334 'GOD'S PEACE'
end my friend proposed to show us an interesting card game, and the other old ladies were already feverishly excited about this performance. But Greta who, from former experience, knew the intention of the game, remembering such hints as ' flutterings near the heart ' with ' secret messages ' and a ' sighing friend,' and all the other parapher- nalias belonging to the trade, showed clearly enough that she wished to be spared this ordeal before such a large company of matchmakers.
She accepted therefore with a grateful glance my proposal that we should leave the game till another day, and that instead she should finish the feast by singing some of her songs in the spinning-room for the old ladies.
In this room they all keep their spinning-wheels, and while the wheels run round the tongues wag about the affairs of the institution. But the spin- ning-room also does service as a chapel, and is therefore furnished with an harmonium. Messages have been sent out of the coming event, and when we, led by my friend, who feels at least as impor- tant as if she was the directrice of the opera, walk into the room, it is already filled. With hastily donned Sunday caps the old women sit in rows, shy and devout, as though they were at communion. Slender and strong, in fair and shining youth, Greta stands amongst them like a bright birch-tree shot up in a thicket of withering, stunted under- growth. But all the wrinkled and worn old women feel, when they see her, a reflex of spring in their
