Living at the Cutters’, Ántonia has more time to spend with Lena, Tiny, and Norwegian Anna. One afternoon, the girls tease Jim about his grandmother’s hope that he become a Baptist preacher when he grows up. Because Jim shows no interest in Black Hawk’s young girls and prefers the older, hired girls’ company, the townspeople begin to whisper among themselves that there must be something strange about him.
Jim discovers that he can’t go to the Harlings’ in the evenings; Mrs. Harling is cool to him because he is still associating with Ántonia. In desperation, he searches for something interesting to do, but every place he goes is dull, and everyone he talks to seems to be scheming for ways to get out of this small town because they too are bored. For a while, Jim goes to Anton Jelinek’s saloon to listen to the talk, but Anton knows that Grandfather Burden doesn’t approve, so he asks Jim not to come in any more.
Jim prefers the dances at the Firemen’s Hall, where the hired girls go, rather than the dances at the Masonic Hall, where the so-called respectable young townspeople socialize. He knows his grandparents would disapprove, so he has to sneak out in order to attend. One night Jim walks Ántonia home. When he tries to kiss her passionately, she scolds him. Defensively, he tells her that Lena has let him kiss her like that. She warns him not to make a fool of himself like the other Black Hawk boys because he’s going away to school to make something of himself. That night Jim dreams of Lena coming to him—sensuously, reaping hook in hand—across a harvested field. On waking, he wishes he could have the same dream about Ántonia.
Grandmother Burden learns that Jim has been sneaking out to dances, and she is so grieved that the boy stops going altogether. He’s surprised to realize that he really is hurt by the townspeople’s talk about him. He feels lonely and shut out and spends many spring hours reading Latin so he can do well when he enters college in the fall. At his high school graduation, Jim gives a stirring speech that surprises and pleases Mrs. Harling. Ántonia, Lena, and Anna congratulate him, too. He tells Ántonia that he was thinking of her father when he wrote the speech. She cries and hugs him, and he feels that her pleasure is his greatest triumph.
When he arrives for a summer picnic at the river with the hired girls, he finds Ántonia crying because the elder flowers remind her of Bohemia. She tells him about the Old Country and reveals that her father married her mother—against his family’s wishes—because she was pregnant with his child. Jim tells her of the intensity he sensed when he was left alone after his grandparents went to see Ántonia’s father’s body; he is sure that her father’s spirit stopped to rest at the Burden farm before starting its journey home to his native land. His words comfort her. When Lena, Tiny, and Anna return to the riverbank, they talk about their families and how difficult it has been for them to adapt to life on the plains. Jim tells them the story of Coronado and his search for the Seven Golden Cities. Late in the day, as the sun is going down in the distance, they see the silhouette of a plow, bold and black, against the setting sun; then, just as quickly, it vanishes as the sun drops below the horizon.
One day, the Cutters go to Omaha. Ántonia tells Grandmother Burden how strange Mr. Cutter acted, storing valuables under her bed and insisting that she promise to sleep there alone. Grandmother is apprehensive. She persuades Jim to sleep at the Cutters’ while Ántonia sleeps at the Burden home. Cutter returns home unexpectedly in the middle of the night and, in the dark, begins caressing Jim in the bed where he hoped to find Ántonia. Enraged, he attacks the boy and accuses him of having an affair with Ántonia. Jim scrambles out the window and dashes home, bruised and lacerated. He’s furious with Ántonia for putting him in a situation that could make him a laughingstock if word ever leaked out. Ántonia decides to return to her family on the farm for a while, and Grandmother accompanies her to the Cutters’ to pack her trunk. While they are there, the irate Mrs. Cutter returns, and Grandmother learns that Mr. Cutter tricked his wife into boarding the wrong train, one bound for Kansas City, so he could come back a day earlier and seduce Ántonia.
