“Perhaps so. Possibly that’s what attracted her. She is strong and independent herself, and might love a man weaker than herself.”
“I’ll tell you what I think. I don’t believe that Jenny really is so strong and independent. She’s only been forced to be. At home she had to help and support, and there was nobody to support her. She had to take care of me, because I needed her—now it is Gram. She is strong and determined, and she knows it, and nobody asks her in vain for help, but nobody can go on for ever giving help and never getting any themselves. Don’t you see that it will make her very lonely, always being the strongest? She is lonely now, and if she marries that fellow she will never be anything else. We all talk to her about ourselves, and she has nobody she could talk to in the same way. She ought to have a husband she could look up to, whose authority she should feel, one to whom she could say: This is how I have lived and worked and fought, for I thought it right, and who could judge if it was right? Gram cannot, because he is her inferior. How can she know if she has been in the right, when she has nobody with authority to confirm it? Jenny should ask, ‘Is it not?’ and ‘Don’t you think?’—not he.”
They sat both quiet a while, then Heggen said:
“It is rather curious, Cesca, that when it is a question of your own affairs you cannot make head or tail of it, but when it concerns somebody else, I think you often can see clearer than any of us.”
“Perhaps. That is why I think sometimes I ought to go into a convent. When I am outside a trouble I seem to understand it all, but when I am mixed up in it myself I can’t see a thing.”
XI
The juicy, blue-grey giant leaves of the cactus were scarred by names, initials, and hearts carved in the flesh. Helge was carving an H and a J, and Jenny stood with her arms round his shoulder, looking on.
“When we come back here our initials will be a brown scar like all the others,” said he. “Do you think we shall be able to find them?”