snow lay round the Parsonage like an insurmountable wall. Even in the summer, the sight of the broad silent fields, the bare monotonous stone dykes, the everlasting grey or blue fiord, had a most depressing effect upon her. All this lifeless wilderness by which she was surrounded filled her with horror. And the living objects were worse than the inanimate. Worst of all, was to walk through the village, where she knew beforehand what people she would meet, in what places, and at what occupation; where she was obliged to return the obtrusive greetings of the peasants, and to answer the rambling speeches of the half-clad labourer's wives about the weather, harvest prospects, and night frosts. She therefore generally restricted her walks to a solitary path leading from the Parsonage to the sand banks. She would take a little brisk exercise here towards sundown—until the sound of a party of returning field-labourers, or the suffocating odour of a newly-manured field drove her home again.
She had lived in this solitude for eight years. She was born in a provincial town of Jutland, where her father was assistant schoolmaster. From her thirteenth year, when she lost her mother, till her confirmation, she stayed in Copenhagen with some aunts, to complete her education in a superior girl's school.
She only took up her permanent abode at the end of her sixteenth year.
