while she herself felt tired and dissatisfied. He had been working the whole summer, reading Greek tragedies and Keats and Shelley when he was not painting.
"I should like to read the tragedies in the original," said Gunnar, "and I am going to learn Greek and Latin."
"Dear me!" exclaimed Jenny. "I am afraid there are so many things you will want to study before you get any peace in your mind that you will end by not painting at all—except in your holidays."
"I have to learn those two languages because I am going to write some articles."
"You!" cried Jenny, laughing. "Are you going to write articles too?"
"Yes; a long series of them about many different things. Amongst others, that we must introduce Latin and Greek into our schools again; we must see that we get some culture up here. We cannot go on like this any longer. Our national emblem will be a wooden porringer with painted roses on it and some carving, which is supposed to be a clumsy imitation of the poorest of all European styles, the rococo. That is how we are national up here in Norway. You know that the best praise they can give anybody in this country—artist or other decent fellow—is that he has broken away—broken away from school, tradition, customary manners, and ordinary civilized people's conception of seemly behaviour and decency.
"I should like to point out for once that, considering our circumstances, it would be much more meritorious if somebody tried to get into touch with, appropriate, exchange, and bring home to this hole of ours some of the heaped-up treasures in Europe that are called culture.
"What we do is to detach a small part from a connective whole—a single ornament of a style, literally speaking—and carve and chip such an ugly and clumsy copy of it that it becomes unrecognizable. Then we boast that it is original or
