ne's children
has it. I can't explain it to you, you know, if you don't understand....
Yes, Sissy, life is not gay. You are forty-two and I am only
thirty-five, but I find it no gayer than you do. I see through
everything too clearly. I should never be able, consciously, to join in
anything that had to do with human wretchedness, to join in rushing
after an unnecessary object. That is why I do nothing, except observe.
I'm a dilettante, you see. My income is enough to live on; and I loathe
myself for playing the capitalist with a bit of money like that, like
the middle-classes; but I can't help it, you know. I ought to have been
rich, very rich. I should have planted a castle on a mountain-top, amid
the whiteness of the Alps, and I would have done a great deal to mend
human wretchedness; but I would not have had it around me. I hate it so:
I turn sick at the smell of a beggar; and meantime my heart breaks and I
feel a physical compassion for the poor devil. It's the fault of my
stomach or my nerves: they simply turn. It's very unfortunate when
you're built that way.... How do you like my new overcoat, with the
velvet turn-back cuffs? They're rather neat, aren't they? Pity they're
getting wet. But it's good velvet, it doesn't spoil.... And yet,
yesterday, I was really alarmed when I saw my back in two
looking-glasses. I had no idea that I had such a rotten back, a back
full of human wretchedness, in spite of my fine overcoat. The line went
like that, with a sort of hump. It was terrible; it upset me for all the
rest of the day. Then, in the evening, I sat down at my piano and played
_Isolde's Liebestod_; and then it all passed.... You can't make your
little brother out, eh? A mad chap, you think, what? Yes, I
am--almost--the maddest of the bunch. Bertha is very well-balanced;
only, her eyes are always blinking.... Karel: what he might have become,
I don't know; but now he is a round nought, kept in equilibrium by the
roundness of Cateau with her owl's eyes.... Then you have Gerrit: he
looks well-balanced, but isn't; puts on a jovial and genial air; and is
a melancholy dreamer all the time. You don't believe it? You'll see it
for yourself, when you know him better.... Next come you: well, you
yourself tell me you've had a strange life with your two husbands....
After that, they all go down-hill: Ernst behaves very oddly; Dorine too
is sometimes queer, with that everlasting trotting about; and I look at
all their queerness a