Quotes about Motherhood in Honor of LGBT History Month, III

Willa Cather is next in the series, providing us with several portraits:

The woman in the chaise longue was still alone. She lay there all day, looking at the sea. The little girl, Carin, played noisily about the deck. Occasionally she returned and struggled up into the chair, plunged her head, round and red as a little pumpkin, against her mother’s shoulder in an impetuous embrace, and then struggled down again with a lively flourishing of arms and legs. Her mother took such opportunities to pull up the child’s socks or to smooth the fiery little braids; her beautiful hands, rather large and very white, played about the riotous little girl with a quieting tenderness.
—On the Gull’s Road

His mother was waiting for him under the bittersweet vines on the porch, just where she had always stood to greet him when he came home for his college vacations, and, as Douglass had lived in a world where the emotions are cultivated and not despised, he was not ashamed of the lump that rose in his throat when he took her in his arms. She hurried him out of the dark into the parlor lamplight and looked him over from head to foot to assure herself that he was still the handsomest of men, and then she told him to go into her bedroom to wash his face for supper. She followed him, unable to take her eyes from this splendid creature whom all the world claimed but who was only hers after all.
—The Treasure of Far Island

‘Are there any quail left now?’ I asked. I reminded her how she used to go hunting with me the last summer before we moved to town. ‘You weren’t a bad shot, Tony. Do you remember how you used to want to run away and go for ducks with Charley Harling and me?’

‘I know, but I’m afraid to look at a gun now.’ She picked up one of the drakes and ruffled his green capote with her fingers. ‘Ever since I’ve had children, I don’t like to kill anything. It makes me kind of faint to wring an old goose’s neck. Ain’t that strange, Jim?’

‘I don’t know. The young Queen of Italy said the same thing once, to a friend of mine. She used to be a great huntswoman, but now she feels as you do, and only shoots clay pigeons.’

‘Then I’m sure she’s a good mother,’ Ántonia said warmly.
—My Ántonia