A shudder passed over the beggar’s body. He clasped his hands and raised his eyes with a longing glance. What would she do with him? Would she force him to live? He shook before her strength. And yet he had so nearly reached the peace of the eternal forests. She began the struggle by telling him the minister’s daughter had got her sledge and her meal-sack again, and that she, the major’s wife, had a shelter for him as for so many other homeless wretches in the bachelor’s wing at Ekeby. She offered him a life of idleness and pleasure, but he answered he must die. Then she struck the table with her clenched fist and let him hear what she thought of him. “So you want to die, that’s what you want. That would not surprise me, if you were alive. Look, such a wasted body and such powerless limbs and such dull eyes, and you think that there is something left of you to die. Do you think that you have to lie stiff and stark with a coffin-lid nailed down over you to be dead? Don’t you believe that I stand here and see how dead you are, Gösta Berling? “I see that you have a skull for a head, and it seems to me as if the worms were creeping out of the sockets of your eyes. Do you not feel that your mouth is full of dust? Do you not hear how your bones rattle when you move? “You have drowned yourself in brandy, Gösta Berling, and you are dead. “That which now moves in you is only death spasms, and you will not allow them to live, if you call that life. It is just as if you grudged the dead a dance over the graves in the starlight. “Are you ashamed that you were dismissed, since you wish to die now? It would have been more to your honor had you made use of your gifts and been of some use on God’s green earth, I tell you. Why did you not come directly to me? I should have arranged everything for you. Yes, now you expect much glory from being wrapped in a winding-sheet and laid on saw-dust and called a beautiful corpse.” The beggar sat calm, almost smiling, while she thundered out her angry words. There was no danger, he rejoiced, no danger. The eternal forests wait, and she has no power to turn thy soul from them. But the major’s wife was silent and walked a couple of times up and down the room; then she took a seat before the fire, put her feet on the fender, and leaned her elbows on her knees. “Thousand devils!” she said, and laughed softly to herself. “It is truer, what I am saying, than I myself thought. Don’t you believe, Gösta Berling, that most of the people in this world are dead or half-dead? Do you think that I am alive? No! No, indeed!