(_Hammelev enters from the right_.)

HAMMELEV

Well, I showed Anton up to the room, mother. I thought he’d long to see--to come up there. If you had only seen how he went around and felt everything! “Oh, God!” he exclaimed, “there hangs the little rack.” And he felt all the books. “There is my ‘Ivanhoe’--and there is Dickens’ ‘Oliver Twist’; and there ‘The Last of the Mohicans’!” He felt all of them by their backs. But the shirts and the socks--you could have saved yourself the trouble of making them, Mother.

MRS. HAMMELEV

Why?

HAMMELEV

A person can never get enough of such things, of course, in a way. But he is well looked after in this respect. She, his sweetheart, has sewn and fixed and looked after everything for him. She works, by the way, in a dressmaking establishment.

MRS. HAMMELEV (_with an expression of surprise_) She works--she works at a dressmaker’s!

HAMMELEV

Yes--in one of those large department stores in Copenhagen. She is in charge of the dressmaking department. She makes good money, too, he says.

MRS. HAMMELEV (_as before_)

Good for her!

HAMMELEV

And a good thing for him, too. How would they have got along otherwise?

MRS. HAMMELEV

I should hope Anton does not have to receive anything from anybody.

HAMMELEV

But he had to do so once. Do you know who kept him alive? When he took lessons from that professor, you know. We thought he was living with that friend of his he wrote about.

MRS. HAMMELEV

Wasn’t he?

HAMMELEV

Well, yes--yes, he was, in a way. But his friend most of the time wears skirts, and her name is Louise Thorsen. And it was she who took care of him the best way she could.

MRS. HAMMELEV (_passionately_)

And stole his youth. For if they shared things with each other, it must have meant that they lived together.

HAMMELEV

Yes--and what is there to be said? She is a woman and he a man. And, besides, he is an artist. So we ought not to judge, I think.

MRS. HAMMELEV

But we must be allowed to have our opinions. We have only this one child. And he is in need of parental love more than other children.

HAMMELEV

Yes, mother dear, but I think it has been a great fortune for him to have found her. What can _we_ do for him, we two old cronies? We shall soon have enough to do straightening out our own affairs until we meet up there with the great Doctor who opens all eyes. And when we have gone, who would he then have to cling to? No--a young woman like her is what a man like him needs. And the old doctor said that--thank God--should he get children, there was no danger that his affliction would be hereditary.

MRS. HAMMELEV

But there are greater afflictions that _can_ be inherited.

HAMMELEV

Yes, I can see that you are not very pleased with the whole thing. Before she took off her coat it seemed to me, too, as if she looked a bit too “cityfied.” But I think she really is a good girl.