"Come inn! Come insside!" cried Aunt Floor, in a bass voice and accentuating her consonants. "How d'ye do, Stefanie? How d'ye do, Anton? And how d'ye do, Ina ... and you, little Lily: allah,[2] two childr-r-ren alr-r-ready, that little thing!"
Aunt Floor had not got up to receive them; she was lying on a sofa and a second baboe was massaging her huge, fat legs. The girl's hands glided to and fro beneath her mistress' dressing-gown.
"Caughtt cold!" said Aunt Floor, angrily, as though the others could help it, after renewed words of welcome on their part and enquiries after the voyage. "Caughtt cold in the train from Paris. I assur-r-re you, I'm as stiff as a boar-r-rd. What came over Dhaan, to want to come to Gholland at thiss time of year, I cannott make out...."
"Why didn't you stay behind in India, Aunt?" asked Ina, well-bred and weary-eyed.
"Not likely! I ssee myself letting Dhaan gho alone! No, dear, we're man and wife and where Uncle Dhaan ghoes I gho. Old people like us belong to one another.... Dhaan is with Gharold now, in the other room: your Papa arrived a moment agho, Ina. Those two are talking bissiness of course. I asked Dhaan, 'Dhaan, what on ear-r-rth do you want to gho to Gholland for?' 'Bissiness!' says Dhaan. Nothing but bissiness, bissiness. I don't understand it: you can always wr-r-rite about bissiness. Year after year that confounded bissiness; and nothing ghoes r-r-right: we're as poor as r-r-rats.... There, Saripa, soeda,[3] that's enough: I'm as stiff as a boar-r-rd all the same."
The two baboes left the room; the anthracite-stove glowed like an oven, red behind its little mica doors. Aunt Floor had drawn herself up with a deep sigh and was now sitting: her fat, yellow face, with the Chinese slanting eyes, loomed like a full moon from out of the hair, still black, which went back, smooth and flat, to a large kondé;[4] and there was something of a mandarin about her as she sat, with her legs wide apart in the flannel dressing-gown and her fat, swollen little hands on her round knees, just as Anton Dercksz often used to sit. Her sunken breast hung like the bosom of a tepèkong[5] in two billows on her stomach's formidable curve; and those rounded lines gave her an idol-like dignity, as she now sat erect, with her stiff, angry mandarin-face. From the long lobes of her ears hung a pair of enormous brilliants, which gleamed round her with startling brightness and did not seem to belong to her attire—the loose flannel bag—so much as to her own being, like a jewel set in an idol. She was not more than sixty; she was the same age as Ottilie Steyn de Weert.
"And is old Mamma well?... It's nice of you to have come," she said, remembering that she had not yet said anything amiable to her relations.
Her gelatinous mass now shook more genially on the sofa, while around her sat Stefanie, with her wrinkled witch-face; Anton, who recollected Floor forty years ago, when she was still a strapping young nonna, a nonna with Chinese blood in her veins, which gave her an exotic attraction for the men; Ina d'Herbourg, very Dutch and correct, blinking her eyes with a well-bred air; and the fair-haired little wife, Lily.
"Why dhoesn't Dhaan come?" exclaimed Aunt Floor. "Lily, gho and see what's become of your gr-r-randpapa and your uncle."
"I'll go, Aunt," said Ina d'Herbourg. "You stay here, dear. She mustn't walk about much yet, Aunt."