Chapter 10 - Page 2

their interest, he had been known to most of the
younger ones among them from his schoolboy days, when he used to come
home on leave as a cadet, and he seemed to enjoy particular confidential
relations with nearly every one of them, or, at all events, to be in
possession of some secret or other which only they two knew. They had
all kinds of jokes and expressions from their younger days which were
unintelligible to the rest; and what is vulgarly called "chaff" formed,
perhaps, the staple of his conversation with them, varied now and then
by a touch of sentiment, which was intended, by chance as it were, to
open up to them for a moment the real deeper nature which they might not
have suspected him of possessing. They used to twit him about his
inclination to stoutness, and he used to joke about it too, and say he
had too good a time of it.

Among the Becks' most frequent visitors out there was postmaster
Forstberg's family, which included, besides the parents, a hobbledehoy
son and their daughter Marie, a fair-haired girl some eighteen years of
age, of quiet manners, and with an uncommonly clever face. Nobody said
that she was pretty, but nearly every one who knew her had the
impression that she was; and there was a certain indefinable harmony and
grace, not only about her perhaps rather small figure, but about
everything she did. But if she was not considered pretty, it was agreed
on all sides that she had great sense; and among her friends she was
always the one they elected to confide in, whenever they had anything on
their minds. That she never confided anything to them in return had,
curiously enough, never struck them; and for that matter, she was too
correct and proper, they imagined, to have any heart affairs herself.
She was a confidential friend of Carl Beck's sisters, and especially of
Mina, who declared that she put her before all the rest of her
acquaintance, and thought in her own heart that she was exactly the
match for her brother.

The only one of the young girls in the circle with whom Carl Beck had
had no youthful acquaintance was Marie Forstberg; and it had been some
time before he discovered that the quiet girl was worth talking to. He
used to be secretly annoyed then that the conversation when she was
present should lapse so easily into empty trifling; her mind was so
clear and true, and she had such a beautiful smile for whatever she
approved. Before her, therefore, he always displayed now the broad,
manly side of his character--which he could do with so much grace--and
the coquetry which was at the bottom of this was not without its effect.
She had always made rather a hero of him in her own mind, and he had
created the flattering impression now that the light and