Autumn was at hand. The first strong wind had risen. Thin, tattered grey clouds raced across the sky. The dreary, tossing sea was covered far and wide with foam. Great, powerful waves rolled silently in, relentless, awesome; towered majestically, in a metallic dark-green curve, then crashed thundering on the sand.
The season was quite at an end. On that part of the beach usually occupied by the throng of bathers, the pavilions were already partly dismantled, and it lay as quiet as the grave, with only a very few basket-chairs. But Tony and Morten spent the afternoon in a distant spot, at the edge of the yellow loam, where the waves hurled their spray as far up as Sea-gull Rock. Morten had made her a solid sand fortress, and she leaned against it with her back, her feet in their strap shoes and white stockings crossed in front of her. Morten lay turned toward her, his chin in his hands. Now and then a sea-gull flew past them, shrieking. They looked at the green wall of wave, streaked with sea-weed, that came threateningly on and on and then broke against the opposing boulders, with the eternal, confused tumult that deafens and silences and destroys all sense of time.
Finally Morten made a movement as though rousing himself from deep thought, and said, “Well, you will soon be leaving us, Fräulein Tony.”
“No; why?” Tony said absently.
“Well, it is the tenth of September. My holidays are nearly at an end, anyhow. How much longer can it last? Shall you be glad to get back to the society of your own kind? Tell me—I suppose the gentlemen you dance with are very agreeable?—No, no, that was not what I wanted to say. Now you must answer me,” he said, with a sudden resolution, shifting his chin in his hands and looking at her. “Here is the question I have been waiting so long to ask. Now: who is Herr Grünlich?”
Tony sat up, looking at him quickly, her eyes shifting back and forth like those of a person recollecting himself on coming out of a dream. She was feeling again the sense of increased personal importance first experienced when Herr Grünlich proposed for her hand.
“Oh, is that what you want to know, Morten?” she said weightily. “Well, I will tell you. It was really very painful for me to have Thomas mention his name like that, the first afternoon; but since you have already heard of him—well, Herr Grünlich, Bendix Grünlich, is a business friend of my father, a well-to-do Hamburg merchant, who has asked for my hand. No, no,” she replied quickly to a movement of Morten’s, “I have refused him; I have never been able to make up my mind to yield him my consent for life.”
“And why not?—if I may ask,” said Morten awkwardly.
“Why? Oh, good heavens, because I couldn’t endure him,” she cried out in a passion. “You ought to have seen him, how he looked and how he acted. Among other things, he had yellow whiskers—dreadfully unnatural. I’m sure he curled them and put on gold powder, like the stuff we use for the Christmas nuts. And he was underhanded. He fawned on my Father and Mother and chimed in with them in the most shameful way—”
Morten interrupted her. “But what does this mean: ‘That trims it up uncommonly.’”