Jenny Winge sat as before, looking thoughtfully in front of her. In the orchard below grew rows of vegetables, small innocent tufts of green on the grey soil, and on the far side of the meadow one could see the yellow masses of ruins on the Palatine against the dark foliage. The day promised to be warm. The Alban mountains in the distance, beyond the pines of the villa gardens, looked misty against the soft blue of the sky.
Jenny drank some wine, still looking straight ahead. Helge followed with his eyes the smoke of her cigarette—a faint morning breeze carried it out in the sunshine. She sat with her legs crossed. She had small ankles, and her feet were clad in thin purple stockings and bead-embroidered evening shoes. The jacket was open over the gathered silver-grey dress with the white collar and the beads, which threw pink spots on her milky-white neck. The fur cap had slid back from her fair, fluffy hair.
“I suppose you have the support of your father, though, Mr. Gram—I mean, he understands you, doesn’t he? Surely he sees that you can’t get ahead so quickly at that school, when you have quite different work at heart?”
“I don’t know. He was very pleased that I could go abroad, of course, but”—after some hesitation—“I have never been very intimate with my father. And then there is mother. She was anxious lest I should work too hard, or be short of money—or risk my future. Father and mother are so different—she has never quite understood him, and kept more to us children. She was a great deal to me when I was a boy, but she was jealous of father even—that he should have greater influence over me than she had. She was jealous of my work too, when I locked myself up in a room of an evening to read, and always anxious about my health and afraid I should give up my post.”
“The letter I fetched at the post office was from them.” He took it out of his pocket and looked at it, but he did not open it. “It is my birthday today,” he said, trying to smile. “I am twenty-six.”
“Many happy returns.” Miss Winge shook hands with him. She looked at him almost in the same way as she looked at Miss Jahrman when she nestled in her arms.
She had not noticed before what he looked like, though she was under the impression that he was tall and thin and dark. He had good, regular features on the whole, a high, somewhat narrow forehead, light brown eyes with a peculiar amber-like transparency, and a small, weak mouth with a tired and sad expression under the moustache.