No, not tense, not tense in her heart, not tense in her body, not tense in her arms that are supposed to guide the soup to her mouth, nor tense in her innermost core, like the frozen lake in Canto 32 of the Inferno in Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Of winter, the Danube in Austria never wore / A veil of ice as thick as this, nor did the Don / Under its frigid sky support what this lake bore” (our italics). A veil of ice as thick as this, Sigrid’s shoulders should never bear. Because the thing, the very serious thing, is: if she’s nervous, she will eventually lose Kåre’s respect. It would have been good for her to know this, because then she might perhaps have worked on it and thus avoided the consequences when she sits down to breakfast in his kitchen one month from now. But she of course doesn’t know, currently sitting in the café, that this will happen.