"Gerdy, you're just like a naughty child. Every time you run out of the room, you leave the door open."
And Gerdy, from being limp, became filled with poignant self-pity. Aunt Constance had ceased to care for her, cared more for her daughter-in-law, Mathilde.... Everybody, everybody cared more for Mathilde.... Addie, Johan Erzeele: they all cared more for Mathilde.... She, Gerdy, was misjudged by everybody ... everybody except Uncle Henri, who was nice and kind....
She made a great effort, mastered herself, mastered her volatile emotions. Alex had come over that Saturday from Amsterdam, where he was now boarding with a tutor at the Merchants' School; and he and Marietje soon got the bridge-table ready. And it became quite a serious rubber, in the still, pale-yellow atmosphere of the big living-room, where the lamps shone sleepily through their yellow-silk shades, just bright enough to light the books or crochet-work in the hands of the silent women, Constance, Adeline, Emilie.... At about nine o'clock there was a certain movement in those intimate, silent, almost melancholy indoor lines and colours, when Adeline took Klaasje to bed and Constance and Adèletje helped Grandmamma upstairs: the child and the old woman at the same hour, the one never outgrowing her first childhood, the other relapsing into her second, after so well knowing the many sad things that were to come, that had come, that had already faded away, even as all life, that comes and goes, fades away in the faded pallor of the past.... And, when Constance and Adeline returned downstairs together, they seemed to hear the wind getting up around the house; and Adeline said, on the stairs:
"Listen, the wind's getting up."
"There's a change in the weather," said Constance.
"That means thaw; it's a westerly wind and we shall have rain."
On entering the room, they found Ernst there. He often came round in the evenings. He watched Gerdy's cards and sat very still, never spoke much, feeling that they never understood what he said and that it was better to talk to them as little as possible, even though there was some good about them, even though they were not utterly depraved, even though they meant the suffering souls no harm, although once in a way, all of them, they would trample on them unconsciously, because they did not see and understand and because they were so stupid and so innately rough.... Nevertheless, rough and stupid as they were, they were his relations and he came and looked them up, feeling at home in the house of his sister Constance and her husband, in the house also of Addie, who was the cleverest of them all and who, he felt certain, did hear and see the souls, for he often spared them.... He now stared at the cards and thought of the rubbers at Mamma's in the Alexanderstraat, when he used to go there on Sundays in the old days.... Strange, that everything changed, that nothing remained, he thought.... It was no longer the Hague now: it was Driebergen; it was Van der Welcke's house and Gerrit's children: Gerrit, how rough, how very rough he used to be, but even so not exactly wicked and depraved! And the cards as they were played one after the other fell from the fingers of Van der Welcke, Gerdy, Alex and Marietje. The same game; only life changed; the game did not change nor did the souls, the poor souls, ever and ever suffering around him, linking themselves to his soul with dragging chains.... He sat in silence and followed the play of the hand, understood it, nodded his approval of Van der Welcke's careful game....
Mathilde had come in; so had Addie, for a moment, before going upstairs to work; and they met as husband and wife who, after dinner, in a bustling house, seek each other out for a moment to exchange a word or two. Mathilde's eyes were red, Addie looked serious; and they all noticed it; it struck them, it saddened them, while they heard the wind flapping like a sagging sail and the panes lightly creaking and the windows lightly rattling in their frames.... Constance wondered what had happened and thought that it must be Mathilde, always urging him to move to the Hague; and Addie would be quite willing, for his wife's sake, but then the money-question would crop up and remain insoluble, because Mathilde would not be economical.... And that indeed was how it was; and they had lost each other, Addie and Mathilde; and they would find each other again in a rebirth of desire, when Addie reflected:
"What a beautiful, healthy woman she is! And we have to be healthy in our bodies and normal in our longings if we would be healthy of soul, in the life of our bodies and our physical being."
On the evening after the excursion on the ice, they found each other again. The wind had lashed their blood to a warm glow, the exercise had sent it coursing through their veins. Love was reborn of their embrace until drowsiness overtook them. And Mathilde thought that she had found him again and Addie thought that he had found her again, because their kisses had sealed one to the other, because their arms had clasped one to the other, but they lost each other again at once, as ever and always, because Mathilde just did not know him in his two-sided soul and he never knew things for himself, whatever he might know for others, in the clarity of his knowledge; in any of the manifestations of the instinctive knowledge which he knew silently and blissfully in his soul's soul: the hidden spark, from which treasure shone.