At that time, though already forty, she was a woman so full of blossoming prettiness that she was still known as the beautiful Lietje. She was small, but perfect in shape and particularly charming in feature, charming in the still very young lines of throat and breast, creamy white, with a few pale-gold freckles; charming with blue eyes of innocence and very fair, soft, wavy hair; charmingly half-woman and half-child, moulded for love, who seemed to exist only that she might rouse glowing desires. When Steyn de Weert saw her thus for the first time, in some ultra-modern Hague drawing-room of the Dutch-Indian set, she was married to her second husband, that half-Englishman, Trevelley, who was supposed to have made money in India; and Steyn had seen her the mother of three biggish children: a girl of fifteen and two boys a little younger; but the enamoured dragoon had refused to believe that, by her first marriage, with Pauws, from whom she had been divorced because of Trevelley, she had a daughter at the Conservatoire at Liège and a son of eighteen at home! The beautiful Lietje? She had married very young, in India, and she was still the beautiful Lietje. Such big children? Was that woman forty? The young officer had perhaps hesitated a moment, tried, now that he knew so much, to view Mrs. Trevelley with other eyes; but, when he looked in hers and saw that she desired him as he did her, he forgot everything. Why not cull a moment of happiness? What was an instant of love with a still seductive and beautiful woman? A triumph for a week, a month, a couple of months; and then each would go a different way.
That was how he had thought at the time; but now, now he was sitting here, because that bounder of a Trevelley, who wanted to get rid of Ottilie, had taken advantage of their relations to create a scandal and, after a pretence at a duel, to insist on a divorce; because all the Hague had talked about Ottilie, when she was left standing alone with a lover; and because he, Steyn, was an honest chap after all: that, that was why he was sitting here, with that old woman opposite him. Not a word was uttered between them; they drank their tea; the tray was removed; Jack dreamed and moaned; the wind howled. The pages followed in quick succession under Ottilie's fingers; and Steyn read the Manchurian war-news and the advertisements, the advertisements and the war-news. The room around them, married though they were, looked as it had always looked, impersonal and unhomely; the clock ticked on and on, under its glass shade. It looked like a waiting-room, that drawing-room: a waiting-room where, after many things that had passed, two people sat waiting. Sat waiting ... for what? For the end that was so slow in coming, for the final death.
Steyn restrained himself and read through the advertisements once more. But his wife, suddenly shutting up her book, said, abruptly:
"Frans!"
"Eh?"
"I was talking to Lot just now."
"Yes ..."
"Would you object if they stayed on with us, he and Elly?"
"No, on the contrary."
But it seemed as though Steyn's calm consent just irritated his wife, perhaps against her own will, into contradiction: