“What, going so early, Miss Falck? We have missed you sadly to-night.” Then, as she said something about the English mail, “Yes, yes, quite right. And I ought to be writing home, too, instead of playing.”
“That means that he will not have another rubber,” thought Sigrid, as she hurried down the hill to the dépendence, “and I shall be blamed for it.”
She fell into a state of blank depression, and long after Swanhild was fast asleep she sat struggling with the English letter, which, do what she would, refused to have a cheerful tone forced into it.
“The only comfort is,” she thought, “that the worst has happened to us; what comes now must be for the better. How the wind is raging round the house and shrieking at the windows! And, oh, how dreary and wretched this life is!”
And in very low spirits she blew out the candle, and lay down to sleep as best she might in a bed which shook beneath her in the gale.
With much that was noble in Sigrid’s nature there was interwoven a certain fault of which she herself was keenly conscious. She could love a few with the most ardent and devoted love, but her sympathies were not wide; to the vast majority of those she met she was absolutely indifferent, and though naturally bright and courteous and desirous of giving pleasure, yet she was too deeply reserved to depend at all on the outer circle of friends; she liked them well enough, but it would not greatly have troubled her had she never met them again. Very few had the power to call out all the depths of tenderness, all the womanly sweetness which really characterized her, while a great many repelled her, and called out the harder side of her nature.
It was thus with Fru Grönvold. To her aunt, Sigrid was like an icicle, and her hatred of the little schemes and hopes and anxieties which filled Fru Grönvold’s mind blinded her to much that was worthy of all admiration. However, like all the Falcks, Sigrid was conscientious, and she had been struggling on through the spring and summer, making spasmodic efforts to overcome her strong dislike to one who in the main was kind to her, and the very fact that she had tried made her now more conscious of her failure.
“My life is slipping by,” she thought to herself, “and somehow I am not making the most of it. I am harder and colder than before all this trouble came; I was a mere fine-weather character, and the storm was too much for me. If I go on hating auntie perhaps I shall infect Swanhild, and make her turn into just such another narrow-hearted woman. Oh, why does one have to live with people that rub one just the wrong way?”
She fell asleep before she had solved this problem, but woke early and with a restless craving, which she could not have explained, dressed hastily, put on all the wraps that she possessed, and went out into the fresh morning air.
“I have got to put up with this life,” she said to herself, “and I shall just walk off this stupid discontented mood. What can’t be cured must be endured. Oh, how beautiful it is out all alone in the early morning! I am glad the wind is quite gone down, it has just cooled the air so that to breathe it is like drinking iced water. After all, one can’t talk of merely enduring life when there is all this left to one.”