Manne began to talk about “the Glove.” He always did at this time of night.
“The Glove” was Manne’s pet name for a plump little lady who had a glove shop in Regeringsgatan. For a long time she had kept Manne at a distance and he had been forced to purchase and make presents of an incredible number of pairs of gloves in order to win her favour. And now marriage with her was not the most impossible of dear old Manne’s eccentricities. He was unfaithful to “the Glove” now and then with ladies of his own class, but he always returned to her, disappointed and full of remorse. Her diligence, thrift, wordly wisdom and other bourgeois qualities had for him an exotic attraction, the whole charm of the incomprehensible.
Manne tried to kick away the knave of spades and looked appealingly at Stellan with his boyish, humid eyes.
“If you only knew what a woman she is! Damn me if the tears do not come into my eyes when she sews on my buttons. And I had promised her not to gamble again! What will she say when I tell her this?”
Stellan sat there shivering and sleepless, with the worries of tomorrow like poison in his veins and nerves. He was sick of Manne’s sentimentality. It was as if a night frost had fallen on their friendship:
“Why the devil do you tell her?”
Manne smiled a pathetic smile:
“You don’t understand, Stellan. I can hide nothing from her. I can’t. I should go mad at once if I did. She is my reason and conscience, you know. We won’t go just yet, Stellan. It isn’t six yet. And I must ride a little before I talk to her....”
Manne poured out a glass of soda water and swallowed it in one draught:
“Ugh!” he said, “how awful it all was!” And then he suddenly began to talk about old Kolsnäs, about his father, the late chamberlain, who had taken part in the battle of Dybböl, and about his poor little shivering mother with her sewing basket and screen and fires well into June. And he talked about their long battle on the lake outside Stonehill and about their riding trips in the Backa forest.