XXIIGABFOR eight years Gab and I have lived together on terms of the greatest intimacy, like two sisters. Gab is much younger than I and regards me with deep affection.Often I look at her curiously. She seems to read what is in my face and replies to my mute interrogation.“You cannot understand me. You are Saxon and I am Latin.”When I survey her I find myself thinking as she thinks, and I wonder if there exists a way of comprehending that we Anglo-Saxons do not possess. Gab is deeply serious. She has long, black eyes which seem to slumber perpetually. When she walks, despite her youth, she proceeds with slow and protracted steps, which give you an impression that she must be of a serious and meditative nature.When I became acquainted with her she was living in a dark little apartment, furnished in Hindu style, where in her black velvet costume she looked like some Byzantine princess. Jean Aicard, the poet, said one day that her voiceis of velvet, her skin and locks are of velvet, her eyes are of velvet and her name ought to beVelours. If one could compare her to a living creature a boa constrictor would be most appropriate, for her movements are like those of a snake. There is nothing sinuous, nothing rampant about them, but theensembleof her motions suggests the suppleness of the young adder.I knew Gab for at least two years before it entered into my head that she was fond of me. She was always so calm, so silent, so undemonstrative, so unlike any other human being that only a supernatural personality, it seemed, would ever be able to understand her.Her eyes and her hair are just alike, deep black and very brilliant. In her presence people never know for certain whether she is looking at them or not. Yet nothing about them escapes her, and through her half-closed eyes she penetrates to the very depths of their souls. She is neither tall nor slight, neither plump nor thin. Her skin is like alabaster, her abundant locks are parted in the middle and brought together in a knot behind the head, just as our grandmothers did their hair. Her teeth are small, regular and white as pearls. Her nose is straight and graceful. Her face is full and her head is so large that she never finds quite hair enough to dress it with.When Gab was a baby she had as playmatesa donkey, a pony and an army of lead soldiers, including Napoleon in his various aspects, with horses, rifles and wooden cannon. When I became acquainted with her she still had with her the nurse who had taken her mother’s place. This woman told me that Gab used to make her play horse while she took the part of Napoleon, until the poor nurse staggered with fatigue. She told me again that Gab was so shy that when her mother received a visitor, if the child were in the drawing-room and there was no way of escape, the little one would hide herself behind a curtain and would not budge until the intruder went away. Her mother was so much concerned with what she called the child’s timidity that she was unwilling to force her in any way. Gab subsequently has explained to me that she was not afraid and was not timid, but the truth was she could not endure certain people and that she did not wish to be obliged to see those who annoyed her.She is just the same to-day. For years whenever a visitor came in by one door she would go out by another, and it made no difference whether the person came for a long call or for only a single word. At lunch or at dinner nothing could, and nothing can, induce Gab to meet people.GABPhotoTablerGABGab has an iron will. Her nurse told me that one day on a journey with her parents Gab, who was then a very small girl, wanted to have adonkey that was running along the railway track. She cried for the donkey and did not cease until they had found the beast and bought it for her.Gab has rarely to be corrected. It seems as if some one had taught her all the politeness in the world, and all the seriousness as well. When nine years old she was reading Schopenhauer. At fourteen she was carrying on special research among the archives of the State police. At sixteen she was studying the literature of ancient India. At eighteen she published a manuscript she had found after her mother’s death. She spent her pocket money to have it published. The title of the book wasAu Loin, and Jean Lorrain declared that it was the most beautiful book on India which he had ever read.Gab’s mother must have written this book during her journey in India, for a short time before her death she had visited this interesting country, and had gained access to private houses and courts to which Europeans are not ordinarily admitted. She was a marvellously beautiful woman, and made a great sensation in a country in which beauty is held in high regard.The story goes that one evening at a ball in the viceroy’s palace, to which she had been invited, her entrance made such a sensation that all the couples, forgetting that they were there to dance, stopped and came forward to admire her radiant beauty.When she died those who attended her funeral wept like children, saying that she was too beautiful to have been an ordinary mortal, and that there was something supernatural in her countenance.All her life she had been called the beautiful Mme. X.At the time of my debut at the Folies-Bergère Gab was fourteen years old. One day her mother said to her: “There is a new foreign dancer whom everybody is going to see. We will see her at a matinee.”On reaching the theatre to buy seats the day before the performance they asked about me at the ticket office. Gab’s mother, whose beauty captivated everybody, had no trouble in getting all the information she wanted. The following dialogue ensued:“Is she pretty?” asked Gab’s mother.