On many points our verdicts
were agreed.
There came a pause in Snoilsky's productive activity; he was depressed.
It was generally said, although it sounded improbable, that he had had
to promise his wife's relations to give up publishing verse, they
regarding it as unfitting the dignity of a noble. In any case, he was at
that time suffering under a marriage that meant to him the deprivation
of the freedom without which it was impossible to write. Still, he never
mentioned these strictly personal matters. But one evening that we were
together, Snoilsky was so overcome by the thought of his lack of freedom
that tears suddenly began to run down his cheeks. He was almost
incapable of controlling himself again, and when we went home together
late at night, poured out a stream of melancholy, half-despairing
remarks.
A good eighteen months later we met again in Stockholm; Snoilsky was
dignified and collected. But when, a few years later, so-called public
opinion in Sweden began to rave against the poet for the passion for his
second wife which so long made him an exile from his country, I often
thought of that evening.
As years passed by, his outward bearing became more and more reserved
and a trifle stiff, but he was the same at heart, and no one who had
known him in the heyday of his youth could cease to love him.
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