If Helge came, if she met him, she knew that the despair and disgust of her own life would overwhelm her. She did not know what would happen, but one thing was certain—she could not face a repetition of the old scenes.
And Gunnar. All these weeks, while he had been begging of her to be his, she had not made up her mind if she loved him or not. He wanted her such as she was, and he vowed that he could help her—build up again all that had been destroyed in her.
Sometimes she wished that he would take her by force, so that she need not choose. It did not matter what he said; she knew that if she became his, the little pride she had left told her that the responsibility was her own. She had to become what she had once been—what he believed she had been and could be again. Whether she cared or not, she had to clean herself from all that soiled her now, bury in a new life everything that had happened since she gave Helge Gram the kiss by which she betrayed her faith and her whole life up to that spring day on the Campagna.
Did she want to be his? Did she love him because he was all that she had wished to be, because his whole being awoke in her all that which she had once chosen to worship and to nurse—every faculty she had thought worth developing?
The love she had looked for on byways, driven by her morbid longing and feverish restlessness—would she find it here by surrendering to him, by shutting her eyes and giving herself to the one man she really trusted—the one who all her instincts told her was her conscience and her just judge?
She had not been able to do it—not in all these weeks. It seemed to her that she ought to try and get out by her own will from the mire into which she had descended; she wanted to feel that it was her will from the old days which had taken the lead of her shattered mind, so that she could get back ever so little of the respect and confidence in herself from before.
If she was to go on living, Gunnar was life itself to her. A few words written by him on a piece of paper, a book that brought her a message from some emotion in his soul had awakened the last smouldering longing back to life when after the death of the child she had dragged herself about like a maimed animal.
If he came now—he would win her. If he would but carry her the first bit of the way, she would try to walk the rest of it herself. And as she sat there waiting for him she decided in her shrinking soul: If he comes, I shall live. If the other one comes, I must die.
And when she heard steps on the stairs, and they were not those of Gunnar, and there was a knock at the door, she bent her head and went shivering to open it for Helge Gram, instinctively feeling that she opened the door to the fate she had challenged.
She stood looking at him while he walked into the room, putting his hat on a chair. She had not acknowledged his greeting this time either.
“I knew you were in town,” said he. “I came the day before yesterday from Paris. I looked up your address at the club, and meant to come and see you some day—but then I saw you in the street this afternoon. I recognized your grey fur a long way off.” He spoke swiftly—out of breath, as it were. “Will you not say good evening to me? Are you vexed because I have come to see you?”
“Good evening, Helge,” she said, taking the hand he offered her. “Will you not sit down, please?”
She sat down on the sofa. She could hear that her voice sounded calm and as usual. But in her brain she had the same delirious sensation of dread as in the afternoon.
“I wanted to come and see you,” said Helge, sitting down on a chair close to her.
“It was good of you,” replied Jenny. Both were silent.
“You live in Bergen now,” she said. “I saw that you had got your degree. I congratulate you.”
“Thank you.”
There was another pause.
“You have been abroad a long time. I meant to write to you sometimes, but it never came off. Heggen lives in this house, I see.”
“Yes; I wrote him to get a studio for me, but they are so dear and so difficult to find. This room has a good light, though.”
“I see that you have some pictures drying.”
He rose, went across the room, but returned immediately to his seat. Jenny bent her head, feeling that he did not take his eyes from her. They tried to keep up conversation. He asked about Francesca Ahlin and other acquaintances they had in common, but there were long intervals when he sat staring at her.
“Do you know that my parents are divorced?” he asked suddenly.
She nodded.
“They stayed together for our sake as long as they could, whining and creaking against each other like two millstones until they had ground everything to powder between them. There was nothing more to grind, I suppose, so the mill stopped.
“I remember when I was a boy. They did not fight, but there was something in their voices that made you think they would like to. Mother abused him and used plain talk,
