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varnish of the school desk, while her teachers called out her name without her hearing, so engrossed was she in trying to find a deeper truth in the reflected extension of her inkwell. The other girls teased her, trying to break through her far-too-adult and incomprehensible isolation, wanting to drag her out of it, until the day when Amalie came out of it all by herself and thrashed the biggest of them, cut off their pigtails and burned their fair locks in the school playground, showing everyone, the teachers, too, that they had confused her distraction with mildness and that, although she was a child and, at this point, just nine years old, her character was fraught with calculated brutality. After that they left her alone, or at least most of them did, even the servants and her mother, who often had to spend hours searching for her, only to find her, eventually, in some far-off corner of the house on a chair that she had dragged in front of one of the corridor mirrors, to sit with her elbows propped up on the gilded console, staring at a point beyond her ringlets and freshly ironed white collar. And to those who tried to drag her away from there, even her mother, she gave curt, impertinent replies that were both impudent and dreamy.
    There is something baffling about a child’s being able to keep a secret for so long. It is possible that Amalie did in fact confide in someone, but that is neither here nor there because here we are writing the story of dreams. Amalie would look back on her childhood as a time when she was utterly and absolutely alone, until the day when she discovered an ally in her father. Until then, silent and aloof, she had circulated, on the streets and at school, among people and surroundings that she hardly seemed to notice—and that is neither normal nor good for any child. She spent the long afternoons at home, endlessly wandering in search of glimpses of the orange animals and purple forests, and sometimes she lost her way and had to walk for days before chance, sooner or later, brought her into a clerks’ room or a corridor that she knew.
    During these years she makes some important discoveries. She soaks up the atmosphere of this Victorian home. Everywhere, in the diversity of these innumerable rooms, she encounters the same lopsided heaviness as that of tropical palms thrown off balance, and of immovable chairs floating on tasseled clouds, and of the libraries and studies where it seems that only the weight of the books prevents the bookcases and heavy desks from toppling over. Everywhere silence reigns. Even the sound of the gas lamps is absorbed by the shimmering drapes and the stiff portieres that keep out all the light and are too heavy for Amalie to pull back. Which is why, in all her wanderings, she never can tell whether the rooms she passes through face onto the street or onto the narrow, unechoing yard, or are situated in some inexplicable spot in the center of this bewildering edifice.
    Sometimes Amalie would meet her grandmother, but on these occasions the Old Lady rarely noticed her granddaughter. Her sight was going, but still she bustled through the rooms, guided by some instinctive spatial recall, tightly swathed in wool like her furniture, on her way to her office—the location of which was known only to her and her secretary. There, every day, regardless of everything else, regardless of her increasing blindness and her impaired hearing and her isolation, she shouted out the paper’s renowned editorial, which predicted any shifts in the political affiliations of its subscribers and adjusted its slant accordingly, with the result that the paper was regarded as being uncompromising and changeless when, in fact, from being conservative, and patriotic, and loyal to Estrup’s dictatorship it had switched to being first critical and rebellious, then radical and revolutionary, only, later, to slip back to its original standpoint, in a smooth action that partly followed, partly