Chapter 6 — Mrs. Boye in Copenhagen

Niels has been a student in Copenhagen for a season. The novel is candid about how vague the studentship is. He attends lectures occasionally, reads more on his own than the curriculum requires, walks the city in the evenings, lives in a furnished room that he changes once or twice as the rents change. He is twenty. He has come to the city expecting it to deliver him the life Bartholine's books had described, and the city has done, so far, neither more nor less than cities do for boys from the country.

Erik is ahead of him. He has been in the city longer, has begun his training as a sculptor, has met the people one meets in the studios and the cafés. One evening he takes Niels to the salon of a Mrs. Boye. She is older than they are — a widow in her thirties, perhaps, comfortably off, unattached, witty in the modern way. Her drawing room is the meeting place of a particular Copenhagen circle: students, minor poets, the better sort of editor, men and women who argue about Heine and Hegel and the freedoms of married women. The chapter sketches the room without sentimentality. It is not a glittering salon. It is the kind of room in which a young man from the country first hears the sentences he will spend the next ten years trying to think.

Mrs. Boye looks at Niels. She has, it is clear, looked at many young men brought into the room by their friends. She decides — the novel is exact about the moment without quite naming it — that this one is worth attending to. She speaks to him. She asks him what he reads. She listens to his answers in a way that flatters him without his quite noticing he is being flattered. By the end of the chapter Niels has been included; he will come back next week. The first of the relationships that will shape the novel's middle has been established, and he does not yet know what kind of relationship it will be.