"It is of no use to pull the noose when one has his head in a snare, you see, Ola."
In the sitting-room Ma had examined the mail that had come, sitting by the stove door. Besides a number of Hermoder, The Constitutional, and a free official document, there was a letter from Aunt Alette.
She lighted the candle and sat down to read it.
In certain respects it was a piece of good fortune that Jäger was not at home. He ought to have nothing to do with this.
Dear Gitta,—I have taken the second Christmas day to write down for you my thoughts concerning Inger-Johanna. I cannot deny that she has come to interest me almost more than I could wish; but, if we can feel a certain degree of anxiety for the smallest flower in our window, which is just going to blossom, how much more then for a human bud, which in the developing beauty of its youth is ready to burst out with its life's fate. This is more than a romance, it is the noble art work of the Guide of all, which in depth and splendor and immeasurable wealth surpasses everything that human fantasy is able to represent.
Yes, she interests me, dear Gitta! so that my old heart almost trembles at thinking of the life path which may await her, when rise or fall may depend on a single deceptive moment.
What can Nature mean in letting such a host of existences, in which hearts are beating, succumb and be lost in this choice, or does it thereby in its great crucible make an exact assay, without which nothing succeeds in passing over into a more complete development—who can unriddle Nature's runes? My hope for Inger-Johanna is that the fund or the weight of personality, which she possesses in her own nature, will preponderate in the scales of her choice in the decisive moment.
I premise all this as a sigh from my innermost heart; for I follow with increasing dread how the path is made more and more slippery under her feet, and how delicately your sister-in-law weaves the net around her, not with small means to which Inger-Johanna would be superior, but with more deep-lying, sounding allurements.
To open up the fascinating prospect of making her personal qualities and gifts count—what greater attraction can be spread out before a nature so ardently aspiring as hers? It is told of Englishmen that they fish with a kind of counterfeited, glittering flies, which they drag over the surface of the water until the fish bites; and it appears to me that in no less skilful manner your sister-in-law continually tempts Inger-Johanna's illusions. She never mentions the name of the one concerned, so that it may dawn upon her of itself.
Only the careless hint to me, in her hearing, the last time I was there, that Rönnow had certainly for some time been rather fastidiously looking for a wife among the élite of our ladies—why was not that calculated to excite, what shall I call it, her ambition or her need of having a field of influence?