Sheltered by this myth, their intimacy gradually took on a stable form. They called each other by their Christian names and were Niels and Tema to each other when they were alone, while the presence of the niece was reduced to a minimum. To be sure, Niels sometimes tried to break through the accepted barriers, but Mrs. Boye was so much the stronger that she could easily and gently quell all such attempts at insubordination, and Niels had to submit and fall back for a time on this fanciful passion with real tableaux. Their relation never ran out into a platonic flatness; nor did it sink to rest in the monotony of habit. Rest was the word that least of all described it. Niels Lyhne’s hope was never weary, and though it was gently suppressed whenever it would flare up in a demand, that only made it smolder more hotly than ever in secret. And how Mrs. Boye would feed the fire by her thousand and one coquetries, her provocative simplicity, and her naked courage in discussing the most delicate subjects! Besides, the game was not entirely in her hands, for there were times when her blood would dream in its idleness of rewarding this half-tamed devotion by lavishing on it the fullest rapture of love in order to rejoice in its wondering happiness. But such a dream was not easily extinguished, and the next time Niels came she would meet him with the nervousness of conscious sin, a shyness born of wrongdoing, a sweet shame that made the air strangely tremulous with passion.
There was yet another thing that gave their intimacy a certain tension. Niels Lyhne’s love possessed so much virility that he chivalrously held himself back from taking in imagination what the reality denied him, and even in that separate world where everything did his bidding he respected Mrs. Boye as if she were actually present.
Hence their relation was well buttressed from both sides, and there was no immediate danger that it would fall to pieces. Indeed, it seemed made for a nature at once brooding and athirst for life such as Niels Lyhne’s, and though it was only a game, it was a game of realities, sufficient to give him that undercurrent of passion which he needed.
Niels Lyhne was bent upon being a poet, and there was much in the external circumstances of his life to lead his thoughts in that direction and stimulate his faculties for the task. So far, however, he had little but his dreams to write about, and nowhere is there more sameness and monotony than in the world of imagination; for in that dreamland, which seems so boundless and so infinitely varied, there are, in fact, only a few short beaten paths where everybody walks and from which no one ever strays. People may differ, but in their dreams they do not differ; there they always attain the three or four things that they desire—it may be with more or less speed and completeness, but they always attain them in the end. No one seriously dreams of himself as empty-handed. Therefore no one ever discovers himself in his dreams or becomes conscious through them of his individuality. Our dreams tell nothing of how we are satisfied when we win the treasure, how we relinquish it when lost, how we feast on it while it is ours, where we turn when it is taken from us.
Niels Lyhne’s poetry had hitherto been nothing but the expression of an esthetic personality which, in a general way, found spring teeming, the ocean wide, love erotic, and death melancholy. He himself was not in his poems; he merely put the verses together. But now a change came over him. Now that he wooed a woman and wanted her to love him—him, Niels Lyhne of Lønborggård, who was twenty-three years old, walked with a slight stoop, had beautiful hands and small ears, and was a little timid, wanted her to love him and not the idealized Nicolaus of his dreams, who had a proud bearing and confident manners, and was a little older—now he began to take a vital interest in this Niels whom he had hitherto walked about with as a slightly unpresentable friend. He had been so busy decking himself with the qualities he lacked that he had not had time to take note of those he possessed, but now he began to piece his own self together from scattered memories and impressions of his childhood and from the most vivid moments of his life. He saw with pleased surprise how it all fitted together, bit by bit, and was welded into a much
