XIII.
The house of the sisters Spang was a pleasant one to go to; they were two unmarried ladies who kept an excellent girls' school, at which Julius Lange taught drawing. Benny Spang, not a beautiful, but a brilliant girl, with exceptional brains, daughter of the well-known Pastor Spang, a friend of Sören Kierkegaard, adopted a tone of good- fellowship towards me that completely won my affection. She was cheerful, witty, sincere and considerate. Not long after we became acquainted she married a somewhat older man than herself, the gentle and refined landscape painter, Gotfred Rump. The latter made a very good sketch of me.
The poet Paludan-Müller and the Lange family visited at the house; so did the two young and marvellously beautiful girls, Alma Trepka and Clara Rothe, the former of whom was married later to Carl Bloch the painter, the other to her uncle, Mr. 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.