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There may have been a thing or two so nice that they wanted to
keep it to themselves, but it did not matter, for their smiles
were true.
Jenny kissed her mother good-night. Passing through the
sitting-room, she happened to pull down a photograph; she
picked it up, knowing in the dark that it was a brother of her
own father, with his wife and little girls. He had lived in
America, and she had never seen him; he was dead, and his
picture stood in its place without anybody ever thinking of it.
She herself dusted it every day, yet never looked at it.
She went into her own room and began to take down her
hair.
She had always lied to her mother — could she ever have
been truthful to her without making her suffer, and to what
purpose? Mother would never have understood. She had had
happiness and sorrow since she was quite young; she had been
happy with Jenny’s father and had bemoaned his death, but
she had her child to live for, and learnt to be content. Then
she met Nils Berner, who filled her life with fresh happiness and
fresh sorrow — and again the children consoled her, inasmuch
as they filled the emptiness of her life. The joy of motherhood
is bought with too much suffering; it is too actual, when held
living in one’s arms, for one ever to doubt its existence. To
love one’s child is so natural that there is no cause for
reflection. A mother never doubts that she loves her child, or that
she wants it to be happy — that she does her best for it, or
that it returns her love. The grace of nature is so great to
mothers that children instinctively shrink from confiding their
sorrows and disappointments to her; illness and money troubles
are almost the only sorrows she ever gets to know. Never the
irreparable, the shame, the failures in life, and were she told
of them ever so emphatically by her own children, she would
never believe they were irreparable.
Her mother was not to know anything about her sorrow —
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