Nevertheless,
I took my courage in both hands, and laid it as a kind of votive
offering on the little table before him.
My reward was in the surprising amiability that he then and afterwards
displayed. My travelling had indeed been doubly blessed, for, whilst
my subsequent afternoons were spent in Browning's presence, my
evenings fell with regularity into the charge of Ibsen. One of these
evenings is for me "prouder, more laurel'd than the rest" as having
been the occasion when he read to me the MS. of a play which he had
just completed. He was staying at the Hotel Danieli, an edifice famous
for having been, rather more than forty years previously, the socket
in which the flame of an historic _grande passion_ had finally sunk
and guttered out with no inconsiderable accompaniment of smoke and
odour. It was there, in an upper room, that I now made acquaintance
with a couple very different from George Sand and Alfred de Musset,
though destined to become hardly less famous than they. I refer to
Torvald and Nora Helmer. My host read to me with the utmost vivacity,
standing in the middle of the apartment; and I remember that in
the scene where Nora Helmer dances the tarantella her creator
instinctively executed a few illustrative steps.
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