Jenny | Page 9

about every stone and every place, until
their eyes could not see the beauty in anything, unless it exactly
corresponded to the picture already in mind. They could probably look
at some white pillars standing against the dark blue sky and enjoy the
sight without any pedantic curiosity as to what temple they were part of
and for what unknown god it had been built.
He had read and he had dreamed, and he understood now that nothing
in reality was what he had expected it to be. In the clear daylight
everything seemed grey and hard, the dream had enveloped the pictures

of his fancy in a soft chiaroscuro, had given them a harmonious finish,
and covered the ruins with a delicate green. He would now only go
round and make sure that everything he had read about was really there,
and then he would be able to lecture on it to the young ladies at the
Academy, and say that he had seen it. Not a single thing would he have
to tell them that he had discovered for himself; he would learn nothing
that he did not already know. And when he met living beings he
conjured up in his mind the dead forms of poetry that he knew, to see if
one of them were represented, for he knew nothing of the living, he
who had never lived. Heggen with the full, red mouth would hardly -
he supposed - dream of romantic adventure, like those one reads of in
the popular novelettes, if he fell in with a girl one evening in the streets
of Rome.
He began to feel conscious of having drunk wine.
"You will have a headache tomorrow if you go home now," said Miss
Winge to him, when they stood outside in the street. The other three
walked ahead; he followed with her.
"I am sure you think me an awful bore to take out of an evening."
"Not at all, but you do not know us well enough yet, and we don't know
you."
"I am slow at making acquaintances - in fact, I never really get to know
people. I ought not to have come tonight, when you were kind enough
to ask me. Perhaps one needs training to enjoy oneself too," he said,
with a short laugh.
"Of course one does." Ho could hear from her voice that she was
smiling.
"I was twenty-five when I started and, you can take it from me, I had
no easy time at first."
"You? I thought that you artists always. . . . For that matter, I did not
think you were twenty-five or near it."

"I am, thank goodness, and considerably more."
"Do you thank Heaven for that? And I, a man, for every year that drops
from me as it were into eternity, without having brought me anything
but the humiliation of finding that nobody has any use for me - I - " He
stopped suddenly, terrified. He heard that his voice trembled, and he
concluded that the wine had gone to his head, since he could speak like
that to a woman he did not even know. But in spite of his shyness he
went on: "It seems quite hopeless. My father has told me about the
young men of his time, about their eager discussions and their great
illusions. I have never had a single illusion to talk about all these years,
that now are gone, lost, never to return."
"You have no right to say that, Mr. Gram. Not one year of one's life is
wasted, as long as you have not reached a point where suicide is the
only way out. I don't believe that the old generation, those from the
time of the great illusions, were better off than we. The dreams of their
youth stripped life bare for them. We young people, most of the ones I
know, have started life without illusions. We were thrown into the
struggle for existence almost before we were grown up, and from the
first we have looked at life with open eyes, expecting the worst. And
then one day we understood that we could manage to get something
good out of it ourselves. Something happens, perhaps, that makes you
think: if you can stand this, you can stand anything. Once you have got
self-reliance in that way, there are no illusions that any one or anything
can rob you of."
"But circumstances and opportunities may be such that one's
self-reliance is not much use when they are stronger than oneself."
"True," she said. "When a ship sets sail, circumstances may cause it to
be wrecked - a collision or a mistake in the construction of a wheel -
but it does not start with that presumption.