There was a snore from the leather-covered chair, and Ma continued, more softly:
She may, indeed, and that tolerably earnestly, wish to rule over a fine salon; but she has not yet been brought clearly to comprehend that with it she must take the man who owns it. There is something in her open nature which always keeps the distance between these two questions too wide for even a captain of cavalry to leap over it. God bless her!
Love is like an awakening, without which we neither know nor understand anything of its holy language; and unhappy are they who learn to know it too late, when they have imprisoned themselves in the so-called bonds of duty. I am almost absolutely sure that love has not yet been awakened in Inger-Johanna—may a good angel protect her!
"Ouf!—such old maids," said the captain, waking up. "Go on, go on—is there any more?"
How far the young student who has a position in the office is in any degree a hindrance to these plans, I don't dare to say, either pro or con. But the governor's wife thinks or fears something, I am firmly convinced from her whole manner of treating him lately, although she is far too bright to let Inger-Johanna get even the slightest suspicion of her real reason.
I heard it plainly when I took coffee there on Sunday, before they went away to Tilderöd, and she had the maid tell him that she could not see him. There was a not very gracious allusion to his "Sunday professorship of pettifogging ideas," as she called it.
I suppose these must be something of the same sort of ideas that I was enthusiastic about when I was young and read Rousseau's Émile, which absorbed me very much, nay, which can yet occupy some of my thoughts. For she stated, as one of his leading ideas, that he, in his headlong blindness, thought that he could simplify the world, and first and foremost education, to a very few natural propositions or so-called principles. And you know, we—still, that is going to be quite too long. To be brief, when Inger-Johanna with impetuosity rushed to the defence of Grip, she saw in him only the son of the idiotic "cadet at Lurleiken," as he is called, one of the well-known, amusing figures of the country; but this one, in addition to his father's distracted ideas, was also equipped with a faculty of using that fearful weapon, satire—voilà the phantom Grip!
Youthful student ideas could perhaps be used gracefully enough as piquant topics of conversation; but instead of that, to set them in motion in a headlong and sensational manner, without regard to the opinion of older people, was a great step, was pretentious, and showed something immature, something raw, which by no means ought to be relished.
I have reported this so much at length in order to show you by the very expressions that there may be here a "good deal of cotton in the linen," as the saying is.
And since I am going to bring my innermost heart to light, I shall have to tell you that he appears to me to be a trustworthy, truthful young man, whose natural disposition is as he speaks and not otherwise, and he carries a beautiful stamp on his countenance and in his whole bearing. If possibly he is a little forgetful of "My son, if you want to get on in the world, then bow," that is worst for him and not to his dishonor, we know.