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a penny’s profit. Whenever a relative or friend
commissioned him to buy or sell anything or entrusted any other
business to him, he would turn the matter to his own
advantage without the slightest scruple. Though his marriage had
been in the main a bargain, he was not without a sense of
pride in winning the divorced wife of the Viceroy; but this
did not prevent him from treating her and speaking to her
in a manner that might have seemed incompatible with
such a feeling. Not that he was grossly rude or violent—by
no means. He simply belonged to the class of people who
are so secure in their own sense of normal and
irreproachable mediocrity that they cannot refrain from asserting their
superiority over the less fortunate and naïvely setting
themselves up as models. As for Marie, she was, of course, far
from unassailable; her divorce from Ulrik Frederik and her
squandering of her mother’s fortune were but too patent
irregularities.
This was the man who became the third person in their
life at Tjele. Not one trait in him gave grounds for hope
that he would add to it any bit of brightness or comfort.
Nor did he. Endless quarrelling and bickering, mutual
sullenness and fault-finding, were all that the passing days
brought in their train.
Marie was blunted by it. Whatever had been delicate and
flowerlike in her nature, all the fair and fragrant growth
which heretofore had entwined her life as with luxurious
though fantastic and even bizarre arabesques, withered and
died the death. Coarseness in thought as in speech, a low and
slavish doubt of everything great and noble, and a shameless
self-scorn were the effect of these sixteen years at Tjele.
And yet another thing: she developed a thick-blooded
sensuousness, a hankering for the good things of life, a lusty
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