Oh, I
cannot understand this at all, when I am to explain it."
"And that is enough for you?"
"Oh, more than enough sometimes--much too much! And when shape and
color and movement are so lovely and so fleeting and a strange world
lies behind all this and lives and rejoices and desires and can
express all this in voice and song, then you feel so lonely, that you
cannot come closer to this world, and life grows lusterless and
burdensome."
"No, no, you must not think of your fiancee in that way."
"Oh, I am not thinking of her."
William and his sister came up to them, and together they went into
the house.
* * *
On a morning several days later Mogens and Thora were walking in the
garden. He was to look at the grape-vine nursery, where he had not yet
been. It was a rather long, but not very high hothouse. The sun
sparkled and played over the glass-roof. They entered, the air was
warm and moist, and had a peculiar heavy aromatic odor as of earth
that has just been turned. The beautiful incised leaves and the heavy
dewy grapes were resplendent and luminous under the sunlight. They
spread out beneath the glass-cover in a great green field of
blessedness. Thora stood there and happily looked upward; Mogens was
restless and stared now and then unhappily at her, and then up into
the foliage.
"Listen," Thora said gayly, "I think, I am now beginning to understand
what you said the other day on the hill about form and color.
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