"You don't love me."
"You know better."
"Then come."
"Not this morning."
"You're always so self-willed."
"Because I mustn't go this morning.... Be sensible now and go without me."
She shrugged her shoulders:
"All right, I'll go, I'll go."
It was just after breakfast; and the children were still downstairs. He played with them: Constant toddled to him on shaky legs; Addie held Jetje on his arm and rubbed his moustache against her milk-white little face, to make her laugh and crow. A soft feeling of bliss welled within him, because he was pressing against him a life that was his life, a small shrine of frail and tender child body in which flashed an atom of soul that laughed and crowed and lived. And the baby was so ordinary, a baby just like other babies, when he looked at it as a doctor; and the baby was so mystic when, as a father, he pressed it to himself. What was more mystic than a little child? What was more mysterious and higher in divine incomprehensibility than a little child, a little child born just ordinarily a few months ago? What was more divinely mysterious and mystic than birth and the dawn of life? Where did it come from, the baby with its tiny atom of soul, the baby which his wife had borne him? As a doctor, he laughed at his own naïve question; as a father and man, he grew grave in awe of it.... He felt two beings within himself, more and more clearly every day; two beings long maintained in a strange equilibrium, but now trembling, as at a test. He felt two within himself: the ordinary, normal, practical, almost prematurely old, earnest young scientist and doctor; and within that soul his second soul: a soul of mystery, of divine incomprehensibility; a soul full of mysticism; a soul full of unfathomable force, a force which unloosed a magic that was salutary to many.... And, when that magic passed out of him, salutary to many, he would feel himself normal, practical and serious, but suddenly blind for himself, as though he knew nothing for himself, because he was two souls, too much two souls to know things for himself.... Oh, what was more incomprehensible than the essence of life, what more incomprehensible than himself, what more incomprehensible than this little baby and that little toddling boy!... And it was born so simply, in the womb of a healthy woman, and it grew up so ordinarily; and that very ordinary growth was as great a riddle as anything or everything.... Oh, who knew, what did anyone know?... And the strangest thing of all was that he knew, with a strange consciousness for others, what to do, what to say, how to act; that he had known, unconsciously, as a child, when he had spoken words of consolation to his father, to his mother; later, consciously, with a salutary and sacred knowledge, not alone for father and mother but for others, for so many, for so many!
Now he handed her back to the nurse, his little Jetje, his little riddle of birth and the dawn of life, his little atom of soul; now he stroked the silky curls of Constant, who was clinging to his legs, and went upstairs, knowing. How strange that was in him, that calm, quiet knowledge, that certainty of his will, which would shine forth in a setting of calm speech!... He went up the stairs, to the top floor, to what used to be Guy's room, where Guy had generally sat in the morning bending over his books and maps, until, in an impulse of youthful restlessness, he would wander through the house, looking for his sisters or aunt. Marietje now occupied the room, or Mary, as she was usually called.... Addie knocked and she asked who was there, kept him waiting for a moment in her modesty as she nervously tidied something in her room and put away her clothes. When he entered, she was sitting in a big arm-chair, looking very pale....