Peter was not left long in doubt. It was as he had suspected, Frida was expecting a child. She absolutely must see him, she wrote. She was so ill and so run down. If he did not arrange things for her at once she would drown herself....
Peter sat long staring at the letter and it did not affect him in the way he would have thought. Instead it rather comforted him in a strange way. It cooled his desire to think of her growing more and more unshapely and ugly every day.
“Oh no,” he muttered, “you won’t drown yourself. I have paid for what I have had. We are square. It is high time for me to return to my senses.”
The long tug of war between his love and his purse had ended in a victory for the purse.
Peter burnt all Frida’s letters and did not answer a word. He had decided to regard the affair with Frida as a dream. And he knew he could do it. There was not a trace of proof. So wonderful was the instinctive cunning of this man that he had not sent a single line signed with his name, written in his own handwriting, or even posted at Selambshof. And scarcely once had he been seen in Frida’s company. She on her side had from the first had every reason to keep the matter secret, because a liaison with the hated Peter the Boss would at once have driven away all her customers in Majängen.
But Peter was not to escape as unscathed as he had imagined. Frida was not at all the sort of person to allow herself to be hanged in silence. For a time she continued to bombard him with letters, full of entreaties and reproaches. Then she began to hang around Selambshof, big, swollen, with a sinister spotted face and awful to see. Peter kept a sharp lookout and succeeded for a long time in avoiding her. But one winter evening she suddenly confronted him in the avenue. Peter did not even greet her, but walked on as if he had not noticed her. Then she seized him by the sleeve and poured over him a wild flood of curses and threats. There were no witnesses. Peter let the flood pass over him with great calm—yes, positively with a kind of enjoyment. Only now when he heard her voice and saw her body did he feel the child as something real. And in his innermost heart he no longer doubted that it was his. No, it was almost a pleasure to think how something of himself was irresistibly developing within her. He enjoyed that sensation with the last cruel glowing spark of his love. But his voice was low and ice-cold when at last he answered her. And he spoke slowly as if he wanted to impress something for all eternity upon her consciousness.