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hags sell themselves for a few coins and will do anything for any gentleman who cares to beckon.
    There would seem to be no lower limit to the age of a whore. He sees men of middle years standing back against a wall in a yard, while small, pink tongues flutter about them in the dark. The child prostitutes are often fit to drop and pale with fatigue. They entice their customer with exaggerated gestures, just as their procurers have taught them, but which appear grotesquely false to any other than he who genuinely wishes them to be sincere, the fine gentleman with a clean conscience. Most likely they consume greater quantities of semen than proper food during the course of a day. The watchmen chase them away with their maces, and yet they soon return, like the rats. It happens regularly that the watchman finds a child who is barely alive, or else dead. In these instances, they are put onto a cart and driven away. Morten does not know what becomes of them. Their bodies do not appear in the faculty vaults, for which he is grateful. His enquiring mind has its limits. Once he asked a watchman about it, only to be threatened with detention should he not keep his curiosity to himself.
    He tires of spying in gateways and courtyards and along the rampart. He puts it behind him. It no longer feels important. He is twenty-eight years old. Miss Schultz will soon be sixteen. The Crown Prince, Frederik, assumes the regency and is driven about the town in an open carriage to be hailed. His father, the king, retreats into his madness, which is not of a tyrannical character in the manner of his forebear’s megalomania, but quieter and more unassuming. Morten and the young mistress exchange pleasantries beneath the sycamore, sometimes being permitted to con ­verse a while before Madame Schultz appears in the doorway to call her in. He imagines, purely for the sake of experiment, the young lady bent over the bench, her dress drawn up and corset snatched apart, her arse beaming against his thrusting loin, his member vanishing into the hirsute and rankly smelling darkness between her buttocks. But the scenario does not appeal to him and is practically impossible to establish, a fact that is only to his relief. Perhaps I am in love, he thinks to himself.
    He strolls in Kongens Have, a haven of grassy lawns, trees and foun­tains to which the general public enjoy restricted access. Miss Schultz and her two sisters accompany him with their mother’s permission. On the gravel, midway along the wide central axis, they stand and look towards Christian IV’s picturesque Renaissance palace. A succession of fountains spurt and sparkle, one behind the other. The trees are pruned and topped off. They resemble green toadstools whose stalk-like trunks have been placed with such monotonous precision that one feels gripped by some disorder of perspective. But the dizziness he feels is perhaps on account of other circumstances, such as the young ladies in his company now seating themselves on the green of the lawn. Their dresses are spread about them; they are like daisies descended from above to take up their places in the grass. He glimpses the toe of a shoe. Morten halts a few paces away. To demonstrate tact, he averts his gaze. He knows why Madame Schultz has allowed him to be out with his daughters. It is not because he is a suitor, for in her eyes he is not, nor even in his own. It is because he is taken to be a harmless and reliable student of divinity, and because the Madame clearly trusts in her fellow human beings, and in him in particular.
    The splash of the fountains feels comforting now. A cool dampness is felt to drift across the lawns. A girder of rainbow appears above the neatly trimmed grass and dwindles among the topiary of the trees. He wipes his brow with a handkerchief, which he returns to the pocket of his waistcoat. Shoes crunch the gravel, a walking cane, a slim young gentle ­man clad in a green tailcoat