and the children, her one desire being to see them happy. Each of his
attacks only washed away a fresh layer of obstructing mire, and made the
sacrifice in her action stand out more clearly. It was because she was
so unsensual and chaste that she could act as she had done. Alas! she
had had to pay dearly for _his_ remissness; it was the mother who,
in their extreme want, gave her own body to nourish her offspring.

Pelle would not yield, but fought fiercely against conviction. He had
been robbed of freedom and the right to be a human being like others,
and now solitude was about to take from him all that remained to sustain
him. Even if everything joined together against him, he was not wrong,
he _would_ not be wrong. It was he who had brought the great
conflict to an end at the cost of his own--and he had found Ellen to be
a prostitute! His thoughts clung to this word, and shouted it hoarsely,
unceasingly--prostitute! prostitute! He did not connect it with
anything, but only wanted to drown the clamor of accusations on all
sides which were making him still more naked and miserable.

At first letters now and then came to him, probably from old companions-
in-arms, perhaps too from Ellen: he did not know, for he refused to take
them. He hated Ellen because she was the stronger, hated in impotent
defiance everything and everybody. Neither she nor any one else should
have the satisfaction of being any comfort to him; since he had been
shut up as an unclean person, he had better keep himself quite apart
from them. He would make his punishment still more hard, and purposely
increased his forlornness, kept out of his thoughts everything that was
near and dear to him, and dragged the painful things into the
foreground. Ellen had of course forgotten him for some one else, and had
perhaps turned the children's thoughts from him; they would certainly be
forbidden to mention the word "father." He could distinctly see them all