III.
My temperament expressed itself in a profusion of youthful longings, as well as in my love of athletics.
During my University studies, in my real budding manhood, I had voluntarily cut myself away from the usual erotic diversions of youth. Precocious though I was in purely intellectual development, I was very backward in erotic experience. In that respect I was many years younger than my age.
On my return, my Paris experiences at first exercised me greatly. Between the young French lady and myself an active correspondence had sprung up, while the young Spaniard's radiant figure continued to retain the same place in my thoughts.
Then my surroundings claimed their rights, and it was not without emotion that I realised how charming the girls at home were. For I was only then entering upon the Cherubino stage of my existence, when the sight of feminine grace or beauty immediately transports a youth into a mild state of love intoxication.
It was incredible how rich the world was in bewitching creatures, and the world of Copenhagen especially. If you walked down Crown Princess Street, at a window on the ground floor you saw a dark girl with a Grecian-shaped head and two brown eyes, exquisitely set, beneath a high and noble forehead. She united the chaste purity of Pallas Athene with a stern, attractive grace.
If you went out towards the north side of the town, there was a house there on the first floor of which you were very welcome, where a handsome and well-bred couple once a week received young men for the sake of the lady's young niece. The master of the house was a lean and silent man, who always looked handsome, and was always dignified; he had honourably filled an exalted official post. His wife had been very attractive in her youth, had grown white while still quite young, and was now a handsome woman with snow-white curls clustering round her fresh-coloured face. To me she bore, as it were, an invisible mark upon her forehead, for when quite a young girl she had been loved by a great man. She was sincerely kind and genuinely pleasant, but the advantage of knowing her was not great; for that she was too restless a hostess. When it was her At Home she never remained long enough with one group of talkers properly to understand what was being discussed. After about a minute she hurried off to the opposite corner of the drawing-room, said a few words there, and then passed on to look after the tea.
It was neither to see her nor her husband that many of the young people congregated at the house. It was for the sake of the eighteen-year-old fairy maiden, her niece, whose face was one to haunt a man's dreams. It was not from her features that the witchery emanated, although in shape her face was a faultless oval, her narrow forehead high and well-shaped, her chin powerful. Neither was it from the personality one obtained a glimpse of through her features. The girl's character and mental quality seemed much the same as that of other girls; she was generally silent, or communicative about trifles, and displayed no other coquetry than the very innocent delight in pleasing which Nature itself would demand.
But all the same there was a fascination about her, as about a fairy maiden. There was a yellow shimmer about her light hair; azure flames flashed from her blue eyes. These flames drew a magic circle about her, and the dozen young men who had strayed inside the circle flocked round her aunt the evening in the week that the family were "at home" and sat there, vying with each other for a glance from those wondrous eyes, hating each other with all their hearts, and suffering from the ridiculousness of yet meeting like brothers, week after week, as guests in the same house. The young girl's male relatives, who had outgrown their enthusiasm for her, declared that her character was not good and reliable--poor child! had she to be all that, too? Others who did not ask so much were content to enjoy the sound of her voice.
She was not a Copenhagen girl, only spent a few Winters in the town, then disappeared again.
Some years after, it was rumoured, to everybody's astonishment, that she had married a widower in a provincial town--she who belonged to the realms of Poesy!
Then there was another young girl, nineteen. Whereas the fairy maiden did not put herself out to pretend she troubled her head about the young men whom she fascinated with the rhythm of her movements or the radiation of her loveliness, was rather inclined to be short in her manner, a little staccato in her observations, too accustomed to admiration to attract worshippers to herself by courting them, too undeveloped and impersonal to consciously assert herself--this other girl was of quite another sort. She had no innate irresistibility, but was a shrewd and adaptable human girl. Her face did not attract by its beauty, though she was very much more beautiful than ugly, with a delicately hooked nose, a mouth full of promise, an expression of thoughtfulness and determination. When she appeared at a ball, men's eyes lingered on her neck, and even more on her white back, with its firm, smooth skin, and fine play of the muscles; for if she did not allow very much of her young bust to be seen, her dress at the back was cut down nearly to her belt. Her voice was a deep contralto, and she knew how to assume an expression of profound gravity and reflection. But she captivated most by her attentiveness. When a young man whom she wished to attract commenced a conversation with her, she never took her eyes from his, or rather she gazed into his, and showed such a rapt attention to his words, such an interest in his thoughts and his occupations, that after meeting her once he never forgot her again. Her coquetry did not consist of languishing glances, but of a pretended sympathy, that flattered and delighted its object.