But the most vexatious part of it was that Nikolai also wanted to forbid her to apply to one who was as good as her own child, when there was the necessity for it.

She would pay no attention to that however.  If he would not help her, he must put up with her going to one who could, now that it was a question of closing the shop and the whole business.

No, she swore she would not go bankrupt.  And she struck the table so that the coppers danced in the drawer.

It was a good thing that it was this week, for next week he was going abroad for two or three months; he had said so himself yesterday, so that both she and Silla heard it.

Nikolai sat quite pale.  His mouth moved as if it were trembling, and he wiped his forehead once or twice with his sleeve.

He looked slowly up at his mother; it was as if he were afraid of getting to hate her.

“You shall have the money.”

He felt he was on the point of bursting into tears, and must get away to have his rage out.

It was another postponement for him and Silla until the spring.  And where was the end of it to be?

His hand shook and fumbled with the door-handle.

This fresh piece of information, which his mother had so unexpectedly given Nikolai, that it was he who had destroyed her well-being, was like yet another stone weighing him down.

It crushed him like a moral defeat.  He could not rid himself of the thought that there was something in it.  He felt his courage was weakened, and he went about disheartened.

He had lost another quarter as to his prospects of getting married, and if his mother required or rather claimed money from him again for her down-hill trade, what could he do?

It was like work without hope, and despondency began to take hold of him.

When he put his shillings away in the tin box on Saturday, it was with bitter thoughts.  At any moment his mother might come and swallow the whole of it—­as she, of course, had a right to do, since he in his time had wasted all hers.

He had always thought that when it came to the point, it was he who had a reckoning to demand of his mother, because she had brought him into the world without being able to give him a father, and then let him go.

But now it seemed to be just the other way.  His mother, with her all-consuming business, was the great, lawful gulf for all his happiness.

He began to be weary of it all.

Amid all this there sometimes dawned and smouldered a faint glow of rebellion within him, although, in his honest endeavour to come to the bottom of the truth, it was some time before it blazed up.

Should he let Silla go, too, into this same gulf?

The answer blazed up clearly, so that the flames shone and flickered: 

“Not while there was a rag left of what was called Nikolai!”

And with reference to his mother, and his having perhaps brought misfortune upon her, should he not have hit out, but just let himself be insulted and trampled upon, as he was going to be again now?  His mother, tall and big, would just squeeze them to death with that shop, both he and Silla.  They were not even to have leave or the right to sigh.