Childhood and Early Youth 27 her. She regretted bitterly her inability to sing, and she also struggled in vain to make the piano express her feelings. At the age of twenty, she gave up her attempts at playing. She also gave up drawing after some years of study, for, although she was not devoid of talents here, she did not consider them great enough to warrant the necessary time and labour. Her colour sense showed itself early in her arrangement of flowers, and this part of the home decorations was given her to do from childhood. She learned to dance simply through listen- ing to the music, and she is said to have danced well. But she had always declared she would stop when she was twenty-five years old, and she did. Now in her old age the desire to dance has returned, and when with intimate friends she sometimes takes a turn in an old waltz. When between twelve and fourteen years of age Ellen became melancholy, because of the lack of harmony in life, because of the ugliness and injustice that reigned in the world, because " God was not," and everything "went wrong." Tegn^r's Mjeltsjukan" was now the I Literal translation—spleen-sickness, otherwise melancholy. Translator's footnote.