“Thank you,” she said, at length. “I see things much more clearly now; last night I could only see things through Aunt Grönvold’s spectacles, and I think they must be very short-sighted ones.”
“That is quite true,” she said. “The marriages brought about by scheming relatives may look promising enough at first, but in the long run they always bring trouble and misery. The true marriages are made in heaven, Sigrid, though folks are slow to believe that.”
Sigrid went away comforted, yet nevertheless life was not very pleasant to her just then, for although she had the satisfaction of seeing Torvald walking the streets of Bergen without any signs of great dejection in his face, she had all day long to endure the consciousness of her aunt’s vexation, and to feel in every little economy that this need not have been practiced had she decided as Fru Grönvold wished. It was on the whole a very dreary Christmas, yet the sadness was brightened by one little act of kindness and courtesy which to the end of her life she never forgot. For after all it is that which is rare that makes a deep impression on us. The word of praise spoken at the beginning of our career lingers forever in our hearts with something of the glow of encouragement and hopefulness which it first kindled there; while the applause of later years glides off us like water off a duck’s back. The little bit of kindness shown in days of trouble is remembered when greater kindness during days of prosperity has been forgotten.
It was Christmas-eve. Sigrid sat in her cold bedroom, wrapped round in an eider-down quilt. She was reading over again the letter she had last received from Frithiof, just one of those short unsatisfying letters which of late he had sent her. From Germany he had written amusingly enough, but these London letters often left her more unhappy than they found her, not so much from anything they said as from what they left unsaid. Since last Christmas all had been taken away from her, and now it seemed to her that even Frithiof’s love was growing cold, and her tears fell fast on the thin little sheet of paper where she had tried so hard to read love and hope between the lines, and had tried in vain.