July comes on hot and breathless. Jim is kept busy carrying water to the men harvesting wheat. The Burdens enjoy having Ántonia around, even though she clatters pans in the kitchen and runs through the house. Early every morning she goes with Jim to the garden to get vegetables for dinner, and she tells him that she prefers working outdoors to working indoors. As Jim and Ántonia watch a thunderstorm from the chicken-house roof, he asks her why she isn’t always nice like this. Her answer: “If I live here, like you, that is different. Things will be easy for you. But they will be hard for us.”
