Besides which, especially when she was away from
Copenhagen, but when she was there, too, she needed a literary assistant
who could look through her MSS. and negotiate over them with the
publishers of anthologies, year-books, and weekly papers, and for this
purpose she not infrequently seized upon me, innocently convinced, like
everybody else for that matter, that she was the only person who made a
similar demand upon me.
Still, it was rather trying that, when my verdict on her work did not
happen to be what she wished, she saw in what I said an unkindness, for
which she alleged reasons that had nothing whatever to do with Art.
Magdalene Thoresen could not be otherwise than fond of Rasmus Nielsen;
they were both lively, easily enraptured souls, who breathed most freely
in the fog. That, however, did not come between her and me, whom she
often thought in the right. With regard to my newspaper activity, she
merely urged the stereotyped but pertinent opinion, that I ought not to
write so many small things; my nature could not stand this wasting, drop
by drop.
I had myself felt for a long time that I ought to concentrate my forces
on larger undertakings.
XII.
There were not many of the upper middle class houses in Copenhagen at
that time, the hospitality of which a young man with intellectual
interests derived any advantage from accepting.
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