nflicted.
I wondered why she hated him so much.

I begged Stroeve to behave more wisely. His want of spirit
was exasperating.

"You're doing no good at all by going on like this," I said.
"I think you'd have been wiser if you'd hit her over the head
with a stick. She wouldn't have despised you as she does now."

I suggested that he should go home for a while. He had often
spoken to me of the silent town, somewhere up in the north of
Holland, where his parents still lived. They were poor
people. His father was a carpenter, and they dwelt in a
little old red-brick house, neat and clean, by the side of a
sluggish canal. The streets were wide and empty; for two
hundred years the place had been dying, but the houses had the
homely stateliness of their time. Rich merchants, sending
their wares to the distant Indies, had lived in them calm and
prosperous lives, and in their decent decay they kept still an
aroma of their splendid past. You could wander along the
canal till you came to broad green fields, with windmills here
and there, in which cattle, black and white, grazed lazily.
I thought that among those surroundings, with their
recollections of his boyhood, Dirk Stroeve would forget his
unhappiness. But he would not go.

"I must be here when she needs me," he repeated. "It would be
dreadful if something terrible happened and I were not at hand."

"What do you think is going to happen?" I asked.

"I don't know. But I'm afraid."

I shrugged my shoulders.

For all his pain, Dirk Stroeve remained a ridiculous object.
He might have excited sympathy if he had grown worn and thin.
He did nothing of the kind. He remained fat, and his round,
red cheeks shone like ripe apples. He had great neatness of
person, and he continued to wear his spruce black coat and his
bowler hat, always a little too small for him, in a dapper,
jaunty manner. He was getting something of a paunch, and
sorrow had no effect on it. He looked more than ever like a
prosperous bagman. It is hard that a man's exterior should
tally so little sometimes with his soul. Dirk Stroeve had the
passion of Romeo in the body of Sir Toby Belch. He had a
sweet and generous nature, and yet was always blundering;
a real feeling for what was beautiful and the capacity to create
only what was commonplace; a peculiar delicacy of sentiment
and gross manners. He could exercise tact when dealing with
the affairs of others, but none when dealing with