Now Ola began to lose his footing. He felt like a man who is walking, lost in thought, through the streets on a winter evening, and who suddenly discovers that he has got upon a patch of slippery ice. There was nothing for it but to keep up and go ahead; so, with the courage of despair, he said “If I knew—or dared to hope—that one of the ladies—no—that the lady I wanted to dance with—that she would care to—hm—that she would dance with me, then—then—” he could get no further, and after saying “then” two or three times over, he came to a stand-still.
“You could ask her,” said the fair one.
Her bracelet had come unfastened, and its clasp was so stiff that she had to bend right forward and pinch it so hard that she became quite red in the face, in order to fasten it again.
“Would you, for example, dance with me?” Ola’s brain was swimming.
“Why not?” she answered. She stood pressing the point of her shoe into a crack in the floor.
“We’re to have a party at the Parsonage on Friday—would you give me a dance then?”
“With pleasure; which would you like?” she answered, trying her best to assume a “society” manner.
“A quadrille?” said Ola; thinking: “Quadrilles are so long.”
“The second quadrille is disengaged,” answered the lady.
“And a galop?”