“No, she is not pretty,” was the reply.“Is she common, ordinary?”“No, she has an individuality of her own.”“Tall?”“Rather slight than tall.”“Is she young?”“Yes, I suppose so, but I could not swear to it.”“Is she brunette or blonde?”“She has brown hair and blue eyes, very blue.”“Is she smart?”“Oh, no. Not smart. She is anything butthat. She is a queer sort of girl who seems to think of nothing but her work.”“Is she retiring?”“Well, yes. She knows nobody and sees nobody. She has continued to be quite unacquainted in Paris. She lives on the third storey at the end of a court in a house to the rear of the Folies-Bergère, and she never goes out unless with the manager of the theatre or his wife and with her mother, who never leaves her.”“Does her dancing weary her greatly?”“After the dance she is so tired that they have to carry her home and she goes to bed at once. The first time she came here she stayed at the Grand Hotel, but the manager has given her theappartementof which I have been speaking. He has had a door let in at the rear of the stage, so that she can return to her rooms without having to go upon the street. She remains forty-five minutes on the stage. The white dance alone lasts eleven minutes. That is very fatiguing for her; she sticks at it too long, but the public is never willing to let her stop.”“Is she amiable?”“Well, she does not know a word of French, but she smiles all the time, and says, ‘bong-jour’.”At this moment the manager, M. Marchand, who had come near the ticket office, and who fell victim to the irresistible charm of Gab’s mother, joined in the conversation.“She is a very complex personality, Miss Loie Fuller,” he said. “She has no patience but displays nevertheless an incredible amount of perseverance. She is always rehearsing with her electric apparatus, engaged in search of new effects, and she sometimes keeps her electricians at work until six o’clock in the morning. No one would venture to make the slightest suggestion to her about this; overwork seems to agree with her. She stops neither for dinner nor for supper. She is endlessly seeking for combinations of light and colour.”Then he added, as if aside:“They are queer people, these Americans.”Gab’s mother then asked about my studies and my ideas.“She has just been interviewed on this subject, and the interview was published this morning. Among other things she said, in speaking of the effect that she obtains: ‘Everybody knows when it is successful, but no one realises how one has to keep at it to succeed. That is what I am after unceasingly.’ The interviewer asked her if there was no established system, no books that could help her in her work. She looked astonished and replied, ‘I do not see how any one could use words to indicate the rays of light in their imperceptible and unceasing interplay that is changing all the time.’”My manager then drew the newspaper fromhis pocket and read this passage from my exposition:“‘One needs to have order in one’s thinking to be able to write. One can feel rays of light, in disintegration or in transition only as one feels heat or cold. One cannot tell in words what one feels. Sensations are not thoughts.’”“‘But music, for example, can be reduced to notation.’”“This seemed to surprise her. She was silent, reflected a moment, and then said:“‘I ought to think about that, but it seems to me that the vibration represented by sight is a finer sense, more indefinite, more fugitive, than that of sound. Sounds have a more fixed character and they are limited. As for sight it has no limit, or none at least that we recognise. In any case we are more ignorant of things that concern our eyes than those which address themselves to our ears. Perhaps this is because our eyes from infancy are better developed at an earlier stage, and because seeing is a faculty the young child exercises sooner than hearing. The field of visual harmony as compared with aural harmony is like sunshine in comparison with moonlight. That is why there took place in the human brain a great development of the sense of sight, long before we were able to direct it or even to understand the results or the uses of it.’”“Those who watch Loie Fuller during her work,”continued M. Marchand, after he had put the paper back into his pocket, “are struck by the transformation that takes place in her as she speaks, or as she directs her men to try this experiment or that. In point of fact, Madame, she has transformed the Folies-Bergère. Every evening the usual audience is lost amid a crowd composed of scholars, painters, sculptors, writers and ambassadors, and at the matinees there is a crowd of women and children. All the chairs and tables of the galleries have been piled up behind the orchestra chairs and all the people, forgetful of their rank and dignity, climb over them like a crowd of urchins. All that for a young girl who does not seem to suspect that she has won success. Would you like an example? Lately my wife took her to a large store to buy some handkerchiefs. The first thing Miss Fuller saw was some handkerchiefs marked ‘Loie Fuller,’ and she was surprised to note that some one had the same name as hers. When they told her: ‘Why, not at all. It is your name that appears on these handkerchiefs,’ she replied:“‘How can that be? These people don’t know me.’