Jenny was leaning against a pillar. She turned her white face to him, smiling sadly: “How can you imagine I would do such a great wrong, and sin against God?” “You mean because you don’t love me? But I tell you it does not matter, because I know my love is such that you will end by returning it, when you have lived wrapped in it for a time.” He seized her in his arms, covering her face with kisses. She made no resistance, but whispered: “Don’t, Gunnar, please.” He released her reluctantly: “Why may I not?” “Because it is you. I don’t know if I should have minded if it had been anybody else for whom I did not care at all.” Gunnar held her hand and they walked up and down in the moonlight. “I understand. When you had the little boy you thought your life had some aim and purpose again after all these aimless years, because you loved him and you needed him. When he died you became indifferent to everything and considered yourself superfluous in the world.” Jenny nodded: “There are a few people I care for enough to be sorry if I knew them in distress and glad if all was well with them. But I myself cannot add either to their sorrow or their joy—it has always been so, and one of the reasons why I was unhappy and filled with longing was just that my life was spent without making anybody happy. My sole wish and yearning was to make another being happy. I have always believed in that as the greatest blessing in life. You spoke of the joy of work—to me it never seemed enough, and it is very selfish, besides, because the greatest joy and satisfaction of it is yours alone; you cannot share it with anybody else. Unless you can share your happiness with others, you lose the greatest possible joy. When you are quite young and feel strongly you are selfish perhaps sometimes—I have felt it myself when I have reached a step nearer my goal, but as a rule it is only the abnormal beings who amass riches for any other purpose than spending. A woman’s life is useless to my mind if she is not the joy of somebody else—and I have never been that—I have only caused sorrow. The little happiness I have been able to give was only what any one else could have given just as well; they have loved me only for what they imagined me to be, not for my real self. “After my baby’s death I began to realize how fortunate it was that there was nobody in the world whom I could cause a really inconsolable grief—nobody to whom I was indispensable. “And now you tell me all this. You have always been the one person I least of all wanted to drag into my confused life; I have always been more fond of you, in a way, than of any one else I know. I enjoyed our friendship so much, because I thought that love and all it brings in its train could never come between us. You were too good for it, I thought. Oh, how I wish it had never changed!”