affection for an eleven-year-old girl, she silenced me at a children's
ball with the scoffing remark: "Ah! it was you who let Henrietta K.
thrash you under the May-tree at Farum." Yes, it was I. So cruel had my
fair lady been that she had not even denied herself the pleasure of
telling her friends of the ignominious treatment to which she had
subjected a comrade who, from pure feeling of honour, had not struck
back.

This was my first real experience of feminine nature.


VII.

For nearly ten years I went to one and the same school. I came to know
the way there and back, to and from the three different places, all near
together, where my parents lived during the time, as I knew no other. In
that part of the town, all about the Round Tower, I knew, not only every
house, but every archway, every door, every window, every Paving-stone.
It all gradually imprinted itself so deeply upon me that in after years,
when gazing on foreign sights and foreign towns, even after I had been
living for a long time in the same place, I had a curious feeling that,
however beautiful and fascinating it all might be, or perhaps for that
very reason, it was dreamland, unreality, which would one day elude me
and vanish; reality was the Round Tower in Copenhagen and all that lay
about it. It was ugly, and altogether unattractive, but it was reality.
That you always found again.

Similarly, though in a somewhat different sense, the wooded landscape in
the neighbourhood of Copenhagen, to be exact, the view over the
Hermitage Meadows down to the Sound, as it appears from the bench