“I shall have one in three months—about All Saints’ Day, mynheer.” She spoke with the simplicity of a peasant, to whom life and death and birth and growth are the simplest things in a complex world.

“Are you glad, madame?”

“Glad? No,” she said after a pause, smiling still.

“Are you sorry?”

“No, mynheer.”

“He is an old man, your husband,” I remarked after a long silence.

“Yes, he is old, mynheer.”

“You love him?”

“Love him? No.”