It was later on, indeed not until after New Year (as they happened to be on the same steamer coming back after the Christmas holidays), that they got to know each other better. The first evening that Kallem went to see Thomas Rendalen in his own rooms, he stayed the night there. And a few evenings after, when Rendalen came to him, they kept going backward and forward between the two lodgings (which were close together) till between three and four o'clock in the morning. Edward Kallem had never before come across such a genial sort of fellow, and Rendalen went up to him early one morning, before Kallem had gone out to the hospital, just to tell him that of all his friends and acquaintances Kallem was the one he liked best. In reality Rendalen's was a stronger nature than Kallem's, a mixture of savagery and tameness, of passion, melancholy, and music, with great powers of communicativeness, but with recesses in his character which were seldom, if ever, opened. Unbounded energy--and then again so utterly devoid of power that he could do nothing; the whole machinery was out of order, as though one of the wheels were broken. Not a single spot at right angles, nothing but irregularities on the whole landscape of his character; but the light of a great mind was over the whole. However incalculable were the surroundings, or unpleasant the disappointments--his individuality, with its strict sense of justice, was so winning that one could not do otherwise than be fond of him. His chief concern was for all belonging to schools, and for education to its very centre; to carry each separate child safe through the "dangerous age" which comes at different times. Many suffered greatly at that time, wounds were made but not easily healed; those who lived comfortably and in better circumstances could pass the ordeal unhurt; but they were hardly in the majority. All education and teaching was to be concentrated in forming a good and moral man, that was his first and last thought. He was indefatigable in lecturing on ways and means of education; in discussing all school arrangements and the work to be done in the homes. His mother owned a widely-known girls' school in one of the towns on the coast, and he was anxious to take possession of it so as to be able to carry out his plans! His great aim was a system of mixed schools; but first the teaching of all the principal branches must undergo a change--be made easier, not suitable only for the most talented pupils. And he intended practising all this at the girls' school.