Guy fetched a stool; Adolphine let him push it under her feet.
"There are so many trees round the house," she said. "That's what makes it gloomy and chilly. You should have them thinned out. . . . It must be very lonely, living here."
"Don't you see the others regularly?" asked Constance, trying to change the subject.
"No. Karel and Cateau pay me a visit now and again. It's not much of a pleasure to anyone: it's never more than a visit!" said Adolphine, criticizing her brother and sister-in-law and forgetting that, in the old days, she herself never honoured Constance and Van der Welcke with more than a "visit." And she went on, "Paul one never sees; nor Dorine; and Ernst . . . you know he has not been very well lately?"
Constance gave a start:
"No, I didn't know. I saw him only three weeks ago. . . . I wish he would come and live here, at Driebergen, say in a nice, bright room at a good boarding-house. I really think the country life would do him good and he probably feels rather lonely at the Hague. . . . But he wouldn't do it. . . . He's been living all these years in the same room and seems so much attached to that room that he simply can't leave it . . . and yet he is never satisfied with the landlady and her brother. That brother is his constant bugbear. . . . And yet I thought that he was living quietly enough. . . . Is he still always calm, however self-absorbed he may be? You say he hasn't been well lately?"
"Well, he's not as bad as he was—how long ago is it?—ten or eleven years ago."
"Eleven years."
"He's not like that. But he looks very queer at times . . . and . . ."
