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Updated: June 23, 2025
A 'prentice boy of about Pelle's age, with a red, spotty face, was walking down the middle of the street, eating a great wheaten roll which he held with both hands; his ears were full of scabs and his hands swollen with the cold.
Hanne went into the kitchen to make coffee. The door stood open. She hummed at her task and now and again joined in the conversation. Then she came out, serving Pelle with a cracked tea-tray. "But you look very peculiar tonight!" She touched Pelle's face and gazed at him searchingly.
The other boys quickly discovered Pelle's vulnerable point, and used it for their own advantage; and Pelle had to give way and put up with things in order to keep his father out of their conversation. He did not always succeed, however. When they were in the mood, they said quite absurd things about one another's homes.
And over yonder sat some one who nodded to Pelle in such a friendly manner; it was the woman of the dancing-shoes; her young man had left her, and now she was stranded here her dancing days were over. Yet she was grateful to Pelle; the sight of him had recalled delightful memories; one could see that by the expression of her eyes and mouth. Pelle's own temper was softened as he sat there.
The other boys quickly discovered Pelle's vulnerable point, and used it for their own advantage; and Pelle had to give way and put up with things in order to keep his father out of their conversation. He did not always succeed, however. When they were in the mood, they said quite absurd things about one another's homes.
They sat out on the gallery under the green foliage, Hanne's face glowing to rival the climbing pelargonium; she kept on swinging her foot, and continually touched Pelle's leg with the tip of her shoe. She was nervously full of life, and kept on asking the time. When her mother went into the kitchen to make coffee, she took Pelle's hand and smilingly stroked it. "Come with me," she said.
Up in Pelle's long gangway factory girls, artisans, and newspaper women came tumbling out, half naked; they were always late, and stood there scolding until their turn came to wash themselves. There was only one lavatory at either end of the gangway, and there was only just time to sluice their eyes and wake themselves up.
They emptied Pelle's milk-bottle, and hunted up a mouse's nest that appeared to have only two exits, one up in the meadow, the other halfway down the bank of the stream. Here they pushed in the mouth of the bottle, and widened the hole in the meadow into a funnel; and they took it in turns to keep an eye on the bottle, and to carry water up to the other hole in their caps.
The younger, Frederik, who was a mason's apprentice, never said "thou" to his father; he addressed him in the third person, and his continual "father says, father thinks," sounded curious to Pelle's ears. While they were still talking Madam Stolpe opened the door leading into an even prettier room, and invited them to go in and to drink their coffee.
"Here, Hans!" she said, "this is Pelle, whose doing it is that we two belong to each other!" Then she laughed aloud for sheer delight, and Hans, smiling, held out his hand to Pelle. "I ought to thank you for it," he said. "Yes, it was that dance," she said. "If my dancing-shoes hadn't been mended Hans would have run off with somebody else!" She seized Pelle's arm.
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