Emanuel was given a row of the neat wooden blocks, set up on the table before him.
"Look--there's the puff-puff," said Hedvig.
The child laughed all over his face, but a moment later he was nibbling at the engine.
In the next room Egholm was still talking about the manifold vicissitudes of his life.
He had started as a grocer's assistant in Helsingør, then in Aalborg; after that he had been a photographer, in the time of the war, when the Austrians were there. He had made a fortune, but it had vanished in an attempt to double it, in Göteborg, Sweden, where there was no photographer at that time at all. Then on to Copenhagen with but a few small coins remaining, and, despite this adverse beginning, the possession of the biggest photographic studio in the town a few months later.
This was Egholm's _chef-d'oeuvre_; he had told the story of it a hundred times. And by frequent repetition, it had gained a certain style, as he omitted more and more of the commonplace. He told of his bold advertisements--a new departure altogether--his growing staff of assistants, the eagerness of the public to come first, and the tearful envy of his competitors. And when, in the flight of his telling, he reached its highest point, where he really was the greatest photographer in the place--he stopped. He felt he must remain there on those heights, above the clouds; he wished his hearers always to remember him as there and so. The miserable descent he passed over, and began as a matter of course with his appointment on the railways, as station assistant, at a wretched rate of pay.
Vang did not seem to miss the intervening chapters; he sat wallowing in the delicious smell of cooking that came through from the kitchen.
Egholm told of his railway period, how he had rushed about the country, now at some desolate little station on the Jutland moors, now in big places like Odense or Frederikshavn. He sighed, and passed over the conflicts with authority, and his dismissal. No, he would not think of those things now; not a thought. He turned abruptly to the annals of the Brethren of St. John. True, there was much that was disappointing about his relations with that community, but, after all, there had been something grand in its way about the final meeting. Had he not stood there alone, and told them the truth, in such a wise that even the fellow from Copenhagen had polished his glasses and shaken in his shoes, finding nothing to say in return? Had he not gained the victory? They had thrown him out--but was not that in itself sufficient evidence that his words were true, and had pierced them accordingly?