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