“She did not understand and could not understand that it was on account of her success.”THE DANCE OF FIREPhotoLafitteTHE DANCE OF FIREGab’s mother, after acknowledging the manager’s salutation as he said good-bye, again asked the ticket office men:“She is a proper person, then?”“Good Heavens, yes. She is so middle class that she looks like a little country girl. I suspect that she has never dreamed of trying to be swell. She came here with a valise and a little steamer trunk, and dressed as in this photograph,” he added, showing the portrait I had given him.This photograph depicted me in a yachting cap, a straight-cut dress of indefinite colour, and supported by straps. A light underwaist, a short jacket and a very simple cape completed my costume.After seeing this Gab and her mother went home with their seats for next day’s matinee. This matinee impressed Gab to such a degree that on reaching home this child of fourteen wrote the following lines in my honour:“A luminous and impalpable shadow. Across the dark brown night flits a pallid, palpitating reflection. And while petals fly in the air a supernatural golden flower rises toward the sky. It is not a sister of the terrestrial flowers which shed their dream particles upon our aching souls. Like them the gigantic flower brings no consolation. It grew in a strange region under the moon’s blue rays. Life beats in its transparent stem, and its clear leaves hang loosely in the shade like great tormented arms. Just a dream efflorescence displays itself and meditates. It is the flower’sliving poetry that sings there, delicate, fugitive and mysterious.“It is the unsullied firmament, bestrewn with stars and it is the dance of fire.“A crackling flame is kindled. It turns and twists and glows. Smoke, heavy as an incense, rises and mingles in the darkness where embers glow. In the midst of the tumult, licked by torrents of foaming fire, a mask, also a strange flame, is outlined in the reddish air. The flames die into a single flame, which grows to immensity. You might think that human thought were rending itself in the darkness. And we await with anxious hearts the beauty that passes.“Soul of the flowers, soul of the sky, soul of flame, Loie Fuller has given them to us. Words and phrases avail nothing. She has created the soul of the dance, for until Loie Fuller came the dance was without soul!“It had no soul in Greece when among fair wheat heads on days flooded with sunshine beautiful children danced gaily, brandishing their golden sickles. Rigid, majestic, and somewhat too formal, it had no soul under the Grand Monarch. It had no soul when it might have had one. The eighteenth century dances, the minuet in a whirl of powder; the waltz is only an embrace, the woman cult revived.“The soul of the dance was destined to be born in this sad and feverish age. Loie Fuller modelledform out of a dream. Our foolish desires, our dread of mere nothing, these she expressed in her dance of fire. To satisfy our thirst for oblivion she humanised the flowers. Happier than her brothers, the lords of creation, she caused her silent deeds to live and in the darkness, this setting of grandeur, no human defect marred her beauty. Providence shows itself kindly toward her. In its great secret Loie shares.“Amorous of the resplendent beauty in nature she asks it questions out of her clear eyes. To seize the unknown her hand becomes coaxing. Her firm, precise glance penetrates the soul of things even when they have none. The inanimate becomes animate, and thinks under her magical desire, and the ‘dream pantomime’ is evolved.“Charmingly womanly she has chosen the sweetest and finest among sleeping lives. She is the butterfly, she is the fire, she is light, heaven, the stars. Frail, under floating material, flowery with pale gold, with calcedony and beryl, Salome passed in her power. Afterwards humanity went by feverishly. To calm our frayed souls and our childish nightmares a fragile figure dances in a celestial robe.”And now, fifteen years after, Gab still tells me, when we speak of the impression I made on her at the time she wrote these pages full of ingenuous emotion,“I never see you exactly as you are,” she says, “but as you seemed to me on that day.”I wonder if her friendship, so well founded and positive, is not intimately mingled with the love of form, of colour and of light, which I interpreted synthetically before her eyes when I appeared before her for the first time.
FOR eight years Gab and I have lived together on terms of the greatest intimacy, like two sisters. Gab is much younger than I and regards me with deep affection.
Often I look at her curiously. She seems to read what is in my face and replies to my mute interrogation.
