For instance, she understood as few
others did the great artist, the clever coquette, and the old maid in
Heiberg's wife, the actress.
She had no moral prejudices, and had written _Signe's Story_ as a
protest against conventional morality; but she was none the less
thoroughly permeated by Christian and humane ideas of morality, and
there was no element of rebellion in her disposition.
On the whole, she was more a woman than an authoress. Her nature was
tropical in comparison with Mrs. Charite Paludan-Mueller's North Pole
nature. She lived, not in a world of ideas remote from reality, but in a
world of feeling and passion, full of affection and admiration, jealousy
and dislike. Being a woman, she was happy at every expression of
pleasure over one of her books that she heard or read of, and liked to
fancy that the solitary young man who sent her an enthusiastic letter of
thanks was only one of hundreds who thought as he did. Like a woman,
also, she was hurt by indifference, which, however, her warm heart
rarely encountered.
This richly endowed woman made me appear quite new to myself, inasmuch
as, in conversations with my almost maternal friend, I began to think I
was of a somewhat cold nature, a nature which in comparison with hers
seemed rather dry, unproductive and unimaginative, a creature with
thoughts ground keen.
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