There was a time when she wanted to go on the stage. She and her friends were stage-struck; they sold their school books and their confirmation brooches to buy tickets, and night after night they went to the gallery of the theatre. One day she told her friends how _she_ would act a certain part that interested them. They burst out laughing; they had always known she was conceited, but not that she was a megalomaniac. Did she really believe that she could become an artist, she, who could not even dance? It would be a pretty sight indeed to see her walk up and down the stage with that tall, stiff skeleton of hers. No, she could not dance. When she was quite a child her mother used to play to her, and she twisted and turned, tripped and curtseyed as she liked, and her mother called her a little linnet. She thought of her first party, how she had arrived full of anticipation, happy in a new white dress which her mother had made after an old English picture. She remembered how she stiffened all over when she began to dance. That stiffness never quite left her; when she tried to learn dancing by herself her soft, slim body became stiff as a poker. She was no good at it. She was very anxious to go to a dancing class, but it never came to anything. She laughed at the recollection of her school friends. She had met two of them at the exhibition at home, the first time she had got one of her pictures hung and a few lines of praise in the papers. She was with some other artists—Heggen was one of them—when they came up to congratulate her: “Didn’t we always say you’d be an artist? We were all sure that some day we should hear more of you.” She had smiled: “Yes, Ella; so was I.” Lonely! She had been lonely ever since her mother met Mr. Berner, who worked with her in the same office. She was about ten at that time, but she understood at once that her dead father had departed from their home. His picture was still hanging there, but he was gone, and it dawned upon her what death really meant. The dead existed only in the memory of others, who had the power conditionally to end their poor shadow life—and they were gone for ever. She understood why her mother became young and pretty and happy again; she noticed the expression on her face when Berner rang the bell. She was allowed to stay in the room and listen to their talk; it was never about things the child could not hear, and they did not send her out of the room when they were together in her home. In spite of the jealousy in her little heart, she understood that there were many things a grown-up mother could not speak about with a little girl, and a strong feeling of justice developed in her. She did not wish to be angry with her mother, but it hurt very much all the same.