Ragna's time was well occupied. By her own wish she continued her studies under the best professors obtainable--that part was Aunt Gitta's doing. Literature interested her more than anything else and after a time she was encouraged to try her hand at writing a series of short essays. To her great delight a well-known review accepted them, and this materially affected her relations with her aunt. The good lady had heretofore regarded her as a child to be exhaustively directed and controlled, but a niece whose writings were published was quite a different person in her estimation. In common with many people of prosaic mind she had a genuine respect for intellectual attainments, therefore, Ragna was promoted to a position of semi-independence, her working hours were held sacred, and to give her more time for her literary pursuits such household tasks as had fallen to her share were removed as incompatible. This was a mistake, for the homely work would have been a wholesome antidote to the romantic trend of the girl's mind. Withdrawn from the ordinary business of the house, she lived an unreal life made up of fanciful imaginings which her philosophical and literary studies were unable to counteract. She had no experience of actualities to control and place in their proper perspective the various social and philosophical theories which formed the greater part of her reading. Consequently with nothing to counter-balance the paramount influence of the moment, she swayed to the mental attitude of whatever author she happened to be reading, being in turn, or imagining herself a Swedenborgian, an agnostic, an atheist, and a mystic. She was cynical with Voltaire and romantic with Byron and De Musset. For a considerable period the "categorical imperative" haunted her days and nights, and during three months at least. "Also sprach Zarathustra" was the sun whose rising and setting determined her getting up and her sitting down. But Nietsche did not last long; his doctrine was too foreign to her nature and she returned to Kant as to an old friend. Fru Boyesen was not a little worried by these moral and spiritual waverings, but never having known anything of the kind herself, was unable to cope with the case. She took a purely material view of the situation. They were now out of mourning, but Ragna seemed to have little taste for society in general, and none for that of young men; she preferred her books, she said, when her aunt rallied her on the subject. Now Fru Boyesen had been at some pains to obtain for her niece a circle of eligible masculine acquaintances; she had made it known that she considered the girl as her adopted daughter and would make her her heiress, and there was no lack of eligible suitors; so when Ragna had sent two of the most desirable firmly but kindly about their business with no better excuse than that they did not happen to be congenial to her, her aunt felt that it was time to interfere.