Ursula laughed. “It’s quite different,” she said.
“Well, I dare say. But I won’t hear another word about them. That kind of people are all a mistake.”
Harriet lifted her indolent eyes, and fixed them on Ursula’s face.
“Do you like your wine?” she said. “Mind you deserve it.”
For the rest of the meal Mynheer Mopius talked of the entertainments he would organize for Ursula. He refused to let her accompany Harriet on the theological errand concerning Leah’s eyes.
“No, no,” he said, “come into the drawing-room and amuse us. Do you play? Do you sing? Harriet does neither. We do both.”
Ursula played well. She gave them a Concert of Liszt, and Mynheer did not talk till Mevrouw dropped her scissors and asked him, after a wait, to pick them up for her. As soon as he could, he got hold of the piano himself, and called out to his wife to join him. He had been possessed of a fine bass twenty years ago, and had enjoyed much admiration in Batavian society. It now stopped somewhere down in his stomach, and only a rumble came out. His wife rose wearily to play his accompaniments, and he kept her chained to the piano for the rest of the evening, though Ursula could not help seeing that the playing seemed to cause her physical pain.
He sang only love-songs of the ultra-sentimental kind, all about broken hearts and lovely death and willing sacrifice. Many of them were of a by-gone period when everybody pretended—at least in verse—to be absolutely ill with affection.
Harriet came back and poured out tea. When her uncle said it was bad she shrugged her shoulders.
“It always is,” she replied.