“Well, then, there is a great deal of good for you here. Your special activities. Your material and moral work for others.... Don’t let Van Helderen get too much smitten with you, mevrouw. He’s a charming fellow, but he puts too much literature into his monthly reports.... I see him coming and I must be off. So I can rely on you?”
“Absolutely.”
“When shall we have the first meeting, with the committee and the ladies?”
“To-morrow evening, resident, at your house?”
“Right you are. I shall send round the subscription-lists. We must make a lot of money, mevrouw.”
“We’ll do our best for Mother Staats,” she said, gently.
He shook her hand and went away. She felt limp, she did not know why:
“The resident has been warning me against you, because you’re too literary!” she said to Van Helderen, teasingly.
She sat down in the front verandah. The skies burst asunder; a white curtain of rain descended in perpendicular streams. A plague of locusts came hopping along the verandah. A cloud of tiny flies hummed in the corners like an Æolian harp. Eva and Van Helderen placed their hands on the little table and it tilted its leg with a jerk, while the beetles buzzed around them.