Nils swung himself into the saddle and trotted to the west end of the village, where the houses and gardens scattered into prairie-land and the road turned south. Far ahead of him, in the declining light, he saw Clara Vavrika’s slender figure, loitering on horseback. He touched his mare with the whip, and shot along the white, level road, under the reddening sky. When he overtook Olaf’s wife he saw that she had been crying. “What’s the matter, Clara Vavrika?” he asked kindly.
“Oh, I get blue sometimes. It was awfully jolly living there with father. I wonder why I ever went away.”
Nils spoke in a low, kind tone that he sometimes used with women: “That’s what I’ve been wondering these many years. You were the last girl in the country I’d have picked for a wife for Olaf. What made you do it, Clara?”
“I suppose I really did it to oblige the neighbors”—Clara tossed her head. “People were beginning to wonder.”
“To wonder?”
“Yes—why I didn’t get married. I suppose I didn’t like to keep them in suspense. I’ve discovered that most girls marry out of consideration for the neighborhood.”
Nils bent his head toward her and his white teeth flashed. “I’d have gambled that one girl I knew would say, ‘Let the neighborhood be damned.’”
Clara shook her head mournfully. “You see, they have it on you, Nils; that is, if you’re a woman. They say you’re beginning to go off. That’s what makes us get married: we can’t stand the laugh.”
Nils looked sidewise at her. He had never seen her head droop before. Resignation was the last thing he would have expected of her. “In your case, there wasn’t something else?”
“Something else?”