his triumphs in every direction. The shop windows, with their tasteless cheap goods, seemed to be only designed to suit the taste of the common people. All distinguished taste seemed to be disappearing from the world; the current literature only dealt with peasants and work-people. The artists at the Charlottenburg exhibition all seemed enamoured of such subjects as "In a peasant's room;" "Pigs on a dunghill;" "A shoemaker at his last." Even in the theatres there was no immunity, for the peasant Members of Parliament had their free seats.
One day she met in the street a friend of her youth, whom she had not seen for ten years—she had married a doctor.
Before they had said ten words to each other, the friend, who was dressed like a scarecrow, began criticising her dress, and could talk of nothing but the cause of the people, in which she was determined to interest her. Ragnhild had no peace till she went with her to the house of a Mrs Gylling, who held a kind of "Popular Court" in the capital. She was obliged to sit for an hour in an assemblage of chattering High School people, peasants, and theological students, whose big beards reeked with tobacco. Several elderly ladies, who all wore velvet hoods of the same shape as those worn by the peasant women, surrounded her with offensive familiarity. An anæmic-looking young lady, with two long yellow plaits hanging down her back, was sitting in a
