“You are very pretty, Anna,” he said.
“How you talk, Henrik!”
“You are the prettiest girl in the whole of Värmland.”
“That I certainly am not.”
“The prettiest in this sleighing party at any rate.”
“Alas, Henrik, I am not that either.”
“Well, you are the prettiest in this sledge, that you can’t deny.”
No, that she could not.
For Count Henrik is no beauty. He is as ugly as he is stupid. They say of him that that head on the top of his thin neck has descended in the family for a couple of hundred years. That is why the brain is so worn out in the last heir.
“It is perfectly plain that he has no head of his own,” they say. “He has borrowed his father’s. He does not dare to bend it; he is afraid of losing it,—he is already yellow and wrinkled. The head has been in use with both his father and grandfather. Why should the hair otherwise be so thin and the lips so bloodless and the chin so pointed?”