"I am afraid it is very untidy here. I have not had time to dust for several days," said Mrs. Gram. "We don't use this room every day, and I have no servant just now. I had to dismiss the one I had—she was so dirty and always answering back, but it's hard to get another at all, and just as well, for they're all alike as far as that goes. Keeping house nowadays—it's simply dreadful. Helge told us you would be coming, but we had almost given up hope of seeing you."
When she talked and laughed she showed big, white front teeth and a black hole on either side, where two were missing.
Jenny sat looking at the woman who was Helge's mother—how different it all was from what she had imagined.
She had formed a picture in her mind of Helge's home and mother from his descriptions, and she had pitied the woman whom the husband did not love and who had loved the children so much that they had rebelled and longed to get away from this tyrannic mother-love that could not bear them ever to be anything but her children. In her heart she had taken the mother's part. Men did not understand to what extent a woman could change who loved and got no love in return except the love of small children; they could not understand what a mother would feel at seeing her children grow up and glide away from her, or how she could rise in defiance and anger against the inexorable life that let little children grow up and cease to feel their mother everything to them, while they were everything to her as long as she lived.
Jenny had wanted to love Helge's mother—and she could not do it; on the contrary, she felt an almost physical antipathy towards Mrs. Gram as she talked on and on.
The features were the same as Helge's—the high, slightly narrow forehead, the beautifully carved nose, and the even, dark brows, the same small mouth with thin lips, and the pointed chin. But there was an expression about her mouth as if everything she said were spiteful, and a malicious and scorn-
