"Meaning I'm not good enough, perhaps?"
"Oh, good enough and good enough…. Anyway, you can't read nor write, and never so much as take a newspaper to look at."
"As to that," said he, "I can read and write all I've any need for.
But as for you, with all your gabble and talk … I'm sick of it."
"Well, then, here's that to begin with," said she, and threw down the silver ring on the table.
"Ho!" said he, after a while. "And what about the other?"
"Oh, if you want your rings back that you gave me, you can have them," said she, trying to pull off the gold one.
"You can be as nasty as you please," said he. "If you think I care…." And he went out.
And naturally enough, soon after, Barbro was wearing both her rings again.
In time, too, she ceased to care at all for what he said about the death of the child. She simply sniffed and tossed her head. Not that she ever confessed anything, but only said: "Well, and suppose I had drowned it? You live here in the wilds and what do you know of things elsewhere?" Once when they were talking of this, she seemed to be trying to get him to see he was taking it all too seriously; she herself thought no more of getting rid of a child than the matter was worth. She knew two girls in Bergen who had done it; but one of them had got two months' imprisonment because she had been a fool and hadn't killed it, but only left it out to freeze to death; and the other had been acquitted. "No," said Barbro, "the law's not so cruel hard now as it used to be. And besides, it's not always it gets found out." There was a girl in Bergen at the hotel who had killed two children; she was from Christiania, and wore a hat—a hat with feathers in. They had given her three months for the second one, but the first was never discovered, said Barbro.
Axel listened to all this and grew more than ever afraid of her. He tried to understand, to make out things a little in the darkness, but she was right after all; he took these things too seriously in his way. With all her vulgar depravity, Barbro was not worth a single earnest thought. Infanticide meant nothing to her, there was nothing extraordinary in the killing of a child; she thought of it only with the looseness and moral nastiness that was to be expected of a servant-girl. It was plain, too, in the days that followed; never an hour did she give herself up to thought; she was easy and natural as ever, unalterably shallow and foolish, unalterably a servant-girl. "I must go and have my teeth seen to," she said. "And I want one of those new cloaks." There was a new kind of half-length coat that had been fashionable for some years past, and Barbro must have one.