Some one had made me a present of some stuffed humming-birds, perched on
varnished twigs under a glass case. I always looked at them while I was
reading in the nursery; they stood on the bookshelves which were my
special property. These birds with their lovely, shining, gay-coloured
plumage, conveyed to me my first impression of foreign or tropical
vividness of colouring. All that I was destined to love for a long time
had something of that about it, something foreign and afar off.

The girl was Danish as far as her speech was concerned, but not really
Danish by descent, either on her father or her mother's side; her name,
too, was un-Danish. She spoke English at home and was called Mary at my
uncle's, though her parents called her by another name. All this
combined to render her more distinctive.

Once a year I met her at a children's ball; then she had a white dress
on, and was, in my eyes, essentially different from all the other little
girls. One morning, after one of these balls, when I was fourteen, I
felt in a most singular frame of mind, and with wonder and reverence at
what I was about to do, regarding myself as dominated by a higher,
incomprehensible force, I wrote the first poetry I ever composed.

There were several strophes of this heavenly poetry. Just because I so
seldom met her, it was like a gentle earthquake in my life, when I did.
I had accustomed myself to such a worship of her name that, for me, she
hardly belonged to the world of reality at all. But when I was sixteen
and I met her again, once more at a young people's ball, the glamour
suddenly departed. Her appearance had altered and corresponded no longer
to my imaginary picture of her. When we met in the dance she pressed my
hand, which made me indignant, as though it were an immodest thing. She
was no longer a fairy. She had broad shoulders, a budding bust, warm