Jenny went to him and laid her hands on his shoulders:
“I cannot understand,” she said—“I really cannot—that you have been able to stand such a life.”
Gert Gram bent forward, resting his head on her shoulder:
“I don’t understand it myself.”
When he raised his head and their eyes met, she put her hand to his neck and, overwhelmed by a tender compassion, kissed him on the cheek and forehead.
She felt a sudden fear when she looked down at his face resting on her shoulder, with eyes closed, but the next moment he lifted his head and rose, saying:
“Thank you, Jenny dear.”
Gram put the drawings back in their cover and straightened the table.
“I hope you will be very, very happy. You are so bright and courageous, so energetic and gifted. Dear child, you are everything I wanted to be, but never was.” He spoke in a low, absentminded voice.
“I think,” he said a moment later, “that when relations between two people are new, before their life is perfectly accorded, there are many small difficulties to overcome. I wish you could live elsewhere, not in this town. You should be alone, far from your own people—at first at least.”
“Helge has applied for a post in Bergen, as you know,” said Jenny, and the feeling of despair and anguish again seized her when she thought of him.
“Do you never speak to your mother about it? Why don’t you? Are you not fond of your mother?”
“Of course I am fond of her.”
“I should think it would be a good thing to talk to her about it—get her advice.”
“It is no good asking anybody’s advice—I don’t like to speak to anyone about these things,” she said, wishing to dismiss the subject.
“No, you are perhaps. …” He had been standing halfway turned to the window. Suddenly his face changed, and he whispered in a state of excitement:
“Jenny, she is down there in the street!”
“Who?”
“She—Rebecca!”
Jenny rose. She felt she could have screamed with exasperation and disgust. She trembled; every fibre of her body was quivering with revolt. She would not be involved in all this—these wicked, odious suspicions, quarrels, spiteful words, and scenes—no, she would not.
“Jenny, my child, you are shivering—don’t be afraid. I won’t let her hurt you.”
“Afraid? Far from it.” She steeled herself at once. “I have been here to fetch you; we have looked at your drawings, and we are now going to your house to supper.”
“She may not have noticed anything.”
“Heavens! we have nothing to hide. If she had not seen that I am here she will soon get to know it. I am going with you; we must do it for your sake as well as for mine—do you hear?”
Gram looked at her: “Yes, let us go, then.”
When they got down in the street Mrs. Gram was gone.
“Let us take the tram, Gert; it is late,” she said, adding in a sudden temper: “Oh, we must stop all this—if only for Helge’s sake.”
Mrs. Gram opened the door. Gert Gram ventured an explanation; Jenny looked frankly into the angry eyes of his wife: “I am sorry Helge is out for the evening. Do you think he will be home early?”
“I am surprised you did not remember it,” Mrs. Gram said to her husband. “It is no pleasure to Miss Winge to sit here with us two old people.”
“Oh, that is all right,” said Jenny.
“I don’t remember hearing that Helge was going out this evening,” said Gram.
“Fancy your coming without any needlework,” said Mrs. Gram, when they were sitting in the drawing-room after supper. “You are always so industrious.”
“I left the studio so late, I had no time to go home in between. Perhaps you could find me something?”
Jenny conversed with Mrs. Gram about the price of embroidery patterns at home and in Paris, and about books she had lent her. Gram was reading. Now and again she felt his eyes on her. Helge returned about eleven.
“What is the matter?” he asked, when they walked down the stairs. “Has there been a scene again?”
“No, not at all,” she replied, in a short, irritated voice. “I suppose your mother did not like my coming home with your father.”
“It seems to me, too, that you need not have done it,” said Helge humbly.
“I am going home by tram.” Overwrought, and unable to control herself, she pulled her arm out of his. “I cannot stand any more tonight, and I will not have these scenes with you every time I have been to your home. Good night.”
“Jenny! Wait! Jenny! …” He hurried after her, but she was already at the stop when the tram came, and got in, leaving him without a word.
VII
Jenny walked listlessly about in her studio next morning and could not settle down to anything. The pouring rain was beating against the big window. She stopped to look at the wet tiles of the roofs, the black chimneys, and the telephone wires, along which the small raindrops were rolling down like pearls until they gathered into one large one and fell off, to be replaced immediately by others.
She might go to her mother and the children in the country for a few days. She must go away from all this. Or she might go to an hotel in some other town and write for Helge to come and talk things over with her quietly. If they could only be together again—they two alone! She tried to think of their spring in Rome, of the silvery haze over the mountains, and of her own happiness in it all. But she could not reconstruct the picture of Helge from that time—as he had appeared to her enamoured eyes.
Those days seemed already so far away; they were an isolated episode in her life, and although she knew they were a reality she could not connect them with her present existence.
Helge—her Helge was lost to her in
