She felt so weary with her
depression that she could have remained lying there. It was as though
the illusion was beginning to crumble to pieces, like a dear house of
sympathy from which sympathy had shown itself to be absent.

"Don't let Grandmamma notice anything," she said, softly.

He promised.

She wanted to leave the old woman her happiness in her illusion, the
illusion of that dear house of sympathy. Her own illusion was crumbling.
And yet she thought that she was exaggerating, making too much of it,
because a wretched boy had given her child pain:

"That's no reason why they should all be like that," she thought.

And she once more summoned to her mind the illusion of that great, dear
house of sympathy for which she had yearned in her lonely exile.

"Come, Mamma, let's go out."

She released him slowly, smiled through her tears, as she rose from his
lap and went to change her things:

"How small we all are!" she thought. "What small creatures we are and
what small souls we have Is that life? Or is there something different?"

CHAPTER XXXI

The boy had grown serious. For that little incident represented more to
him than a quarrel with a cousin about a word of abuse: it had suddenly
opened a window to him, who was already none too young for his years,
given him a view into the people around him, the big, older, grown-up,
serious people, the people to whom he would belong later, when he too
was big and old and grown-up; and, at the same time, it had given him
his first great sorrow. The boy had grown more serious, more serious
than he already was, now that he had discussed it calmly with Frans van
Naghel and told him that he had asked his father about it and that the
nickname was a pure slander. And the delicate bloom on his child-soul,
which was like the soul of a little man, was not only offended by that
slander and soiled by it and profaned, but that fledgling man's soul,
with its downy freshness, was startled and astonished and shocked and
did not understand why the people around him uttered slanders, the
people for whom Mamma had longed because she missed them so in her
loneliness and because she was filled with that strange feeling, that
passion for her family. Why, why did people slander? Why did they speak
evil? For he now felt that they all knew that nickname and perhaps all
believed that slander a little, inasmuch as they all slandered. What did
it benefit them, what did they gain by i