His sleep was like that of one in a besieged fortress, where one hears the shots shattering bit by bit the walls that save one from destruction.
Yes, this was the story of Peter the Watch-dog.
We must not forget that this thin and anxious figure was the embryo of the future coarse and brutal Peter the Boss.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excited and curious, Frida thrust her head into the girls’ room:
“If you please, Miss Hedvig,—you ought to let me make your bed on a day like this.”
Hedvig was leaning over her narrow bed with her black hair full of curling papers. She would soon be fifteen years old now. Her breasts were already filling out beneath her bodice. Her lips were very red, and looked almost skinless, in her long pale face.
“No,” she said vehemently, “Kristin must come up.”
For some time past Hedvig had made her own bed. She could not bear Frida to touch anything of hers. She seemed to shiver as in a cold draught and her teeth began to chatter as soon as the plump, laughing hussy came near her. But the maid did not pay her back in the same coin. The excellent Frida had no stiff-necked pride. With a mixture of good nature and bad conscience she only became more servile. “Kristin? very well.”
Humming softly as usual she vanished down the stairs.
Laura yawned, stretched herself lazily and shook her fair hair. For all her laziness her arch eyes sparkled. She was not in the least like her elder sister:
“You really are mad, Hedvig,” she said, jumping out of the bed.
Then Kristin came puffing and muttering up the stairs. Her old black frock had not shrunk as she herself had done, and it seemed almost empty when she sank down on the edge of the bed. Her hands twitched and trembled as if they had gone to sleep in her lap and were dreaming of knitting needles.
“Well, Hedvig, do you know your catechism, so that we need not be ashamed of you?”
Laura came up, stark naked, with a lather of soap on her neck:
“Know her catechism? when she is overflowing with it!”
The old woman had no smile for this fresh, plump young thing.
“Are you not ashamed, child, to talk like that of God’s word? And you won’t be ready in time either.”
Hedvig had done her hair and Kristin helped her on with the white frock that reached almost to her ankles. She fumbled a long time with the fastenings at the back, and then she arranged the pleats with bony, trembling fingers.