“Your
“Henrik Ibsen.”
In spite of Ibsen’s entreaties his young friend continued to send him letters, and a little present accompanied one of them at the close of 1890. He replied:
“I have safely received your dear letter. Also the bell with the lovely picture. I thank you for them from my heart. My wife, too, thinks the picture is very well painted. Soon I will send you my new play. Receive it in friendship—but in silence.
“Your ever devoted
“Henrik Ibsen.”
That was the end of the letter-writing. They never saw one another again after the meeting in the Tyrol, and from then the Viennese girl kept silence. Only once did she break it—on the poet’s seventieth birthday, in 1898, when she sent him a congratulatory telegram. Three days later she received from him a photograph, on the back of which was written:
“The summer in Gossensass was the happiest, the most beautiful in my life. Hardly dare to think of it. And yet must always—always.”
So Love came tapping at the window of the old gentleman who had described Youth knocking at the door.
A Winter’s Jaunt to Norway the papers unanimously described as “lively” and “breezy,” and its proud parent began to feel as if she had discovered the home of the winds.
A few years later the solid meal followed—the notes were served up as soup, re-served as fish for the papers, and took more solid form as meat for the magazines. Memory was called upon in all kinds of ways and on all kinds of Scandinavian subjects as puddings for the Press, so these little trips for pleasure became invested capital and bore good interest. I became an authority on Northern lands, and for years was written to, or telegraphed to, or ’phoned to for copy on like subjects. I was asked to review somebody else’s Norway book; to join a Norwegian Club; to supply someone with a teacher of Norsk literature, and be interviewed for “galleries” of travellers or sportswomen. One gentleman, whom I unfortunately did not see, but of whose industry I remain an unceasing admirer, wrote an admirable four-column interview with me, entirely from his own imagination.