He had gone on speaking recklessly, but Cecil felt much too keenly to be checked by any conventionality as to the duty of talking only of surface matters.
“You are unjust to the world, yourself included!” she exclaimed. “I believe that you have too much of the hardy Norseman about you ever to hanker after a life of ease and pleasure which must really ruin you.”
“That speech only shows that you have formed too high an estimate of our national character,” said Frithiof. “Perhaps you don’t know that the Norwegians are often drunkards?”
“Possibly; and so are the English; but, in spite of that, is not the real national character true and noble and full of a sense of duty? What I meant about you was that I think you do try to do the things you see to be right. I never thought you were perfect.”
“Then if I do the things that I see to be right I can only see a very little, that’s certain,” he said lightly.
“Exactly so,” she replied, unable to help laughing a little at his tone. “And I think that you have been too lazy to take the trouble to try and see more. However, that brings us round again to the things that bore you. Would you like to write at this table in the window? You will be quite quiet in here till dinner-time.”
She found him pens and ink, tore a soiled sheet off the blotting-pad, drew up the blind so as to let in just enough sunshine, and then left him to his translating.
“What a strange girl she is,” he thought to himself. “As frank and outspoken as a boy, and yet with all sorts of little tender touches about her. Sigrid would like her; they did take to one another at Balholm, I remember.”
Then, with a bitter recollection of one who had eclipsed all others during that happy week on the Sogne Fjord, the hard look came back to his face, and taking up his pen he began to work doggedly at Herr Sivertsen’s manuscript.
The next morning his new life began: he turned his back on the past and deliberately made his downward step on the social ladder, which nevertheless meant an upward step on the ladder of honesty and success. Still there was no denying that the loss of position chafed him sorely; he detested having to treat such a man as James Horner as his master and employer; he resented the free-and-easy tone of the other men employed on the premises. Mr. Horner, who was the sort of man who would have patronized an archangel for the sake of showing off his own superior affability, unluckily chanced to be in the shop a good deal during that first week, and the new hand received a large share of his notice. Frithiof’s native courtesy bore him up through a good deal, but at last his pride got the better of him, and he made it so perfectly apparent to the bumptious little man that he desired to have as little to do with him as possible, that James Horner’s bland patronage speedily changed to active dislike.