"Yes, yes, better say Grandmamma. When you see her, call her Grandmamma at once. It's less stiff: she will like it ... even though you're not married to Lot yet...."
His voice sank; he sighed, as though he were thinking of other things, of more important things; and, with the jerk in his neck, he started up and remained like that for a second, with his head on one side, as if he heard something, as if he were listening. Elly did not think Grandpapa looking well to-day. The drowsiness overcame him again; his head dropped and his eyes grew glassy. And he sat there, so frail and fragile, as if one could have blown the life out of him like a dancing feather. Elly, after a moment's hesitation, left him alone. The old gentleman gave a start, when he heard the door close gently, and recovered his full consciousness. He sat for a second or two without moving. Then he unlocked the drawer of his writing-table, with which he had been busy before, and took out the pieces of a letter that had already been torn up. He tore the pieces still smaller, as small as they possibly could be, and scattered them in his waste-paper-basket, in among other discarded papers. After that he tore up a second letter, after that a third, without reading them over. He scattered the tiny pieces in the basket and shook the basket, shook the basket. The tearing tired his stiff fingers; the shaking tired his arm.
"A few more this afternoon," he muttered. "It's getting time, it's getting time...."
[CHAPTER III]
The old gentleman went out at about three o'clock, alone: he did not like to be accompanied when he went, though he was glad to be brought back home; but he would never ask for this service. Aunt Adèle looked out of the window and followed him with her eyes as he turned by the barracks and crossed the razor-back bridge. He was not going farther than just down the Nassaulaan, to Mrs. Dercksz'; and he managed the distance with a delicate, erect figure and straight legs: he did not even look so very old a man, in his overcoat buttoned up to the throat, even though each step was carefully considered and supported by his heavy, ivory-knobbed stick. In order above all not to let it be perceived that this short walk was his exercise and his relaxation, a great deal of exercise and relaxation for his now merely nervous strength, he had needs to consider every step; but he succeeded in walking as though without difficulty, stiff and upright, and he studied his reflection in the plate-glass of the ground-floor windows. In the street, he did not strike a passer-by as so very old. When he rang, old Anna hurried and the cat slipped crosswise through her petticoats, cat and maid making for the front-door at one run:
"The old gentleman, I expect."
Then she drove the cat back to the kitchen, afraid lest the old gentleman should stumble, and drew him in with little remarks about the weather and questions about his health; and to Takma it called for rare art to let his overcoat, which he took off in the hall, slip from his shoulders and arms into the maid's hands. He did it slowly and gradually, a little tired with the walk, but in the meanwhile he recovered breath sufficiently to go upstairs, one flight only, with the aid of the stick—"We may as well keep the stick, Anna," he would say—for Mrs. Dercksz nowadays never came down to the ground-floor rooms.
She was expecting him.
He came almost every day; and, when he was not coming, Aunt Adèle or Elly would call round to say so. So she sat, in her high-backed chair, waiting for him. She sat at the window, looking out at the gardens of the villas in the Sofialaan.