Astrid had returned home some months before, and was a great favourite among the young people. Her vivacity and ready, if rather shallow wit, her delicate almost affected prettiness, her coquettishness attracted the young men and her good humour and readiness to oblige made her friends among the girls. It was natural for her to try to please everyone, and she exercised her blandishments on all who came near her, from the servants in the house, to the most important personages of her social world. She was quite sincere in her desire to please; approbation was the meat and drink of her existence. She admired Ragna and rather stood in awe of her attainments, but could not understand her indifference to social pleasures. Ragna had not cared to tell her more than the barest outline of the momentous home journey, and if she had, Astrid would not have understood, for constancy to a dream-memory could form no part of her spiritual make-up. She was not one to whom any impression would be lasting; to her, lovers might come and go as butterflies to a flower,--to all she would give of her smiles, but no one of them would leave a mark on her soul. Fidelity, to her, would mean the imposed constraint of public opinion, not the keeping of herself to one, and one only. She wished to marry, and to marry well,--all things considered, one man is very like another, when it comes to matrimony, she thought. Innumerable times she had fancied herself in love, and each time she had gone to Ragna with the tale of her infatuation. After the first time or two, when she had taken the affair seriously, Ragna would listen with an amused smile,--it was always the same story over again,--and she ceased to be surprised, when a few days or weeks later, the Star waned and a new luminary rose above the horizon. Astrid had once said to her: "One starts out with the idea that men are all different, but when they have kissed you, you know they are all alike--if one could not see, one would swear it was always the same man." Ragna had with difficulty repressed her impulse to protest, "but what's the use?" she thought, and wisely kept her own counsel. Finally Astrid had announced her engagement, much to her own satisfaction. It was an excellent match and her mother was pleased; she stipulated, however, for a year's delay before the marriage, as Astrid was barely twenty, and far from strong. Fru Bjork, then, on the strength of her daughter's conventional social success, felt herself complacently superior to Fru Boyesen, in the way that an ordinary hen would feel herself comfortably above one who had hatched ducklings. She could not but gloat a little over her friend's discomfiture before she presented a proposition of her own; she therefore remained silent a few minutes and pressed Fru Boyesen's hand sympathetically.