Page:Undset - Jenny (1921).djvu/96

 condition was unclean and unnatural left her when he spoke, but with it went also the feeling that the bond between her mother and herself was mysterious, supernatural. It became everyday, commonplace; she had been born and her mother had suffered; she had been small and needed her mother, and because of that her mother had loved her. Another little child was soon coming, who needed her mother more. Jenny felt she had grown up all at once; she sympathized with her mother as well as with Berner, and comforted him in a precocious way: "It will pass off quite well; it always does, you know. They scarcely ever die of it."

When she saw her mother with the new child, who took all her time and care, Jenny felt very forlorn, and she cried, but by and by she became very fond of the baby, especially when little Ingeborg was over a year old and was the sweetest, darkest little gipsy doll you could imagine—and her mother had another tiny infant.

She had never considered the Berner children as her sisters; they were exactly like their father. Her relationship to them was more that of an aunt—she felt herself almost as an elderly, sensible aunt to her mother as well as to the children.

When the accident happened her mother was younger and weaker than she. Mrs. Winge had become young again in her second happy marriage, and she was a little tired and worn after her three confinements in the comparatively short time. Nils was only five months old when his father died.

Berner fell one summer when out mountaineering, and was killed on the spot. Jenny was then sixteen. Her mother's grief was boundless; she had loved her husband and been worshipped by him. Jenny tried to help her as much as she could. How deeply she herself mourned her stepfather she never told anybody; she knew that she had lost the best friend she had ever had.

When she had finished school she began to take drawing