It was dark when she arrived at her destination; her mother, Bodil, and Nils were at the station to meet her.
It was as if she had seen her mother a week ago, but Mrs. Berner cried when she kissed her daughter: “Welcome home, my darling child—God bless you!” Bodil had grown, and looked very smart in a long coat and skirt. Kalfatrus greeted her shyly.
As she came out of the station she smelt the odour peculiar to the railway square of Christiania—a mixture of sea-water, coal smoke, and dried herring.
The cab drove along Carl Johan, past the old familiar houses. Mrs. Berner asked about the journey, and where she had spent the night. It seemed all so commonplace to Jenny, as if she had never been away from it. The two young people on the back seat said never a word.
Outside a garden gate in Wergelandsveien a young couple stood kissing each other good-night. A few stars twinkled in the clear deep blue sky above the naked trees in the Castle gardens. A smell of mouldering leaves came through the carriage window, reminding her of melancholy springs of old.
The cab stopped at the house where they lived. There was light still in the dairy on the ground floor; the woman came out on the doorstep, when she heard the cab, and said: “Good evening; welcome back,” to Jenny. Ingeborg came rushing down the stairs to embrace her, and hurried up again, carrying her sister’s bag. Supper was laid in the sitting-room, and Jenny saw her napkin with her father’s silver ring in her old place beside Kalfatrus. Ingeborg hurried into the kitchen, and Bodil went with Jenny to her old room at the back, which had been Ingeborg’s during her absence, and still harboured some of her belongings. On the walls were some picture cards of actors; Napoleon and Madame Récamier in mahogany frames hung on either side of Jenny’s old empire mirror above the antique chest of drawers.
Jenny washed and did her hair; she felt an irritation in her skin from the journey, and passed the powder-puff a couple of times over her face. Bodil sniffed the powder to see if it was scented. They went to supper. Ingeborg had a nice hot meal ready; she had been to a cookery school that winter. In the light of the lamp Jenny saw that her young sisters had their thick curly hair tied up with silk bows. Ingeborg’s small, dark face was thinner, but she did not cough any longer. She saw, too, that mamma had grown older—or had she perhaps not noticed, when she was at home and saw her every day, that the small wrinkles in her mother’s pretty face increased, that the tall, girlish figure stooped a little, and that the shoulders lost their roundness? Since she grew up she had always been told that her mother looked like an elder and prettier sister of hers.
They spoke about everything that had happened at home during the year.
“Why didn’t we take a taxi?” said Nils suddenly. “How stupid of us to ride home in an old four-wheeler!”