A portrait of spiritual crisis hiding inside what appears to be an ordinary Danish family. Egholm returns home disheveled and troubled, having spent his day entangled in the affairs of a religious brotherhood that demands both his devotion and his dwindling resources. His wife Fru Egholm watches with quiet dread, caught between her husband's burning faith and the mounting bills that faith seems to ignore. Their son Sivert observes it all from the window, a child caught in the space between what his parents believe and what they can afford. Johannes Buchholtz captures something devastating in this 1922 novel: the way religious conviction can become a kind of selfishness, how a man's search for God can ruin the people sleeping under his roof. This is quiet Danish realism at its most unflinching. The prose has no interest in spectacular drama; instead it builds its power through the accumulation of small tensions, the glances exchanged across the dinner table, the weight of unspoken reproaches. It asks whether faith is ever truly innocent, or whether it always demands a sacrifice someone else pays for.
