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Rh politeness. But when they met again after many years, he a famous poet and she a middle-aged matron, he instinctively adopted the "Du" (thou) of affectionate intimacy, and she responded in kind. He asked her whether she had recognised herself in any of his works, and she replied: "I really don't know, unless it be in the parson's wife in Love's Comedy, with her eight children and her perpetual knitting." "Ibsen protested," says Herr Paulsen, in whose Samliv med Ibsen a full account of the episode may be read. It is interesting to note that the lady did not recognise herself in Eline Gyldenlöve, any more than we can.

It must have been less than a year after the production of Lady Inger that Ibsen made the acquaintance of the lady who was to be his wife. Susanna Dåe Thoresen was a daughter (by his second marriage) of Provost Thoresen, of Bergen, whose third wife, Magdalene Krag, afterwards became an authoress of some celebrity. It is recorded that Ibsen's first visit to the Thoresen household took place on January 7, 1856, and that on that occasion, speaking to Susanna Thoresen, he was suddenly moved to say to her: "You are now Elina, but in time you will become Lady Inger." Twenty years later, at