As she had not the courage to go straight down to Dean Green, she went first to Nils Hansen's. It was generally said of Nils Hansen, that he flourished, and that in the greatest prosperity, on the hatred of the whole town. His crime consisted in his having several years before mustered the lesser townsfolk in a struggle against those of more importance, or rather in the fact that he had been victorious. He had taken the town councillorship from them, seized the pews in church, so that now every one had equal rank and place there. He had had everything supervised and the financial estimates inspected, in a way that the leading people looked upon as extremely wrong. His worse villainy admittedly was, that, aided by some pecuniary help from non-residents, he had established a bank for poor people, called the penny bank, which had helped a number of the lower orders, even in some cases bringing them quite to independence; for all the vested interests, his sharp and amusing answers were like a wireworm at the root of a tree. It had aroused incredible merriment when a school-mistress in the town, a pretty, fair woman, with more than usual endowments, and even with the expectation of a fortune, refused several eligible offers, to engage herself to rough, rude, shoemaker Hansen. She was desperately in love with him into the bargain. She smiled and blushed if he were so much as named, and it can be imagined what it was when he himself hove in sight--one shoulder a little higher than the other, by the way--with his odd face, blinking eyes, broad shoulders, and huge hands. Endless jokes were made behind their backs, because, both while they were engaged, and afterwards when they were married, she taught Hansen, and he boasted of it. But they afterwards felt the result of this schooling, and paid for it as well. She was older than Tomasine, and had once been some months with her in England. When Tomasine returned, Fru Hansen had been married a year, and was therefore somewhat outside the circle in which the former moved, though she often went to see her, for she was very fond of the healthy, clear-headed little housewife. It was therefore with her that Tomasine was especially angry when it transpired what kind of man John Kurt was. Why had she not by a single word dissuaded her from taking him? After his death Laura Hansen had tried to have some talk with Tomasine, but in vain. But now the latter thought, "Perhaps most wives have something to complain of, and yet this does not prevent girls from marrying; so why should I have expected them to advise me to act differently from what they would have done themselves?" So she went down to Laura Hansen.