education as existed in their house was as
ramshackle as their friends, their rooms, their tables. It was
especially where her children were concerned that Adolphine had that
mania for having and doing everything in a very imposing fashion, a
fashion at least as imposing as that in which Bertha had and did things
for hers. As Adolphine, however, was the only one of the Van Lowes who
was, by exception, thrifty, her thrift often waged a severe struggle
with her yearning for what was imposing. And so, whereas everything
relating to the Van Naghels' household and the education of their
children was conducted, as a matter of course, on the most expensive
lines, which they both recognized as expensive, but which their tastes
and their manner of life made it impossible to alter, everything at
Adolphine's was done cheaply. And so, whereas Louise and Emilie and
Marianne had been to expensive boarding-schools near London and
Paris--great country-houses, where the daughters of wealthy men received
a fashionable education, with dancing-lessons in ball-dresses, drawing-,
painting- and music-lessons given by well-known masters--Adolphine,
though inwardly eaten up with jealousy, pronounced those
boarding-schools simply absurd and quite beyond her means and discovered
one near Cleves, to which she sent Floortje and Caroline: a very
respectable establishment, but one where German shopkeepers' daughters
were taken in and where a very different tone prevailed from that of the
aristocratic schools near Paris and London. This, however, did not
prevent Adolphine from extolling _her_ boarding-school as far above
those silly, frivolous institutions to which Bertha had sent her
children. And, as regards the boys, Adolphine magnified _her_ three
boys, Piet, Chris and Jaap: the eldest was to enter the East-Indian
civil service; the two others were intended for Breda and Willemsoord,
which was better than those two spendthrift Leiden students, who were at
it again, wanting some thousands of guilders for their approaching
masques, and far better than that lazy lout of a Karel.

Also, Adolphine was always drawing comparisons between her Marietje, a
gentle, fair, white-skinned little girl, a bit subdued amid the blatancy
of the others, and Bertha's Marietje: comparisons invariably in her own
child's favour; but now, after Emilie's wedding with Van Raven, she drew
comparisons more particularly between Emilie's wedding-preparations and
all that she, A