"We'll set the police on his track! He shall be sent to the Penitentiary. Things must be changed here! I said it was a good house, Evelyn."
"Won't the ladies sit down?" asked the joiner. "It's so much easier to keep up a conversation sitting down. We've no chairs, but that doesn't matter; we've no beds either; they went for taxes, for the lighting of the street, so that you need not go home from the theatre in the dark. We've no gas, as you can see for yourselves. They went in payment of the water-rate—so that your servants should be saved running up and down stairs; the water's not laid on here. They went towards the keeping up of the hospitals, so that your sons will not be laid up at home when...."
"Come away, Eugenia, for God's sake! This is unbearable!"
"I agree with you, ladies, it is unbearable," said the joiner. "And the day will come when things will be worse; on that day we shall come down from the White Mountains with a great noise, like a waterfall, and ask for the return of our beds. Ask? We shall take them! And you shall lie on wooden benches, as I've had to do, and eat potatoes until your stomachs are as tight as a drum and you feel as if you had undergone the torture by water, as we...."
But the ladies had fled, leaving behind them a pile of pamphlets.
"Ugh! What a beastly smell of eau-de-Cologne! It smells of prostitutes!" said the joiner. "A pinch of snuff, cobbler!"
He wiped his forehead with his blue apron and took up his plane while the others reflected silently.
Ygberg, who had been asleep during the whole of the scene, now awoke and made ready to go out again with Falk. Once more Mrs. Homan's voice floated through the open window:
"What did she mean when she said your father was on the flagship? Your father is a captain, isn't he?"
"That's what he's called. It's the same thing. Weren't they an insolent crowd? I'll never go there again. But it will make a fine report. To the restaurant Hasselbacken, driver!"