I saw beauty
everywhere. If I sat at the window of a cafe on the Corso on a Sunday
morning, as the ladies were going to Mass, it seemed to me that all the
beauty on earth was going past. A mother and her three daughters went
by, a mere grocer's wife from the Corso, but the mother carried herself
like a duchess, had a foot so small that it could have lain in the
hollow of my hand, and the youngest of the three daughters was so
absolutely lovely that people turned to look after her; she might
perhaps have been fifteen years of age, but there was a nobility about
her austere profile, and she had a way of twisting her perfect lips into
a smile, that showed her to be susceptible to the sweetest mysteries of
poetry and music. My long illness had so quickened the susceptibility of
my senses to impressions of beauty that I lived in a sort of
intoxication.
In the Scandinavian Club I was received with endless expressions of
sympathy, courteous remarks, and more or less sincerely meant
flatteries, as if in compensation for the suffering I had been through.
All spoke as though they had themselves been deeply distressed, and
especially as though Copenhagen had been sitting weeping during my
illness. I certainly did not believe this for a moment, but all the same
it weighed down a little, the balance of my happiness, and the first
meetings with the Northern artists in these glorious surroundings were
in many respects very enjoyable.
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