remembered it at all. Yet, to please him, she wrote of a longing which did not exist—yes, she had been feigning, feigning all the time before his honest passion.
There was a time when she had not been a hypocrite, or if she had lied to Gert she had also lied to herself. She had felt a storm in herself; it was perhaps pity for him and his fate and rebellion against her own—why should they both be harried by a longing for something impossible?—and in the growing anxiety for where it all would lead, she had rejoiced that she loved him, for she was forced to fall into the arms of this man, however mad she knew it to be.
She would sit in the tram when she left him of an evening, looking at all the sleepy, placid faces of the people, and rejoicing that she came from her lover—that he and she were whirled by the tempest of their fate. They had been driven into it and did not know where they were going, and she was proud of her fate because unhappiness and darkness threatened.
And now she was sitting here only wishing for it to end, planning a journey abroad to escape from it all. She had accepted a invitation to stay at Tegneby with Cesca to prepare the break. It was better for Gert that he was alone—if she could manage to end the life between them now, she could have done him some good.
Two young women were sitting opposite her. They were probably not older than she, but stupefied by a few years of marriage. Three or four years ago they had no doubt been a couple of neat office girls, who dressed attractively and sported with their admirers in Nordmarken. She knew the face of one of them, now she thought of it; she had seen her at Hakloa one Easter. Jenny had noticed her then because she was such a good ski-runner and looked so brisk and smart in her sport-suit. In a way she was not badly dressed now either; her
