A story might be well began there on the balcony of the National Theatre in Christiania, with a young man confronted suddenly by the challenge of his life’s tether; a young man dreaming of a world wider and more glamorous than his own, a world that would hold fit employment for his youth and courage and ambition. He would turn from the balcony with an ache about him, and it might be that in the wide reception-room behind it he would find himself suddenly beside the girl whose image had been never long absent from his thoughts, and there would be comfort for him in the sight of her cool skin and light flaxen hair and pale cornflower blue eyes, eyes that would smile softly into his, that would seem to bid him “take life easy as the grass grows on the weirs.” And her sweetness would be cast as a net about him, entangling alike his dreams and purpose and his discontent. They will say nothing: there will be no need of words; but they will turn and walk out of the large room and stand together alone and silent on the balcony, in the evening air, happy, unutterably happy in their nearness one beside the other. And he will never leave the city: he will be unfaithful to his dream; he will build a chalet on the hills of Majorstuen. And his youth will pass; and one evening he will stand again alone upon the balcony, and remember how thirty years earlier he had stood there, dreaming of a wider city, and the old ache will rise in him and he will wonder if he has been wise to accept the immediate adventure, the adventure that lay to hand. He will ask himself whether he might not have found elsewhere employment for that faith and energy of which the years have robbed him.