remember this--it's a cruel
law in our social life--that parents care much for their children, but
children less for their parents; that the family-bonds become still
looser between brothers and sisters; and that those bonds gradually
become wholly loosened between uncles and aunts and nephews and nieces
and cousins. Family-life may have existed in the days of the old
patriarchs, who went into the wilderness with sons and daughters and
herds, but it has ceased to exist in our modern days. At Gerrit's,
although he has no herds, a little bit of it may still exist, because
his children are very many and very small. But, when children are a
little bigger, they want to stretch their wings; and then the
family-bonds get loosened. If children marry, then each child has his
own family--for so long as it lasts--and his own interests; and the
bonds that bound together the patriarchal family of the desert flap
lightly in the wind. Now how can you expect criticism, the greatest and
cheapest 'fun' that man can have at his fellow-man's expense, not to be
directed at relations, when the word 'relation' is really only a synonym
for 'stranger'? There is no such thing as the family in modern society.
Each man is himself. But in natures such as yours and Mamma's there
remains something nice and atavistic that belongs to the patriarchal
family of the desert: you would like to see the family exist, with
family-love, love of parents for children and children for parents, of
brothers and sisters and even nephews and nieces and uncles and aunts
and cousins. Mamma, who has a simple nature, has instituted, for the
satisfying of that feeling, a weekly evening at which we, who are
related by blood but not by interest, meet out of deference for an old
woman whom we do not want to grieve, whom we wish to leave in her
illusion. You, my noble, gentle one, with your more complex character,
feel a more powerful yearning for the old patriarchal life of the
desert, especially after the sorrow and loneliness which you have known
in your life. And you come to the Hague, with your pastoral ideas, to
find yourself in the midst of polished cannibals, who rend one another
daily into tiny pieces and eat one another up with their
family-criticism. That your gentle nature should be shocked at the
spectacle was only to be expected."

"So we are all strangers to one another," said Constance; and a chilly
feeling passed over her, a melancholy rose within her at the