"Don't be so silly," she continued. "I am a married woman, and you may trust me. Now, come, out with it," and while she said that she looked at me half commandingly, half lovingly. My hands dropped, and I noticed how very red and ugly they were. A new shame overcame me. "It is true," I said at last. "That you have got a sweetheart?" "No; I mean that I have not got one." "But this poem?" and, greatly puzzled, she looked down at the bag that was smelling of coffee. "I don't know who he is, nor where he is;" and with sudden courage: "all I know is that he does exist." "But, pray, where have you seen him, then?" "I have never seen him at all, except in my thoughts." "Oh" she exclaimed, and rising with a yawn, she began to leave the kitchen; but at the doorway she turned round once more and said: "As long as you know him only in your thoughts he can do you no harm." Scarcely had the door closed behind her, when I flew at the drawer, pulled out the bags, and threw them into the fire. I watched until the flickering flames had destroyed every bit of them, then I leaned against the grey wall of the kitchen and wept bitterly. Oh, for those tears in that grey kitchen! Oh, for those dreams in that grey kitchen! Every moment my heart yearned in incomprehensible longing for him. When would he come? Oh, when? When would he come to take me away, like the princes came in the fairy tales to woo a shepherdess or a kitchen-maid? I felt so sure that we were destined to meet some day, but it seemed a long, long way off. Sometimes a doubting fear would overcome me. How if the picture of my dreams--that picture so proud, so far away--should never turn into a form of flesh and blood, but ever be a dream! At such moments I was weak and foolish. I looked down at my hands, which were so red and ugly from washing-up and scrubbing. If no man would ever love me because of my red and ugly hands, what then? At that question my soul trembled, and tears thronged into my eyes. The next second, however, I smiled at my fears; a line or two out of my poems had fallen into my thoughts. What did it matter that my hands were red and ugly? What did hands matter at all? What had the heart, the mind, the soul of a man or woman in common with his or her hands? The man of my dreams was not a man who would love a girl only for her beauty. No; he would love me for the purity of my thoughts, the chastity of my longing, and for that wonderful part of my being that made me write my poems and dream all day. Once on washing-day I was standing at the tub, when the door opened and my mother came in. "Mother!" I cried, "why did you not write that you were coming?" "We have not heard from you for so long, and when no letter arrived yesterday I became worried, and walked over," she said. Only then I noticed her tired face and the dust that covered her rough shoes. "Do you mean to say you walked all that distance?"