Your
Elsie Lindtner.
You need not trouble to find me more lace patterns. I have presented my whole collection to the Metropolitan Museum. My new craze, dwarf cacti, amuses me far more—they can’t be enclosed in letters and newspapers unfortunately.
When did they first meet? It is no concern of mine, but I can’t help thinking much about it. Did they know each other before? Yes, of course. He looked after her when she passed through the room. From me he looked across at her—and compared. And after—yes, what after? Did he think continually of Jeanne as before he thought of me? Or is it merely because chance has thrown them together in Paris? Or is it possible that they did not recognise each other at first, and only discovered later where they had met for the first time? Have I played any part in their conversation? Have they clasped hands over my memory, as over a grave?
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
I don’t grudge them their happiness. Jeanne is the right woman for him, and only a Joergen Malthe could satisfy and supplement Jeanne’s whole nature.
How has it come about that everything in me has gone to rest? I feel like a heap of faded leaves lying down somewhere in a deep hollow, where not a breath of wind reaches it, and it lulls itself to sleep.
I don’t live now as I used to live, and I have no goal to strive for; but I have no cares, much less do I feel in despair about anything. Truly, I am very comfortable in mind and body. I should not mind living for ever this sort of life. Yet at the same time I should feel no alarm if some one came and said, “You must die to-night.”