In the meantime Miss Ragnhild was waiting impatiently at the Parsonage for the day when she should leave it for ever. Although she felt too old to expect anything from the future, she had a burning desire to get away from the place where she had wasted her youth; and where there was not one spot or one person to regret. Even the sight of the curate had latterly been disagreeable to her, and had a most depressing effect upon her. It was not only that he had become careless in his person, or because his hair and his clothes smelt of the stable when he occasionally dined at the Parsonage. But she thought a corresponding change had taken place in his inner being, and that his original good breeding was disappearing in his efforts to acquire a broad "popular" manner.
Ever since his visit to Sandinge, she thought a certain smug self-importance had come over him. He had become clumsily ironical in speaking of her dress and her idle life; and she found his everlasting didactic lectures absolutely intolerable.
She was weary of existence, and daily more depressed by an infinite melancholy. By way of cheering herself, she had lately paid a visit to Copenhagen, where she had not been for two or three years. But melancholy followed her here too. She did not know whether it was the state of her own spirits at the moment, but it appeared to her that the everlasting peasant was celebrating
