Yes, she had longed for them all, for her home and for Holland! Oh, the passionate longing of those last years, ever and ever more passionate! Oh, how lonely she had been, and how she had pined for Holland, for the Hague, for her relations! During all those years, she had been an outcast from her home, an exile, as it were, during all those long, hungry years. Twenty years she had spent abroad! For five of them she had been married to De Staffelaer, the five years in Rome, and then . . . oh, the one mistake of her life! Ah, how she had pined since that mistake, incessantly! . . . And, after the child was born, she had pined incessantly. . . . Yes, for thirteen years she had pined! During all that time, she had seen her mother twice, for a couple of days, because travelling was such an effort for Mamma, because she herself dared not go to the Hague, which was so near, so near!
Her brothers, her sisters, her whole family had denied her all that time, had never been able to forgive the scandal which she had caused, the blot which she had cast on their name. . . .
She was a girl of twenty-one when she married De Staffelaer. He was an intimate friend of Papa’s: they had been at the University together and belonged to the same club. Now De Staffelaer was Netherlands minister at Rome: a good-looking,
