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Even in her White Villa, on its island with a forest of her very own, Elsie Lindtner, to her intense disappointment, was bored. She lived there with two servants, Torp, the cook (a delightful figure), who believed in spooks, and whose teeth chattered when she told ghost stories; and Jeanne, the mysterious young housemaid with “amber eyes” and hair that glowed like red fungi against the snow, who wore silk stockings, and won Elsie’s heart by admiring and dressing Elsie’s own wonderful hair. Jeanne became the salient interest in Elsie’s hermit life on the island, and was promoted to the intimacy of companion and confidante. It was Jeanne who arranged the flowers artistically with her “long, pointed fingers,” and picked up her skirts disdainfully when she passed the flirtatious gardener, to whose fascinations Torp, the cook, became a hapless prey. Torp “made herself thin in collecting fat chickens for him,” and he played cards with her in the basement kitchen.
Jeanne rowed hard in the little white boat across the lake to catch the last post with Elsie’s fatal invitation to Malthe. “I will never part with Jeanne,” Elsie said as she watched her. Then she wandered at random in the woods and fields, and scarcely seemed to feel the ground under her feet. The flowers smelt so sweet, and she was so deeply moved.
“How can I sleep? I feel I must stay awake until my letter is in his hands.... Now it is speeding to him through the quiet night. The letter yearns towards him as I do myself.... I am young again, yes, young, young! How blue the night is.”
But she could not, alas, young as she felt, get into the white embroidered muslin which used to become her so well, and Malthe’s first glance told her all.
“He cast down his eyes so that he might not hurt me again.” One reads of tears of blood. “... During the few hours he spent in my house I think we smiled ‘smiles of blood.’”
Malthe left the White Villa the same night, and said at parting, “I feel like the worst of criminals.”
After this shattering blow Elsie in her despair craved for even the boring society of the husband she had deserted. She was, to use her own expression, “greedy of Richard’s caresses,” and invited him, too, to visit her on her island. But Richard declined altogether. He had just become engaged to a girl, “a mere chit of nineteen.”
“He has made a fool of me! I am done for. Nothing is left to me but to efface myself as soon as possible.”