Mr. Winthrop

Mr. Winthrop is a member of the Natural History Club at Hale House, first encountered by Mary Antin at a Friday evening meeting. He is a tall, lean gentleman with frank blue eyes, whose manner of greeting Mary suggests he had been waiting for her coming all his life. He reads the minutes of the last meeting with evident satisfaction, and his demeanor—looking and speaking as if he were happy to be alive—immediately endears him to Mary, who likes him at once.

Introduction at the Natural History Club

Mary Antin comes to the Natural History Club reluctantly, having been persuaded by Mrs. Black, the resident at Hale House, despite her aversion to bugs. The club is composed of adults, not people from the neighborhood, but workers at Hale House and their friends, who often have eminent naturalists, travellers, and other notables lecture before them. Mary's curiosity to see a real live naturalist induces her to accept Mrs. Black's invitation. At the meeting, the club sits in a ring around the reception room, facing the broad doorway of the adjoining room. Mrs. Black introduces Mary, who says "Glad to meet you" all around the circle and sits down in a kindergarten chair beside the piano. It is Friday evening, and Mary has the sense of leisure that pervades the school-girl's consciousness when there is to be no school on the morrow. She likes the pleasant room, pleasanter than any at home, and the faces of the company she is in, and is prepared to have an agreeable evening, even if a little bored.

The Spider Lecture

Mr. Winthrop finishes reading the minutes and introduces the speaker of the evening, Mr. Emerson, whom he describes as "an authority on spiders." He pronounces the word "spiders" with unmistakable relish, as if he doted on the horrid creatures. This triggers Mary's memory of a hideous experience long ago, when, putting on a dress that had hung on the wall for weeks, she felt a thing with a hundred legs crawling down her bare arm and shook a spider out of her sleeve. Her nerves contract into a tight knot, and she grips the arms of her little chair, determined not to run with all those strangers looking on. She watches Mr. Emerson to see when he will open a box of spiders, but eventually realizes the lecturer has no menagerie in his pockets. Instead, he talks in a familiar way about different kinds of spiders and their ways, weaving across the doorway a gigantic spider's web by unwinding a ball of twine and looping various lengths on invisible tacks he has ready in the door frame.

Calling Mary a Fraud

Despite Mary's enthusiasm about animals, plants, and rocks, and her devotion to the Natural History Club, she does not become a thorough naturalist. Her scientific friends are right not to take her seriously. Mr. Winthrop, in his delightfully frank way, calls her a fraud, and she does not resent it. She dips into zoölogy, botany, geology, ornithology, and an infinite number of other ologies, as the activities of the club or of particular members give her opportunity, but she makes no systematic study of any branch of science until she goes to college. What enthralls her imagination in the whole subject of natural history is not the orderly array of facts, but the glimpse she catches, through this or that fragment of science, of the grand principles underlying the facts. By asking questions, by listening when her wise friends talk, by reading, by pondering and dreaming, she slowly gathers together the kaleidoscopic bits of the stupendous panorama painted in the literature of Darwinism.

Significance in Mary's Development

Mr. Winthrop's role in Mary's life is that of a frank, encouraging presence within the Natural History Club, which becomes the centre around which her days arrange themselves. The club's meetings and outdoor excursions transfigure the whole structure of her life, with books taking a secondary place and her irregular studies in natural history holding the first. She realizes, with a shock at first but afterwards with complacency, that her heart hangs with more thrilling suspense over the fate of some beans she has planted in a window box than over the fortunes of the classic hero about whom they are reading at school. Mr. Winthrop's candid assessment of her as a fraud, far from discouraging her, becomes part of her self-understanding as a seeker of grand principles rather than a systematic scientist, a distinction that shapes her intellectual path toward college and beyond.