Both her own character and her outer circumstances were such that she had no great prospect of being loved for any other reason than love, and she had gradually begun to suspect that this feeling, of which so much was said and written, was really scorned and put to one side so that it was extremely rare. She had thought over all this, she had felt the minutes running through her fingers like sand, and had decided that the years to come would be still more wretched and worthless than those before and that the jewel she guarded was losing its value every day. Most of all she had been frightened at how quickly women age who live without men, except those who are so fortunate as not to feel any strong desire or lack. But she was not of these; no, she was a real woman and she knew she was. The desire which in her first youth had only been a sweet and indefinite longing, a dream of happiness of a strange and unknown sort, now burned in her veins like poison; and her first timid girlish fancy, which had hardly dared to look beyond a kiss in the twilight between bushes of roses, had developed with years into a hobgoblin much worse than those used in children’s picture-books to frighten naughty boys. Her glance became wistful and yearning, and she tried to bring herself to a decision.
She had almost given up hope of a husband; it was a lover she was seeking, and even him she sought for long in vain. It was not that there was a lack of men who would take her out to dance; there were on the contrary many, and she could make a choice. She looked around in her circle; she flirted right and left. She grew less afraid about her reputation than before and went to secret rendezvous with men who had been attentive to her some evening at a ball. But they remained strange to her, and every time an understanding was in the air, she was overcome with shame and became suddenly icy with fear and repugnance. For every time when the critical moment came, she read in the man’s eyes the ineradicable crudity of his heart. She read it as plainly as if it had stood written on white paper that what was for her a wholly new experience in life—perhaps ruin, perhaps salvation—was for him an amorous adventure. She read that what she was about to do was in his eyes merely a faux pas, which he could overlook only in so far as it gave him pleasure; and she read that not only did he intend to give her up very soon, but that he also meant to salve his conduct beforehand by showing her his contempt. She saw all this and tired of the game before it had begun, asking herself if she might not just as well follow the path of virtue, which in any case was clearly the most convenient, and wither into old age without will and without hope.
But when she met Martin all this became different, and when she gave herself to him she felt no more fear, because she saw that he had understood her, that his thoughts were not like those of the others, and she felt that he loved her. With him she felt no shame, nor did she feign any, for she had already sinned so much in her thoughts that the reality seemed to her innocent and pure. She was no longer young; she was getting on toward thirty, just as he was. Her complexion had already been marked by the early frost, and vanished illusions had made her bitter at heart and crude of speech. But the bitter heart beat warm and fast when it rested on his, and the ugly words did not make her mouth less sweet to kiss.
III
Martin sat alone with his father at the dinner table within the same circle of yellow light which had enclosed the sleepy winter evenings of his childhood. Martin Birck and his father had seldom anything to say to each other. They thought differently about everything except the taxes on foodstuffs. This lack of agreement did not, however, cause them any sorrow; they attached no importance to it. They both knew that different generations think differently, and they found this natural. Nor did they find silence anything painful or oppressive; it was just the self-evident expression of the fact that nothing had happened which could give rise to an exchange of opinions. When they chatted together it was mostly about the improvement of government work and about new houses. For Martin’s father was interested in his city. On Sundays he often went for long walks to distant parts of the city and saw how new suburbs shot up out of the earth. He thought of how Stockholm had developed since his youth, and he found all the new houses handsome, especially if they were large and imposing with many windows and small towers at the corners. And when Martin heard his father speak of all these ugly houses and call them handsome, he thought of how unjust life was, since it remorselessly closed the way to the inner regions of beauty for the best and most useful members of the community. For the way thither went through melancholy, there was no other, and it was not idly that
