order to give pleasure to Constance. The conversation
flagged: Ernst never completed his sentences; and his eyes were always
wandering round the room.... After lunch, he was a little more
communicative and he then asked her if she had ever thought on the grace
and symbolism of a vase. She listened with interest, while she saw
something in Van der Welcke's glance as though he thought that Ernst was
mad; and Addie listened very seriously, full of tense and silent
astonishment. A vase, Ernst said, was like a soul--and he took in his
hand a slender Satsuma vase of ivory-tinted porcelain, with the elegant
arabesques waving delicately as a woman's hair--it was like a soul. For
Ernst there were sad and merry vases, proud and humble vases; there were
lovelorn vases and vases of passion; there were vases of desire; and
there were dead vases, which only came to life again when he put a
flower in them. He said all this very seriously, without a smile and
also without the rhapsody of an artist or a poet: he talked almost
laconically about his vases, as though any other view would have been
quite impossible.... Constance had not seen him since that day, because
he was the only one who did not come regularly to Mamma's
Sunday-evenings. And she retained an impression of that afternoon spent
with her brother Ernst as of something exotic and strangely symbolical,
something, it was true, which she had liked and found pleasant and
refined, but which, all the same, lacked the familiar cordiality of a
brother and sister meeting again after a separation of years.

As regards Adolphine and her children, Constance, after a first sense of
recoil, had, almost unconsciously, laid down rules for her feelings,
though perhaps she did not see those rules so very clearly outlined in
her mind. But, unconsciously, she positively refused to dislike
Adolphine and, on the contrary, was positively determined to think
everything about Adolphine pleasant and attractive: her husband, her
house, her children and her ideas. If any one, even Mamma, said the
least thing about Adolphine, she at once espoused her cause, violently.
Through circumstances, such as the arranging of her own house and
Emilie's wedding, she had not, as yet, been often to the Van Saetzemas';
but she promised herself not to neglect this in future and, with the
greatest tact, to advise Adolphine in all sorts of matters. It operated
strangely in Constance: the feeling of recoil, which, after al