“Oh, look! They’ve broken the calla there,” wailed Fru Egholm, kneeling down beside it. “Broken right down at the root. And it was just coming out....”
“Oh, never mind that!”
“Give me a twenty-five øre, and I’ll look after the lot,” said Jeppe, melting at once before feminine grief.
The family had as much as they could carry. Egholm walked with pictures under either arm; his wife took the fowl, the cut-glass bowl, and the flower-pot with the calla. Leave it—because it was broken? No, she could never be so cruel.
Emanuel’s perambulator lay upside down, revealing the advertisement placard for somebody’s beer that had been tacked over the hole in the bottom. Hedvig tipped it right side up. It would hold a good deal, being of a peculiarly low, broad shape. Emanuel was ultimately placed among the various goods there disposed, as one surrounded by trophies in a triumphal car. He sat looking round with big blue eyes under his little white cap. It was a girl’s cap, really—a sort of sunbonnet that had lain in a drawer since Hedvig’s time, but—Herregud! what did it matter? At his age....
Egholm walked in front, the pictures waving up and down like a pair of wings as he described the view with great enthusiasm to his wife.
The slow-moving flood of the Belt glittered in newborn sunlight. The fields lay green and open under God’s sky. The landscape looked one freshly and boldly in the eyes—Anna marked how the very air tasted utterly different from that about Eriksens’ sour little patch of yard and garden. Her husband voiced her thought exactly when he said:
“I don’t believe there’s a prettier spot in all the world.”