“You cannot think how desperate I have been. But I cannot help being as I am. When we are out of an evening with other artists I see that he is in a bad humour; he does not say anything, but I see he thinks I flirt with them. It is true, perhaps, for I get into good spirits when I can have a meal out and need not cook and wash up once for a change, and not be afraid of spoiling the food when Lennart has to eat it all the same because we cannot afford to throw it away. Sometimes I was glad, too, of not having to be alone with Lennart, though I am fond of him and he is of me—I know he is. If I ask him about it he says, ‘You know it quite well,’ and smiles in a queer way, but he does not trust me because I cannot love with my senses and yet like to flirt. Once he said I had not a notion of what love really meant and that it was his fault for not being able to awaken it in me, but there would probably be another man some day who could. O God, how I cried! “You know we are ever so poor. Well, in the spring Gunnar managed to get my still-life picture sold—the one I had at the exhibition three years ago. We got three hundred _kroner_ for it and we lived on it for several months, but Lennart did not like spending the money I had earned. I cannot see what difference it makes when we are fond of each other, but he talked about having brought me into misery and so on. We have got debts too, of course, so I wanted to write to father asking him for a few hundreds, but he would not let me. I thought it so ridiculous. Borghild and Helga have lived at home or abroad all these years and had everything given to them, whereas I have saved and pinched with the little I had from mother since I came of age, because I did not want to take anything from papa after what he said to me when I broke my engagement with Kaasen and there was all the talk about Hans and me. Father has since admitted that I was right. It was mean of Kaasen and of them at home to try and force me to marry him because he had beguiled me into an engagement when I was only seventeen, and did not know that marriage meant anything else but what you read in silly girl stories. When I began to understand, I knew I would rather kill myself than marry him. If they had succeeded in forcing me to it, I would have led them a life, taking all the lovers I could get just out of spite and to pay them out. Papa sees it now, and he says I can have money whenever I want it.