Page:Karl Gjellerup - Minna, A novel - 1913.djvu/166

 have mentioned, was bright and cheerful, and got plenty of sun. The furniture, however, was not only plain, and even partly broken, but everything showed symptoms of an entire want of order. The lid of the upright piano was quite grey with dust, and on the top of it, on a bundle of music, stood a plate containing half a smoked herring. It has always been a mystery to me how it ever arrived there, for I soon discovered that Mrs. Jagemann never inhabited this room, but muddled about the whole day long in the almost dark kitchen, where she prepared and ate her meals, slept, and read Dresdener-Nachrichten. In a corner stood a bookcase almost entirely filled with green-bound volumes which I at once recognised as Minna's classical treasures, the gift from that severe aunt who would haunt her as a spirit, if she ever parted with them. A door in the middle of one of the walls was covered with a green rug, and a sofa had been placed in front of it. With this rug as a background, an oil-painting was hanging, on which I saw part of a fishing village under low dunes, near a bay. In the foreground sat a couple of young girls netting, while they at the same time carried on a flirtation with a town dandy who was conspicuous by the addition of a paint-box and had an unmistakable likeness to Stephensen. His pointing finger and the laughing expression of the girls evidently suggested that a deeper meaning was signified in this netting. While the figures were as conventionally painted as they were tastelessly thought out, there was a good deal of freshness and nature-study in the beach and the sunlight on the sand-dunes, and the picture with its powerful bright colours beamed in the little room, to the more than plain furniture of which it stood out in striking contrast. Every one was bound to wonder how it had come there. And to me, for whom this