l, was
there; an absolute determination to act against this feeling of recoil;
and, combined with these two, a silent wish, a gentle resolve to improve
Adolphine in one way and another. She insisted that Addie should ask
Adolphine's boys to lunch one Sunday; and, though her nerves were racked
and she driven almost mad by their rude manners and coarse voices, she
had controlled herself and deliberately played the kind auntie. Addie,
sacrificing himself for Mamma's sake, had gone out walking with his
cousins, but had taken the first opportunity of giving the young louts
the slip. Knowing his mother's idiosyncrasies, he did not say much when
he returned and even declared that they were not half bad fellows. When
his father, however, asked him if he understood why Mamma encouraged
those unmannerly cubs, Addie stoically replied, because they were
cousins: one of Mamma's ideas; family-affection. Constance, meanwhile,
was so tired of the three young Van Saetzemas that she did not venture
to repeat the experiment.

Constance thought Dorine uncertain. Dorine was very pleasant, sometimes,
to go shopping with, or would go shopping herself for Constance--it was
she who asked, not Constance--and then, at other times, Dorine would be
cold and nervously irritable. This was because Dorine had a positive
mania for doing all sorts of things for other people, but, at the same
time, was always craving for appreciation and never thought that she was
sufficiently appreciated by any member of the family for whose benefit
she ran about. But the mania was too strong for her; and she went on
running about, for Mamma, for Bertha, for Constance, for Adolphine, and
was always grumbling to herself that she was not appreciated. Yes, she
would like to see their faces if she, Dorine, said, one day, that she
was tired! What would they say, she wondered, if she ventured to suggest
that one sometimes gets wet in the rain? Thus she always grumbled to
herself, fitful, dissatisfied, discontented and yet never able to make a
comfortable corner for herself, in the boarding-house where she lived,
always tearing along the streets from one sister to the other. It was as
though she had a mania that drove her ever onwards. She was miserable if
a day came when she had no errands to run; and she would go to Adolphine
and say:

"Look here, if you'd like me to go to Iserief's and ask about those
pillow cases for Floortje, you've only got to say so; I'm going that way