“You cannot understand me. You are Saxon and I am Latin.”
When I survey her I find myself thinking as she thinks, and I wonder if there exists a way of comprehending that we Anglo-Saxons do not possess. Gab is deeply serious. She has long, black eyes which seem to slumber perpetually. When she walks, despite her youth, she proceeds with slow and protracted steps, which give you an impression that she must be of a serious and meditative nature.
When I became acquainted with her she was living in a dark little apartment, furnished in Hindu style, where in her black velvet costume she looked like some Byzantine princess. Jean Aicard, the poet, said one day that her voiceis of velvet, her skin and locks are of velvet, her eyes are of velvet and her name ought to beVelours. If one could compare her to a living creature a boa constrictor would be most appropriate, for her movements are like those of a snake. There is nothing sinuous, nothing rampant about them, but theensembleof her motions suggests the suppleness of the young adder.
I knew Gab for at least two years before it entered into my head that she was fond of me. She was always so calm, so silent, so undemonstrative, so unlike any other human being that only a supernatural personality, it seemed, would ever be able to understand her.
Her eyes and her hair are just alike, deep black and very brilliant. In her presence people never know for certain whether she is looking at them or not. Yet nothing about them escapes her, and through her half-closed eyes she penetrates to the very depths of their souls. She is neither tall nor slight, neither plump nor thin. Her skin is like alabaster, her abundant locks are parted in the middle and brought together in a knot behind the head, just as our grandmothers did their hair. Her teeth are small, regular and white as pearls. Her nose is straight and graceful. Her face is full and her head is so large that she never finds quite hair enough to dress it with.
When Gab was a baby she had as playmatesa donkey, a pony and an army of lead soldiers, including Napoleon in his various aspects, with horses, rifles and wooden cannon. When I became acquainted with her she still had with her the nurse who had taken her mother’s place. This woman told me that Gab used to make her play horse while she took the part of Napoleon, until the poor nurse staggered with fatigue. She told me again that Gab was so shy that when her mother received a visitor, if the child were in the drawing-room and there was no way of escape, the little one would hide herself behind a curtain and would not budge until the intruder went away. Her mother was so much concerned with what she called the child’s timidity that she was unwilling to force her in any way. Gab subsequently has explained to me that she was not afraid and was not timid, but the truth was she could not endure certain people and that she did not wish to be obliged to see those who annoyed her.
She is just the same to-day. For years whenever a visitor came in by one door she would go out by another, and it made no difference whether the person came for a long call or for only a single word. At lunch or at dinner nothing could, and nothing can, induce Gab to meet people.
GABPhotoTablerGAB
GABPhotoTablerGAB
PhotoTablerGAB
Gab has an iron will. Her nurse told me that one day on a journey with her parents Gab, who was then a very small girl, wanted to have adonkey that was running along the railway track. She cried for the donkey and did not cease until they had found the beast and bought it for her.
Gab has rarely to be corrected. It seems as if some one had taught her all the politeness in the world, and all the seriousness as well. When nine years old she was reading Schopenhauer. At fourteen she was carrying on special research among the archives of the State police. At sixteen she was studying the literature of ancient India. At eighteen she published a manuscript she had found after her mother’s death. She spent her pocket money to have it published. The title of the book wasAu Loin, and Jean Lorrain declared that it was the most beautiful book on India which he had ever read.
Gab’s mother must have written this book during her journey in India, for a short time before her death she had visited this interesting country, and had gained access to private houses and courts to which Europeans are not ordinarily admitted. She was a marvellously beautiful woman, and made a great sensation in a country in which beauty is held in high regard.
The story goes that one evening at a ball in the viceroy’s palace, to which she had been invited, her entrance made such a sensation that all the couples, forgetting that they were there to dance, stopped and came forward to admire her radiant beauty.
When she died those who attended her funeral wept like children, saying that she was too beautiful to have been an ordinary mortal, and that there was something supernatural in her countenance.
All her life she had been called the beautiful Mme. X.
At the time of my debut at the Folies-Bergère Gab was fourteen years old. One day her mother said to her: “There is a new foreign dancer whom everybody is going to see. We will see her at a matinee.”
