"The devil you did! Beg pardon, I'm sure, but to tell the truth I've no faith in that sort of people, as Banker Hermansen would say."
"We were both of us young and inexperienced; he dreamed of gaining world-wide fame by his pen, and I used to weep over his passionate love poems. I was eighteen and he twenty-two, and I promised to follow him to the end of the world, for better or worse.
"Then one fine day we landed in Paris, without caring a jot for our people, our friends, or our own country. We were married there at the Swedish Church, and there I was, a poet's wife, with my people at home trying to forget the black sheep of the family.
"A few years passed. But every day saw the breaking of one of the golden threads in our web of illusion, and when Betty was born we were in desperate straits.
"Poor old Thor, he used to sit up late at night writing stuff for the papers at home, all about magnificent functions he'd never been to at all, and warming his frozen fingers over a few bits of coal in the stove."
"And he might have made quite a decent living in an office," put in Holm sympathetically.
"Unfortunately, he imagined he was a genius, and gradually, as things got worse and worse, the struggle for a bare existence made him bitter, till he hated the world, and looked upon himself as a martyr condemned to suffering.
"Then he took to staying out late of an evening, and wrote less and less. By the time we had been there a year, the poet's wife was washing lace to keep the home together. In the autumn of the second year, he went down with pneumonia, and a week after the 'Nordland sun' was a widow. I couldn't go home, for I'd cut myself adrift from them completely when I married. There was nothing for it but to struggle along as best I could by myself, unknown and friendless in the great city. But, thank Heaven, I've always had my health and a cheerful temper, and little Betty was such a darling."
"She and I have fought our way together, Mr. Holm, and a hard fight it has been at times, believe me.
"Well, we got along somehow in Paris, for a few years, doing needlework, or giving music lessons at fifty centimes an hour. It was a cheerless existence mostly, as you can imagine, and if it hadn't been for the child I should have broken down long before.