“Good-bye, mevrouw. Till to-morrow then!”
He ran out. Constance looked out of the window: they drove off, with Addie between them, waving his hand to her, while Brauws was showing Van der Welcke—much too quick, too wild, too impatient—how to work the “sewing-machine” and obviously asking him to be careful....
Chapter X
Constance had invited Van Vreeswijck at the last moment and he was engaged, so that Brauws was the only guest. Though Constance usually gave a deal of thought to her little dinners, she received Brauws quite simply, treating him as one of themselves; and Addie dined with them.
“And now tell me what you have been doing all these years?” asked Van der Welcke.
Brauws tried to tell him, but kept on hesitating, as though under a strange compulsion. His father was a manufacturer, owning big iron-works in Overijssel, and still carried on that huge business with Brauws’ two elder brothers, who were married to two sisters, the daughters of another manufacturer, owning a cotton-mill in the same district. But Max, who had been a queer boy from a child, had from a child felt repelled by all that factory-life of masters and men, as he saw it around him; and his father, recognizing his exceptional intelligence, had sent him to college, hoping that in this way he would carve out an honourable career for himself among his fellow-men. Max was fond of study and studied long and hard, for the sake of study. At Leiden, he became acquainted with Van Vreeswijck, Van der Welcke and other young sprigs of the aristocracy, who would gladly have admitted him to their club, putting up with him because he had plenty of money to spend and because he was clever and it amused him to help them in their examinations. Van der Welcke and Van Vreeswijck had learnt to value his friendship, but nevertheless lost sight of him afterwards, thinking that he had joined his brothers after all and was managing the factory with them. And, even as they, as youths, had hardly known their friend more than superficially, so they did not know, on leaving Leiden, that Max had not gone to Overijssel—where his father would have liked to marry him to the third daughter of the father-in-law of his two other sons—but to America, to “seek.”
“Well, but to seek what?” Van der Welcke asked, failing to understand what a rich youth could want to seek in America, if he did not see some idea, some plan, some object plainly outlined before him.
Brauws now confessed that at the time he scarcely knew what he had gone to seek, in America. He admitted that his father, the iron-master, had hoped that Max would form industrial connections in America which would have benefited the factory. But Max had formed no connections at all.
“Then what did you do?” asked Van der Welcke.