Jenny Winge sat as before, looking thoughtfully in front of her. In the orchard below grew rows of vegetables, small innocent tufts of green on the grey soil, and on the far side of the meadow one could see the yellow masses of ruins on the Palatine against the dark foliage. The day promised to be warm. The Alban mountains in the distance, beyond the pines of the villa gardens, looked misty against the soft blue of the sky.
Jenny drank some wine, still looking straight ahead. Helge followed with his eyes the smoke of her cigarette—a faint morning breeze carried it out in the sunshine. She sat with her legs crossed. She had small ankles, and her feet were clad in thin purple stockings and bead-embroidered evening shoes. The jacket was open over the gathered silver-grey dress with the white collar and the beads, which threw pink spots on her milky-white neck. The fur cap had slid back from her fair, fluffy hair.
“I suppose you have the support of your father, though, Mr. Gram—I mean, he understands you, doesn’t he? Surely he sees that you can’t get ahead so quickly at that school, when you have quite different work at heart?”
“I don’t know. He was very pleased that I could go abroad, of course, but”—after some hesitation—“I have never been very intimate with my father. And then there is mother. She was anxious lest I should work too hard, or be short of money—or risk my future. Father and mother are so different—she has never quite understood him, and kept more to us children. She was a great deal to me when I was a boy, but she was jealous of father even—that he should have greater influence over me than she had. She was jealous of my work too, when I locked myself up in a room of an evening to read, and always anxious about my health and afraid I should give up my post.”
Jenny nodded several times thoughtfully.
“The letter I fetched at the post office was from them.” He took it out of his pocket and looked at it, but he did not open it. “It is my birthday today,” he said, trying to smile. “I am twenty-six.”
“Many happy returns.” Miss Winge shook hands with him. She looked at him almost in the same way as she looked at Miss Jahrman when she nestled in her arms.
She had not noticed before what he looked like, though she was under the impression that he was tall and thin and dark. He had good, regular features on the whole, a high, somewhat narrow forehead, light brown eyes with a peculiar amber-like transparency, and a small, weak mouth with a tired and sad expression under the moustache.
“I understand you so well,” she said suddenly. “I know all that. I was a teacher myself until Christmas last year. I started as a governess and went on till I was old enough to enter the seminary.” She smiled a little shyly. “I gave up my post in the school when I was left a small amount of money by an aunt, and went abroad. It will last me about three years, I think—perhaps a little longer. Lately I have sent some articles to the papers, and I may sell some pictures. My mother did not approve of my using up all the money, and did not like my giving up my post when I had got it at last after all those years of private teaching and odd lessons here and there at schools. I suppose mothers always think a fixed salary. …”
“I don’t think I would have risked it in your place—burning all your bridges like that. It is the influence of my home, I know, but I could not help being anxious about the time when the money would be spent.”
“Never mind,” said Jenny Winge. “I am well and strong and know a lot; I can sew and cook and wash and iron. And I know languages. I can always find something to do in England or America. Francesca,” she said, laughing, “wants me to go to South Africa with her and be a dairymaid, for that is a thing she is good at, she says. And we shall draw the Zulus; they are said to be such splendid models.”
“That is no small job either—and the distance does not seem to trouble you.”
“Not a bit—I am talking nonsense, of course. All those years I thought it impossible to get away, even as far as Copenhagen, to stay there some time to paint and learn. When at last I made up my mind to give up everything and go, I had many a bad moment, I can assure you. My people thought it madness, and I noticed that it made an impression on me, but that made me more determined still. To paint has always been my most ardent wish, and I knew I could never work at home as hard as I ought to; there were too many things to distract me. But mother could not see that I was so old that if I wanted to learn something I must start at once. She is only nineteen years older than I; when I was eleven she married again, and that made her younger still.
“The curious thing when you leave home is that the influence of the people with whom you accidentally have lived is broken. You learn to see with your own eyes and to think for yourself, and you understand that it rests with yourself to get something good out of your journey: what you mean to see and to learn, how you mean to arrange your life and what influence you choose to submit to. You
