"And you?"
"I?"
"Yes, you, you! Didn't you sometimes long for your parents, for Holland! Didn't you yourself say that it would be good for our boy?"
"For our boy!" he shouted, refusing to listen, in his impotent, seething rage. "For our boy!"
And he laughed more bitterly, more scornfully than she had ever heard him before:
"For our boy! A lot I can do for him here! However hard he may work, whatever tact he may show, even though he enters the career which I had to abandon, he will always, always be reminded of the scandal of his parents! For our boy! Let him become a farmer, if he must be a Dutchman in Holland, hidden somewhere from all our family, our friends and our acquaintances! And it's all, all your fault!"
"You are unreasonable!" she cried, wincing under his insults. "If we have anything to reproach ourselves with, then it falls upon both of us; and you have not the right to let me, me, a woman, bear the burden of our misery alone!"
"That misery would at least not have been discussed, mocked at, criticized, ridiculed, traduced," he shouted, raging and stamping, "if you had not insisted on coming back to Holland!"
"Was I the only one to wish it?"
"Very well," he admitted, losing all his self-control, "I did too. But we were both fools, to return to this rotten country and these rotten people!"