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thought, if he died, if they ever had to lose him, she would do away with herself! He was not their child: he was their treasure, their life. And she gave a glance at him; but, when she saw him sitting hand in hand with his father, while Van der Welcke tried to make out the distant village-steeples after all those years, she turned round again, quickly, with a jealous pang at her heart.... Oh, she felt sorry for Adolphine! She saw in Adolphine a struggle to be "in the swim," a desperate struggle, because Van Saetzema had nothing but a fine-sounding name: in everything else, he was an insignificant person, who had great difficulty in obtaining his promotion, after long years of waiting; married to Adolphine, no one knowing why she had taken him or he her; first trying to set up as an advocate and attorney at the Hague; later, receiving a billet in the Ministry of Justice, but never liked by Papa and never helped on by him, as Van Naghel had been; never thought much of by his superiors; now pushed into all sorts of little jobs and committees by Adolphine; trying to botch up some kind of political creed, in order to stand as a candidate for the Municipal Council, because Adolphine, always jealous and envious of Bertha's importance, wanted to see her own husband coming more and more to the front and had so little chance of realizing that ideal.... Yes, Adolphine must be inwardly furious when she thought of Bertha's household: her husband colonial secretary, after making money at the bar at Semarang; their house a replica of the dignified, stately paternal home of the old days: the same big dinners, the same good society, just verging on the diplomatic set. And so Adolphine gave those impossible "little evenings:" all sorts of persons dragged in anyhow; diversified elements that knew nothing of one another, never saw one another, were astonished to meet one another in those cramped drawing-rooms, full of faded specimens of amateur needle-work and dusty Makart bouquets; a rubber, a jingling duet by the girls, next the tables pushed aside and suddenly, by way of a dance, a mad romp, which sent a cloud of dust flying from the carpet: everything, everything in the same execrable taste, uninviting and, especially, common, with the thick sandwiches and the sluttish maid-servant, who shrugged her shoulders impertinently if the girls asked her to do a thing! Oh, Constance felt sorry for Adolphine, who was, after all, her sister; and s
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