Or it may be that he is faithful to his dream and faithless to his love; that he goes to America and prospers there, and all that other side of him, all that is not strong and hard and resolute, is crushed out in the fierce antagonism of finance, the ruthless fight for wealth, and he returns at length an old man to the country of his youth, to the city that stretches unaltered beneath him in light and shadow: the stern statues, the trees and garden, and the bright, thronged thoroughfare of the Carl Johansgate; and at the end of the balcony there stands a young man leaning, as he had leant thirty years earlier, against the stone of the balustrade, and he is filled swiftly, unaccountably, with an envy for that young man’s potentialities. “I was once,” he thinks, “all that he is now. I, too, was young, and fresh and gracious. I, too, stood with the twenties and the thirties at my feet, and what have I made of them? While others played, I worked. And while I worked the magic and the beauty of life passed by me. I made gold of the years that others turned to poetry.” And he feels lonely, and turns with a shiver to the warm lights at the back of him. And he starts, for it seems to him that there has risen suddenly at his side a figure out of the past: a pale slim girl with cool white skin and flaxen hair and pale cornflower blue eyes, and he is deserted by that assurance that has won him so many contracts, and he stammers and says, “But surely, somewhere,--forgive me, please; but, haven’t we....” And there is a low laugh, and at his side a voice, “But you should know her, she is my daughter.” And turning, he sees all that her mother has become, and seeing it, sees also his own youth buried there. And life seems to me an utterly empty and worthless thing. A story that perhaps Maupassant would have cared to write. For that was one of his favourite devices to bring a man face to face suddenly with the survival of his discarded self, and the theme is Maupassant’s; that we get always the thing we ask for, but never as we ask for it, never according to the letter of our desire. V Very quickly, very pleasantly it passed, our week in Christiania, with driftings in and out of cafés, and visits to the chalet of an old friend of Clifford’s, Von Erpecom Sem, on the heights of Holmenhollen, from which we could see far below the harbour and fjords of Christiania. We never saw it in the sunlight, in all its many-coloured beauty, but at night we saw it; a long scattered stretch of twinkling lights across the water; and agreed that it deserved all that the guide-books have ever said of it.