"Are you so disappointed in your brothers and sisters?" asked Gerrit.
"I am not complaining on my own behalf now, I am complaining on behalf of Adolphine. I think you others are not tolerant enough of anything that does not appeal to your taste. That's all. I am not complaining as far as I'm concerned. You have all received me very nicely; only, I am frightened. I'm frightened, I'm frightened.... Tell me, is it possible that there should be a strong family-feeling, a mutual kindliness, when the daily criticism is so inexorable?"
"The daily criticism in the family: what a good title for an essay!"
"Paul, do be serious!"
"My dear Connie, you know I can't. Alas, I can only be serious when I am holding forth myself!"
"Well, then, I'll let you talk...."
"That's generous of you. My Connie, you must remember this—it's a cruel law in our social life—that parents care much for their children, but children less for their parents; that the family-bonds become still looser between brothers and sisters; and that those bonds gradually become wholly loosened between uncles and aunts and nephews and nieces and cousins. Family-life may have existed in the days of the old patriarchs, who went into the wilderness with sons and daughters and herds, but it has ceased to exist in our modern days. At Gerrit's, although he has no herds, a little bit of it may still exist, because his children are very many and very small. But, when children are a little bigger, they want to stretch their wings; and then the family-bonds get loosened. If children marry, then each child has his own family—for so long as it lasts—and his own interests; and the bonds that bound together the patriarchal family of the desert flap lightly in the wind. Now how can you expect criticism, the greatest and cheapest 'fun' that man can have at his fellow-man's expense, not to be directed at relations, when the word 'relation' is really only a synonym for 'stranger'? There is no such thing as the family in modern society. Each man is himself. But in natures such as yours and Mamma's there remains something nice and atavistic that belongs to the patriarchal family of the desert: you would like to see the family exist, with family-love, love of parents for children and children for parents, of brothers and sisters and even nephews and nieces and uncles and aunts and cousins. Mamma, who has a simple nature, has instituted, for the satisfying of that feeling, a weekly evening at which we, who are related by blood but not by interest, meet out of deference for an old woman whom we do not want to grieve, whom we wish to leave in her illusion. You, my noble, gentle one, with your more complex character, feel a more powerful yearning for the old patriarchal life of the desert, especially after the sorrow and loneliness which you have known in your life. And you come to the Hague, with your pastoral ideas, to find yourself in the midst of polished cannibals, who rend one another daily into tiny pieces and eat one another up with their family-criticism. That your gentle nature should be shocked at the spectacle was only to be expected."
"So we are all strangers to one another," said Constance; and a chilly feeling passed over her, a melancholy rose within her at the sound of those words of Paul's, half banter, half earnest. "We are strangers to one another. That feeling which I felt to be deep and true within myself, when I was abroad, and which drove me back to my family and my country is what you call atavistic and has no reason for existence, since we no longer live in Mosaic times. So we are strangers to one another, we who, for Mamma's sake, continue to greet one another as relations once a week, at her Sundays, because otherwise we should give her pain; and my longing for you all, whom I had not seen for twenty years, my yearning for you, which brought me back to my own country, was no more than an illusion, a phantom?..."
"Well, Connie, perhaps I was cruel; but, really, you are so pastoral! Country, native country! My dear child, what beautiful phrases: how well you remember your Dutch! I have forgotten the very words."
"Sis, dear," Gerrit interrupted, "don't listen to the fellow: he's talking nonsense. He denies everything because he loves to hear himself speak and because he is a humbug: to-morrow he will be defending the country and the family just as he is demolishing then to-night, No, Sis, believe me, there are such things as family and one's native country."