cricket-clubs. They might give one dinner less each winter, but that was really the only thing. And, if the boys, after taking their degrees, were to cost as much money as Otto was costing now; if Louise and Marianne also got married and had to have the same trousseau as Emilie: if it was to go on like that, always and always, with never a moment for taking breath and saving a little: then they did not know what they were to do; for, let Bertha calculate as much as she pleased, the thing was not to be done on fifty thousand guilders a year.
Then, if Van Naghel lost his temper, he reproached Bertha, saying that it was all her fault, that she was a Van Lowe, that the Van Lowes had never been able to calculate, that the Van Lowes’ own housekeeping had been run on much too extravagant a scale, in the old days; but Bertha, blinking her eyes unmoved, reminded him that he owed his career to Papa van Lowe, to Papa’s connections in the years, following upon his term as governor-general, when he still had a great deal of influence in Holland; and she showed him her housekeeping accounts, in which she had carefully made the different entries, telling him that, if he absolutely insisted upon living on the scale they did, it could not be done for less, with the best will in the world. . . . And, seeing no way out of it, they made friends again and did not mention the subject of money for another month; and, outwardly, it was the regular household of a minister of state, full of solid Dutch comfort, with a tinge of modernity superadded: the
