Independent People by Halldor Laxness

WELL, what luck had this scum of a cat in forestalling further misfortune on the lonely croft in the valley?

Just before bedtime Bjartur took him under his arm and set off with him out to the ewe-house. His confidence in the cat, however, was not of the fullest, and instead of going straight to bed he sat up longer than usual, pottering with some small job long after the old woman and the boys were all asleep. Last to bed was Asta Sollilja. She messed about, over beside the range, till a very late hour, first rinsing out a few of her things and mending them, then giving herself a wash and sprucing herself up a little; she had reached the hair-combing age. Sometimes she would heat herself water and wash her feet and her legs up to just above her knees, and her neck, and a little way down her back; and her chest; and he couldn't very well forbid it; this water-fury manifests itself in the female sex at a certain age and lasts for a few years. It is youth, it is the flower-does not the grass suck the dew to itself while it is growing? Then after a few years they stop washing themselves; when the babies begin to come. He put out the light at his end of the loft and lay down on the bed, yawning, with his head pillowed in his hands, but without thought of sleep. She was still washing and combing away in the glimmer of the candle, standing in her slip with an old piece of mirror propped up in front of her. She pushed the straps over her shoulders and washed herself there and in the armpits, poor kid, she's getting a big girl now, she can't help it. Asta, however, was very much aware that he was looking art: her, and she would have washed herself much better if he had not been looking at her-if she washed herself better and he saw, it was naughty. It was strange how passionately she longed to convince him that she never even thought of anything naughty, anything not right; and why? It was because she had nestled up to him out in the world when she was little and because she could never forget it. Before her stepmother's death she had often blushed red when she thought of it, but since then some fear had struck through her almost every time that the memory had recurred to her-strange how the bygone errors of childhood's unwitting days continued to prey on the mind, though actually nothing at all had happened; she had only been afraid out in the world because she was so little-and he had pushed her aside and gone away. And here the fear would flame up in her body, around her heart, the fear of something she did not understand. This dread of the incomprehensible lay ever smouldering in her body, and when she began to think of this thing, it would flare up, though never so much as when she had determined not to think about it at all. Sometimes it followed her into her dreams, taking on the form of monstrous beasts and ghosts or evil men; or a precipice where she could no longer find any way either up or down; or, worst of all, quite incomprehensible piles of filth which she had to carry away, but which grew bigger and bigger the faster she carried. Why had it been naughty, why had it not been right? She had not meant anything wrong, it was simply that she hadn't been able to help herself because she had felt so unhappy-thus over and over again, and then: no, never would she take off this slip when anyone was there, and least of all her father.