roddy Blake, of an ancient New Mexican cliff city, is recalled by the professor. Marsellus's patronizing attitude toward the dead Outland alienates the professor, but his generosity and love of beauty strike a sympathetic chord in Lillian, who tours Europe with him and Rosamond. During a lonely summer, the professor loses interest in life, and when gas from a faulty stove fills his study one night, he is about to let it suffocate him when he is saved by Augusta. This crisis, and his appreciation of the quiet patience of the old seamstress, reconcile him to continued existence, which he faces with a certain apathy but “at least … the ground under his feet.”