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.