On reaching the theatre to buy seats the day before the performance they asked about me at the ticket office. Gab’s mother, whose beauty captivated everybody, had no trouble in getting all the information she wanted. The following dialogue ensued:
“Is she pretty?” asked Gab’s mother.
“No, she is not pretty,” was the reply.
“Is she common, ordinary?”
“No, she has an individuality of her own.”
“Tall?”
“Rather slight than tall.”
“Is she young?”
“Yes, I suppose so, but I could not swear to it.”
“Is she brunette or blonde?”
“She has brown hair and blue eyes, very blue.”
“Is she smart?”
“Oh, no. Not smart. She is anything butthat. She is a queer sort of girl who seems to think of nothing but her work.”
“Is she retiring?”
“Well, yes. She knows nobody and sees nobody. She has continued to be quite unacquainted in Paris. She lives on the third storey at the end of a court in a house to the rear of the Folies-Bergère, and she never goes out unless with the manager of the theatre or his wife and with her mother, who never leaves her.”
“Does her dancing weary her greatly?”
“After the dance she is so tired that they have to carry her home and she goes to bed at once. The first time she came here she stayed at the Grand Hotel, but the manager has given her theappartementof which I have been speaking. He has had a door let in at the rear of the stage, so that she can return to her rooms without having to go upon the street. She remains forty-five minutes on the stage. The white dance alone lasts eleven minutes. That is very fatiguing for her; she sticks at it too long, but the public is never willing to let her stop.”
“Is she amiable?”
“Well, she does not know a word of French, but she smiles all the time, and says, ‘bong-jour’.”
At this moment the manager, M. Marchand, who had come near the ticket office, and who fell victim to the irresistible charm of Gab’s mother, joined in the conversation.
“She is a very complex personality, Miss Loie Fuller,” he said. “She has no patience but displays nevertheless an incredible amount of perseverance. She is always rehearsing with her electric apparatus, engaged in search of new effects, and she sometimes keeps her electricians at work until six o’clock in the morning. No one would venture to make the slightest suggestion to her about this; overwork seems to agree with her. She stops neither for dinner nor for supper. She is endlessly seeking for combinations of light and colour.”
Then he added, as if aside:
“They are queer people, these Americans.”
Gab’s mother then asked about my studies and my ideas.
“She has just been interviewed on this subject, and the interview was published this morning. Among other things she said, in speaking of the effect that she obtains: ‘Everybody knows when it is successful, but no one realises how one has to keep at it to succeed. That is what I am after unceasingly.’ The interviewer asked her if there was no established system, no books that could help her in her work. She looked astonished and replied, ‘I do not see how any one could use words to indicate the rays of light in their imperceptible and unceasing interplay that is changing all the time.’”
My manager then drew the newspaper fromhis pocket and read this passage from my exposition:
“‘One needs to have order in one’s thinking to be able to write. One can feel rays of light, in disintegration or in transition only as one feels heat or cold. One cannot tell in words what one feels. Sensations are not thoughts.’”
“‘But music, for example, can be reduced to notation.’”
“This seemed to surprise her. She was silent, reflected a moment, and then said:
“‘I ought to think about that, but it seems to me that the vibration represented by sight is a finer sense, more indefinite, more fugitive, than that of sound. Sounds have a more fixed character and they are limited. As for sight it has no limit, or none at least that we recognise. In any case we are more ignorant of things that concern our eyes than those which address themselves to our ears. Perhaps this is because our eyes from infancy are better developed at an earlier stage, and because seeing is a faculty the young child exercises sooner than hearing. The field of visual harmony as compared with aural harmony is like sunshine in comparison with moonlight. That is why there took place in the human brain a great development of the sense of sight, long before we were able to direct it or even to understand the results or the uses of it.’”
“Those who watch Loie Fuller during her work,”continued M. Marchand, after he had put the paper back into his pocket, “are struck by the transformation that takes place in her as she speaks, or as she directs her men to try this experiment or that. In point of fact, Madame, she has transformed the Folies-Bergère. Every evening the usual audience is lost amid a crowd composed of scholars, painters, sculptors, writers and ambassadors, and at the matinees there is a crowd of women and children. All the chairs and tables of the galleries have been piled up behind the orchestra chairs and all the people, forgetful of their rank and dignity, climb over them like a crowd of urchins. All that for a young girl who does not seem to suspect that she has won success. Would you like an example? Lately my wife took her to a large store to buy some handkerchiefs. The first thing Miss Fuller saw was some handkerchiefs marked ‘Loie Fuller,’ and she was surprised to note that some one had the same name as hers. When they told her: ‘Why, not at all. It is your name that appears on these handkerchiefs,’ she replied:
“‘How can that be? These people don’t know me.’
