“I don’t want to spoil the happiness of our friendship.”
“Friendship!”
“Friendship is what I said. There is nothing I value so highly, except my domestic happiness. I couldn’t live without friends. I am happy in my husband and my child; next to these I need friends, above all things.”
“So that they can admire you, so that you can rule over them!” said he, angrily.
She looked him in the face:
“Perhaps,” she said, coolly. “Perhaps I have a need of admiration and of ruling over others. We all have our weaknesses.”
“I have mine,” he said, bitterly.
“Come,” she said, in a kinder tone, “let us remain friends.”
“I am terribly unhappy,” he said, in a dull voice. “I feel as if I had missed everything in life. I have never been out of Java and I feel there’s something lacking in me because I have never seen ice and snow. Snow: I think of it as a sort of mysterious unknown purity, which I long for, but which I never seem to meet. When shall I see Europe? When shall I cease to rave about Il Trovatore and manage to visit Bayreuth? When shall I come within range of you, Eva? I’m feeling for everything with my antennæ, like a wingless insect.... What is my life?... With Ida, with three children, whom I foresee growing up like their mother!... I shall remain controller for years and then—possibly—be promoted to assistant-resident ... and so remain. And then at last I shall receive my dismissal—or ask for it—and go to Sukabumi to live, to vegetate on a small pension. I feel everything in me longing for idleness....”
“You like your work, for all that; you’re a first-rate official. Eldersma always says that in India a man who doesn’t work and who doesn’t love his work is lost.”