Ernst was still living in his rooms in the Nieuwe Vitley, surrounded by his collections, surrounded by his hobbies. A man of fifty now, he led a silent, solitary life amid his books, his china, his curiosities; and the landlady looked after him and cooked his meals, because he paid well, paid too much indeed. He saw little of the family because the others really lived as secluded as he did, Paul in his rooms, Dorine at her boarding-house, though she was never satisfied and was constantly changing her boarding-house; and no family-tie drew him to Van Saetzema's house or Karel's. In this way a separation and estrangement had grown up among all of them; the bond between them had perished, now that Mamma was no longer at the Hague to gather them all around her on Sunday evenings in her big house in the Alexander Straat; and Constance, of late years, had often pressed him to come and live at Driebergen. But he obstinately refused; and yet, on the rare occasions when he saw her at the Hague, he would take her hand and sit knee to knee with her, unbosoming himself of all his stored-up discontent with the rooms, the meals, the landlady, that brother of hers: the brother especially, whom he could never stand, the vulgar bounder, as he called him. Constance then felt him to be an aging, always lonely man, who never uttered his thoughts and who, because of this continual silence, bottled up within himself the thousands of words which he now poured forth to her all in one torrent with a timid look, as if he were afraid that the landlady and her brother
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