“She did not understand and could not understand that it was on account of her success.”
THE DANCE OF FIREPhotoLafitteTHE DANCE OF FIRE
THE DANCE OF FIREPhotoLafitteTHE DANCE OF FIRE
PhotoLafitteTHE DANCE OF FIRE
Gab’s mother, after acknowledging the manager’s salutation as he said good-bye, again asked the ticket office men:
“She is a proper person, then?”
“Good Heavens, yes. She is so middle class that she looks like a little country girl. I suspect that she has never dreamed of trying to be swell. She came here with a valise and a little steamer trunk, and dressed as in this photograph,” he added, showing the portrait I had given him.
This photograph depicted me in a yachting cap, a straight-cut dress of indefinite colour, and supported by straps. A light underwaist, a short jacket and a very simple cape completed my costume.
After seeing this Gab and her mother went home with their seats for next day’s matinee. This matinee impressed Gab to such a degree that on reaching home this child of fourteen wrote the following lines in my honour:
“A luminous and impalpable shadow. Across the dark brown night flits a pallid, palpitating reflection. And while petals fly in the air a supernatural golden flower rises toward the sky. It is not a sister of the terrestrial flowers which shed their dream particles upon our aching souls. Like them the gigantic flower brings no consolation. It grew in a strange region under the moon’s blue rays. Life beats in its transparent stem, and its clear leaves hang loosely in the shade like great tormented arms. Just a dream efflorescence displays itself and meditates. It is the flower’sliving poetry that sings there, delicate, fugitive and mysterious.
“It is the unsullied firmament, bestrewn with stars and it is the dance of fire.
“A crackling flame is kindled. It turns and twists and glows. Smoke, heavy as an incense, rises and mingles in the darkness where embers glow. In the midst of the tumult, licked by torrents of foaming fire, a mask, also a strange flame, is outlined in the reddish air. The flames die into a single flame, which grows to immensity. You might think that human thought were rending itself in the darkness. And we await with anxious hearts the beauty that passes.
“Soul of the flowers, soul of the sky, soul of flame, Loie Fuller has given them to us. Words and phrases avail nothing. She has created the soul of the dance, for until Loie Fuller came the dance was without soul!
“It had no soul in Greece when among fair wheat heads on days flooded with sunshine beautiful children danced gaily, brandishing their golden sickles. Rigid, majestic, and somewhat too formal, it had no soul under the Grand Monarch. It had no soul when it might have had one. The eighteenth century dances, the minuet in a whirl of powder; the waltz is only an embrace, the woman cult revived.
“The soul of the dance was destined to be born in this sad and feverish age. Loie Fuller modelledform out of a dream. Our foolish desires, our dread of mere nothing, these she expressed in her dance of fire. To satisfy our thirst for oblivion she humanised the flowers. Happier than her brothers, the lords of creation, she caused her silent deeds to live and in the darkness, this setting of grandeur, no human defect marred her beauty. Providence shows itself kindly toward her. In its great secret Loie shares.
“Amorous of the resplendent beauty in nature she asks it questions out of her clear eyes. To seize the unknown her hand becomes coaxing. Her firm, precise glance penetrates the soul of things even when they have none. The inanimate becomes animate, and thinks under her magical desire, and the ‘dream pantomime’ is evolved.
“Charmingly womanly she has chosen the sweetest and finest among sleeping lives. She is the butterfly, she is the fire, she is light, heaven, the stars. Frail, under floating material, flowery with pale gold, with calcedony and beryl, Salome passed in her power. Afterwards humanity went by feverishly. To calm our frayed souls and our childish nightmares a fragile figure dances in a celestial robe.”
And now, fifteen years after, Gab still tells me, when we speak of the impression I made on her at the time she wrote these pages full of ingenuous emotion,
“I never see you exactly as you are,” she says, “but as you seemed to me on that day.”
I wonder if her friendship, so well founded and positive, is not intimately mingled with the love of form, of colour and of light, which I interpreted synthetically before her eyes when I appeared before her for the first time.