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he replied, in passable Swedish, “there is no distinction between the two.”
    Julian Atherton was completely ignorant of the mores of Swedish aristocratic society. Anine thought if he did know them he simply wouldn’t have cared. For instance he didn’t know it was unseemly to call upon her in the afternoons sometimes, and this habit persisted even after Solveig wrote a respectful letter to Cornelius asking him to remind his son that Anine was engaged to be married. Yet Solveig did not decline to receive Julian Atherton in her house. The American ambassador had quickly become a close friend of Count Bergenhjelm, and Anine’s mother didn’t want to cause a row with the Bergenhjelm family by snubbing Cornelius’s son. Thus he continued to call.
    Anine loved his visits. Above all she was enraptured by Julian’s descriptions of America. He had once crossed the continent by rail. Hearing his accounts of dusty mining towns, encounters with cowboys and the wild saloons of San Francisco was more thrilling than the most engrossing novel. She had spoken a little English before but she endeavored to become fluent mainly so she could converse with him. She was only passively aware that she was falling in love with him. Yet he remained a complete gentleman, never even touching her except to kiss her hand or help her down from a carriage.
    She began to dream about something happening to Ola, or at least to their engagement. She began to use these words in her mind— something happening —as an entrée to an entire class of pleasant fantasies, but she never wished harm upon Ola. She imagined that perhaps a woman might come forward claiming to be his lover and Anine could act indignant and break off the engagement, or that maybe the Bergenhjelm family would suddenly fall out of favor with the king and Solveig would decide that marrying her daughter into their clan was inappropriate. From her observation of Ola’s passion for science Anine daydreamed that some great naturalist, a doddering fellow who made his living cataloguing insects or something like that, might offer Ola a spot on a multi-year scientific voyage to the Galapagos Islands that he would be unable to resist accepting. Then after he was gone a few months Anine could write him a weepy letter claiming she could no longer waste her youth waiting for him. The families would understand that. She would then be free. These were the fantasies she spun in her mind. While Ola was away at university she never saw him, he seldom wrote and it was increasingly easy to think of him in the abstract. Her engagement seemed theoretical. Julian, by contrast, was real.
    But when Ola was killed Anine was wracked with guilt, for she felt instinctively that her wishing had somehow caused the accident. “Please, God, I didn’t mean it,” she whispered while kneeling against her bed in the upstairs room she seldom left in the weeks after the terrible event. “Forgive me, Lord. I never meant for that to happen. I should never have thought of another man. I know my duty now.” She repeated this prayer daily but for a long time it felt as if God had not accepted her entreaty. Is He going to punish me forever? Is that the price of my penance—being an old maid, a spinster, for daring to commit adultery in my mind against my fiancé?
    She thought spinsterhood was an increasingly likely fate. At age eighteen she was already outfitted in widow’s weeds, doomed to the customary year of mourning. She remembered little of this period; it passed for her in a sort of haze, like looking at her own life through a frosted-over window.
    When Julian came to Vänersborg and proposed to her in July she decided firmly that she could not accept. She sent him away that afternoon without a firm answer, but the only doubt in her mind was how to turn him down gently and in such a manner as to make sure her mother never found out about the proposal. In