There may have been a thing or two so nice that they wanted to keep it to themselves, but it did not matter, for their smiles were true.
Jenny kissed her mother good-night. Passing through the sitting-room, she happened to pull down a photograph; she picked it up, knowing in the dark that it was a brother of her own father, with his wife and little girls. He had lived in America, and she had never seen him; he was dead, and his picture stood in its place without anybody ever thinking of it. She herself dusted it every day, yet never looked at it.
She went into her own room and began to take down her hair.
She had always lied to her mother—could she ever have been truthful to her without making her suffer, and to what purpose? Mother would never have understood. She had had happiness and sorrow since she was quite young; she had been happy with Jenny's father and had bemoaned his death, but she had her child to live for, and learnt to be content. Then she met Nils Berner, who filled her life with fresh happiness and fresh sorrow—and again the children consoled her, inasmuch as they filled the emptiness of her life. The joy of motherhood is bought with too much suffering; it is too actual, when held living in one's arms, for one ever to doubt its existence. To love one's child is so natural that there is no cause for reflection. A mother never doubts that she loves her child, or that she wants it to be happy—that she does her best for it, or that it returns her love. The grace of nature is so great to mothers that children instinctively shrink from confiding their sorrows and disappointments to her; illness and money troubles are almost the only sorrows she ever gets to know. Never the irreparable, the shame, the failures in life, and were she told of them ever so emphatically by her own children, she would never believe they were irreparable.
Her mother was not to know anything about her sorrow—
