He took her home to The Rookery. Not until the following morning did he think of asking her name. She was called Dagmar Bru and was the daughter of a Norwegian musician in Copenhagen, she said. Probably some dissolute fiddler who scraped in some low-class restaurant. Her mother she could not remember. She had worked at a lace curtain factory before she came to the sculptor. Tord could get no more out of her and he did not press her. He loved hearing how she had hated the mill. There was style about her. Something wild and free. A beautiful witch! She had fair hair, plentiful, luxuriant, rough hair. A real mane. It was rather uneven, for she had simply cut it off where it was entangled. Any jewellery she could find she put on just like a savage.
Dagmar stayed at The Rookery. Tord would not let her go. He loved her with a love that consisted largely of scolding and sulking, and which was therefore sincere. He needed her. At whom otherwise could he hurl his bitter reflections on Woman. Once when he had been worse than usual she threatened to go back to her father, the musician. Then he felt how terribly empty it would be not to have her as a butt for his reproaches. He became frightened, frightened to the bottom of his heart lest she should throw away the key of The Rookery as she had done that of the studio. And then he suddenly did something that he had never dreamed of before. He asked her to become his wife.
Dagmar said that marriage would be something quite new—one might always try it.
So they had the banns read and drove to church on the same day as the great family council met at Selambshof.
Laura was warming her toes on the fender and quickly swallowed a third cup of coffee:
“Tord is an egoist,” she exclaimed in a tone of moral indignation. “He is an awful egoist. He has no regard for others.”
All agreed. Stellan’s ever watchful irony seemed to have vanished. He found nothing ridiculous in such words on Laura’s lips. He felt with a queer sort of bitterness that in Tord the Selamb egoism had declined from the high plane on which it was assured of success in the world. He was dangerous, Tord, he did not hide what ought to be hidden, he unmasked them all; he was a caricature of them.
Peter stood watching in the window. He made a sign. A cab came driving up the avenue. It was Tord and that woman. No doubt about it. Tord wore a white tie. It was the first time they had ever seen him in a white tie. And the woman had a bouquet of flowers in her hand. They had come from church....
Stellan stamped on the floor: