Page:Pontoppidan - Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896).djvu/107

 her music. Even her annual visit to Copenhagen, which in the first few years of her country life had been like one long fête lasting three weeks, and for which she had prepared herself for months with delight, no longer gave her any real pleasure. After a time she had become strange to city life, her old friends and acquaintances were scattered, her aunts were dead—and then after it, her home life seemed doubly empty, and nature around her doubly dismal in its mute stony lifelessness.

Therefore it was not at all agreeable to her when her father decided to take a curate. She did not want to be disturbed in the state of somnolency into which, by degrees, she had dropped. When, in addition, she perceived that people, even before the arrival of the curate, coupled their names, it did not dispose her more pleasantly towards him: on this account the relations between them were at first decidedly cool, not to say strained. But when she gradually saw that the new house-mate only wanted to live in the same undisturbed reserve as she herself, she became more easily reconciled to his daily presence. When, at the same time, she discovered his taste for music, and that he had made the acquaintance of some of the most renowned composers at his father's house, about whom it amused her to hear, he began little by little to rouse her interest. As Emanuel also felt an even greater need for some one to talk to,