Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/309

the haven of quiet uneventfulness in which the average modern Norwegian passes his life, Johanna's circumstances and Johanna's nature were at war with one another. Concentration was the crux of the girl's being. Interests spread over the domesticity of farm life bred in her a state of hopeless ennui. She was unable to put her desires into words; and had any far-seeing creature, divining her mind, suggested that she ought to have been a boy so that she could go before the mast, or, like so many of her compatriots, to America, she would have denied the truth of the suggestion, even while an uneasy questioning of its sagacity troubled her.

The departure of the deacon opened her eyes to her surroundings. Her daily duties had, while he was near, been gilded with the beatitude of worship. From a distance she had adored. He had mingled with her conception of God, and, unconsciously Pantheistic, she had instilled divinity into everything. God was in the atmosphere, so that whether there was sunshine or mist, rain or calm, Johanna was satisfied with His likeness; God was in the sea, so that the life of it or the death it dealt were to her alike acceptable; God was about her path and around her. She was seraphically content.

But when Hjorth went, this gracious, goodly Pantheism went also. Atmosphere, sea, her daily tasks, all were sordid, uninteresting facts. She saw Helga and her existence there stretch out into the infinite. Though she was seventeen only a cruel comprehension of decay haunted her. She noticed for the first time in her life a darkening, weary look beneath her eyes. It seemed to her that she was growing old. Not all of a sudden old, be it understood, but more dismally than that, gradually old. Other signs she looked for. She could not find them. There were no hollows on her temples; no doubling of her chin; no stoop of her neck; no wrinkles anywhere. Nevertheless she realised that age was. Shewould