easy matter for one
who had become exalted to maintain a proper humility. His greatest
concern was that he might perhaps say or do something that would
cause his old friends, who were still obliged to pursue their
humble callings, to feel themselves slighted and forgotten.
Therefore he deemed it best when attending such functions as
dinners and parties--which duty demanded of him--never to mention
in the hearing of these people the great distinction that had come
to him. He could not blame them for envying him. Indeed not! Just
the same he felt it was wisest not to make them draw comparisons.

And of course he could not ask men like Boerje and the seine-maker
to address him as Emperor. Such old friends could call him Jan, as
they had always done; for they could never bring themselves to do
otherwise.

But the one whom he had to consider before all others and be most
guarded with was the old wife, who sat at home in the hut. It would
have been a great consolation to him, and a joy as well, if
greatness had come to her also. But it had not. She was the same as
of yore. Anything else was hardly to be expected. Glory Goldie must
have known it would be quite impossible to make an empress of
Katrina. One could not imagine the old woman pinning a golden
coronet on her hair when going to church; she would have stayed at
home rather than show her face framed in anything but the usual
black silk headshawl.

Katrina had declared out and out she did not want to hear about
Glory Goldie being an empress. On the whole it was perhaps best to
humour her in this.

But one can understand it must have been hard for him who spent his
mornings at the pier, surrounded by admiring throngs of people, who
at every turn addressed him as "Emperor," to drop his royal air the
moment he set foot in his own house. It cannot be denied that he
found it a bit irksome having to fetch wood and water for Katrina
and then to be spoken to as if he had gone backward in life instead
of forward.

If Katrina had only stopped at that he would not have minded it,
but she even complained because he would not go out to work now, as
in former days. When she came with such things he always turned a
deaf ear. As if he did not know that the Empress of Portugallia
would soon send him so much money that he need never again put on
his working clothes! He felt it would be an insult to _her_ to give
in to Katrina on this point.

One afternoon, toward the end of Au