Chapter 1 — Bartholine and her marriage

The chapter opens on the Blid family in their Jutland farmhouse. They are practical people. They do their work, sleep their sleep, take the Lord's Supper twice a year, and never expect anything from the world beyond the harvest home and three or four Christmas parties. Bartholine, the eldest daughter, is not of their kind. She has the dark luminous eyes of the family and the firm chin, but her cheek is pale and her voice is languid; she lives on poems. They teem with new ideas and profound truths about life in the great outside world, where grief is black and joy is red. They are full of girls who are noble and beautiful and never know it. Why might she not be such a girl herself? She is consumed with longing for the other and richer self the poets describe and forgets — what is so easily forgotten — that even the fairest dreams do not add an inch to the stature of the human soul.

Young Lyhne of Lönborggaard, a few miles away, comes courting. He is the last male descendant of a family that has for three generations served king and country with diligence and honor; he has travelled in France and Germany; he reads German poetry and French philosophy. The intelligence of his line has gone a little weary in him, but to Bartholine he arrives as the man from the great outside world she has been waiting for. He talks about painters and poets, reads her their work in the garden and on the hill above the fjord; love makes him poetic. She is happy. Her love lets her dissolve the twenty-four hours of the day into a string of romantic episodes. They are married.

The first year passes like the courtship. Then Lyhne can no longer hide from himself that he is weary of always having to find new expressions for his love. He has given her everything he had and now is expected to go on giving. Bartholine is no longer inexperienced in life or in books. They sink into estrangement inside the same house — she into ardent attempts to recover what she calls the romance of their early days, he into the country gentleman's steady absorption in his land. By the time their first child is born they have understood, separately, that the marriage is what marriages mostly are. The chapter closes on the cradle. They call the boy Niels.