“We sha’n’t expect to make friends, Mamma, at first. I shall be alone with the girls. Otto and Frances have found a little house at the Hague: it’s lucky that Otto is provided for at the Foreign Office. The minister spoke very nicely about him the other day.... Frans and Henri must finish their university-course quickly now,” she said, in a hesitating tone. “Karel is going to a boarding-school, for I can’t manage him. And Marietje too: she was going soon, in any case. So there will be just the three of us: Louise, Marianne and I.... Things have changed very much, all at once, Aunt Lot. We want to live quietly. In the first place, we shall just have to live quietly; and the girls are quite content to do so....”
It again seemed to Constance as if Bertha were looking for somebody in the room, were hushing something up. Constance had Emilie’s name on her lips, but she did not like to ask. Mamma knew nothing more than that Emilie and Van Raven sometimes had differences.
“I shall have a lot of trouble and worry before me,” said Bertha. “But, when it is all settled and we have our little villa....”
She sank back in her chair and stared before her with dim eyes.
Constance took her hand compassionately, held it tight. It looked as though Bertha, after that busy life which had suddenly snapped with Van Naghel’s death, an hour after their last dinner-party, no longer knew what to do or say, felt derelict and helpless....
Though there was so much business to attend to, she seemed stunned all at once, in the grip of a strange lethargy, as though everything was now finished, as though there was nothing left now that there would soon be no more visits to pay, no receptions to hold, no dinners to give; now that Van Naghel no longer came home from the Chamber, tired and irritable from an afternoon’s heckling; now that there would be no more calculating how they could manage to spend a thousand guilders less a month; now that she would simply have to live quietly on what she and the girls possessed. And it seemed as if she no longer knew how or why she should go on living, now that she would no longer have to give her dinners and pay her visits ... for her children, particularly her girls. Louise and Marianne had said to her so calmly that they wanted very soon to begin living quietly that Bertha now began to wonder:
“Why did I always make so much fuss, if the girls cared for it so little? Why did I go on till I was old and worn out?”
It was true, that had been Van Naghel’s ambition: he had wanted to see his house a political salon. What he wished had happened. Now it was all over. Now there was nothing to be done but to live quietly, in the little villa at Baarn; to make no debts; to let the boys finish their college-course as quickly as possible; and then to educate Karel and Marietje and let theirs be a different life from the others’: how she did not know....
Bertha remained sitting wearily, staring vaguely before her, half-listening to the sympathetic words, uttered with an emphatic Indian accent, of Aunt Lot, who kept saying:
“Kassian!...”[1]