“Laura dear, do let me stay till six. Only till six when my horse is groomed. I must mount him a moment before ... before ... oh, good God....”
Laura knew what was coming. Manne was going to be sentimental. The situation no longer had any novelty. She had an irresistible longing to go to bed and with a mocking curtsey entrusted Manne to the care of Stellan, who never slept after a night’s gambling. Then she withdrew.
And as Laura sat in her lace nightdress and pink silk boudoir cap and counted out her neat little winnings on the eiderdown, Stellan and Manne lounged in their easy chairs in front of the fireplace. The fire had gone out long ago.
The dawn was raw and dismal. Half-emptied glasses with lip marks and thumb marks, cigar ash and stinking, saliva-soaked cigar ends were everywhere. And then the pitiless sharp grey light peeping in through the blinds and the cold anguish of the dry air itself in a room where people have worn out their nerves with barren excitement.
On the carpet lay a torn knave of spades grinning at them.
Manne began to talk about “the Glove.” He always did at this time of night.
“The Glove” was Manne’s pet name for a plump little lady who had a glove shop in Regeringsgatan. For a long time she had kept Manne at a distance and he had been forced to purchase and make presents of an incredible number of pairs of gloves in order to win her favour. And now marriage with her was not the most impossible of dear old Manne’s eccentricities. He was unfaithful to “the Glove” now and then with ladies of his own class, but he always returned to her, disappointed and full of remorse. Her diligence, thrift, wordly wisdom and other bourgeois qualities had for him an exotic attraction, the whole charm of the incomprehensible.
Manne tried to kick away the knave of spades and looked appealingly at Stellan with his boyish, humid eyes.
“If you only knew what a woman she is! Damn me if the tears do not come into my eyes when she sews on my buttons. And I had promised her not to gamble again! What will she say when I tell her this?”
Stellan sat there shivering and sleepless, with the worries of tomorrow like poison in his veins and nerves. He was sick of Manne’s sentimentality. It was as if a night frost had fallen on their friendship: