In the evening his brothers and sisters came home joyful and noisy, and asked him if he had had a good time.

"Yes," he said. "And you?"

They gave him details of the excursion, and each time he envied them he felt a stab in his heart. His step-mother did not look at him, for she had broken the Sabbath. That was his comfort. He must by this time soon have detected his self-deceit and thrown it off, but a new powerful element entered into his life, which stirred up his asceticism into fanaticism, till it exploded and disappeared.

His life during these years was not so uniformly monotonous as it appeared in retrospect later on, when there were enough dark points to give a grey colouring to the whole. His boyhood, generally speaking, was darkened by his being treated as a child when arrived at puberty, the uninteresting character of his school-work, his expectation of death at twenty-five, the uncultivated minds of those around him, and the impossibility of being understood.

His step-mother had brought three young girls, her sisters, into the house. They soon made friends with the step-sons, and they all took walks, played games, and made sledging excursions together. The girls tried to bring about a reconciliation between John and his step-mother. They acknowledged their sister's faults before him, and this pacified him so that he laid aside his hatred. The grandmother also played the part of a mediator, and finally revealed herself as a decided friend of John's. But a fatal chance robbed him of this friend also. His father's sister had not welcomed the new marriage, and, as a consequence, had broken off communications with her brother. This vexed the old man very much. All intercourse ceased between the families. It was, of course, pride on his sister's part. But one day John met her daughter, an elegantly-dressed girl, older than himself, on the street. She was eager to hear something of the new marriage, and walked with John along the Drottningsgata.

When he got home, his grandmother rebuked him sharply for not having saluted her when she passed, but, of course, she added, he had been in too grand company to take notice of an old woman! He protested his innocence, but in vain. Since he had only a few friends, the loss of her friendship was painful to him.

One summer he spent with his step-mother at one of her relatives', a farmer in Östergötland. Here he was treated like a gentleman, and lived on friendly terms with his step-mother. But it did not last long, and soon the flames of strife were stirred up again between them. And thus it went on, up and down, and to and fro.

About this time, at the age of fifteen, he first fell in love, if it really was love, and not rather friendship. Can friendship commence and continue between members of opposite sexes? Only apparently, for the sexes are born enemies and remain always opposed to each other. Positive and negative streams of electricity are mutually hostile, but seek their complement in each other. Friendship can exist only between persons with similar interests and points of view. Man and woman by the conventions of society are born with different interests and different points of view. Therefore a friendship between the sexes can arise only in marriage where the interests are the same. This, however, can be only so long as the wife devotes her whole interest to the family for which the husband works. As soon as she gives herself to some object outside the family, the agreement is broken, for man and wife then have separate interests, and then there is an end to friendship. Therefore purely spiritual marriages are impossible, for they lead to the slavery of the man, and consequently to the speedy dissolution of the marriage.