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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
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