Constance thought Dorine uncertain. Dorine was very pleasant, sometimes, to go shopping with, or would go shopping herself for Constance—it was she who asked, not Constance—and then, at other times, Dorine would be cold and nervously irritable. This was because Dorine had a positive mania for doing all sorts of things for other people, but, at the same time, was always craving for appreciation and never thought that she was sufficiently appreciated by any member of the family for whose benefit she ran about. But the mania was too strong for her; and she went on running about, for Mamma, for Bertha, for Constance, for Adolphine, and was always grumbling to herself that she was not appreciated. Yes, she would like to see their faces if she, Dorine, said, one day, that she was tired! What would they say, she wondered, if she ventured to suggest that one sometimes gets wet in the rain? Thus she always grumbled to herself, fitful, dissatisfied, discontented and yet never able to make a comfortable corner for herself, in the boarding-house where she lived, always tearing along the streets from one sister to the other. It was as though she had a mania that drove her ever onwards. She was miserable if a day came when she had no errands to run; and she would go to Adolphine and say:
"Look here, if you'd like me to go to Iserief's and ask about those pillow cases for Floortje, you've only got to say so; I'm going that way anyhow."
And then, when she went that way, she muttered to herself:
"At it again! Of course, there's only Dorine to inquire about Floortje's pillow-cases! Why can't the girl go herself? Or why don't they send the maid?"
Paul was the one whom Constance saw most often of all the brothers and sisters. He had begun by finding in her a fairly sympathetic listener for his endless unbosomings and philosophizings; then Van der Welcke liked him best and they sometimes had a cigarette together in the smoking-room; he was the most of a brother to them of the four: just an ordinary brother. He would arrive in the morning and run straight up to Constance' room, while she was still dressing, and declare that of course he could come in, though she was in her petticoat. When not too long-winded, he had an interesting way of talking which Van der Welcke appreciated. He always looked at Addie with the eye of a philosopher; and Addie liked him, found him great fun, with his exquisite trousers and wonderful neckties. Constance was fond of him; and it was in Paul that she had really for the first time met a brother again: in Paul, who had come least within her ken in the old days, when she was a girl of twenty and he a child of thirteen.
[20] Tropical flowers.
[21] The great house, i.e., the Viceregal Palace at Buitenzorg.
CHAPTER XXI
"So you're thinking of being presented at Court next winter?" said Van Vreeswijck, who had been a chum of Henri's at Leiden and who was now a chamberlain-extraordinary to the Queen Regent, as he and Van der Welcke were leaving the Plaats together.