XI.
Magdalene Thoresen was spending that year in Copenhagen, and our connection, which had been kept up by correspondence, brought with it a lively mutual interchange of thoughts and impressions. Our natures, it is true, were as much unlike as it was possible for them to be; but Magdalene Thoresen's wealth of moods and the overflowing warmth of her heart, the vivacity of her disposition, the tenderness that filled her soul, and the incessant artistic exertion, which her exhausted body could not stand, all this roused in me a sympathy that the mistiness of her reasoning, and the over-excitement of her intellectual life, could not diminish. 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.