Falbe, the Danish Minister in
London.
It was hard to say which of the two was the more beautiful. Both were
unusually lovely. Alma Trepka was queenly, her movements sedate, her
disposition calm and unclouded--Carl Bloch could paint a Madonna, or
even a Christ, from her face without making any essential alteration in
the oval of its contours. Clara Rothe's beauty was that of the white
hart in the legend; her eyes like a deer's, large and shy, timid, and
unself-conscious, her movements rapid, but so graceful that one was
fascinated by the harmony of them.
XIV.
Just about this time a foreign element entered the circle of Copenhagen
students to which I belonged. One day there came into my room a youth
with a nut-brown face, short and compactly built, who after only a few
weeks' stay in Copenhagen could speak Danish quite tolerably. He was a
young Armenian, who had seen a great deal of the world and was of very
mixed race. His father had married, at Ispahan, a lady of Dutch-German
origin. Up to his seventh year he had lived in Batavia. When the family
afterwards moved to Europe, he was placed at school in Geneva. He had
there been brought up, in French, to trade, but as he revealed an
extraordinary talent for languages, was sent, for a year or eighteen
months at a time, to the four German universities of Halle, Erlangen,
Goettingen and Leipzig.
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