“What makes you ask that, Elly?”
It was the first time that she had spoken to Eline about Otto since the breaking of her engagement.
“Oh, I should so like to know if it affected him much, and if he’s happy now. Do you never meet him?”
“I have met him once or twice at my brother-in-law’s on the Princessegracht.”
“How does he look?”
“He is not much changed, he may have aged a little perhaps, but it is not very noticeable. He is certainly a little quiet and rather gloomy, but then he was never very boisterous, was he?”
“No,” murmured Eline, brimful of past memories.
“He is not in the Hague now; he is at the Horze, I believe.”
“Have I driven him away, I wonder?” thought Eline, and with an effort to make it appear as though the interest she took in him was for his own sake, not for hers, she softly said, “Then I suppose he has got over it; there is nothing I should like better than to know him to be happy, he deserves it. He is a very good fellow.”
The old lady said nothing, and Eline could with difficulty keep herself from crying. Oh, was it not terrible that even before her dear old little pet she was obliged to do violence to herself and be a hypocrite? Oh, what a hollow sham it all was! She, she had [[258]]always shammed, to her own self as well as to others, and she still shammed now. So inured had she grown to her shamming and hypocrisy, that now she could not do otherwise.