silk shades, just bright enough to light the books or crochet-work in the hands of the silent women, Constance, Adeline, Emilie. . . . At about nine o'clock there was a certain movement in those intimate, silent, almost melancholy indoor lines and colours, when Adeline took Klaasje to bed and Constance and Adeletje helped Grandmamma upstairs: the child and the old woman at the same hour, the one never outgrowing her first childhood, the other relapsing into her second, after so well knowing the many sad things that were to come, that had come, that had already faded away, even as all life, that comes and goes, fades away in the faded pallor of the past. . . . And, when Constance and Adeline returned downstairs together, they seemed to hear the wind getting up around the house; and Adeline said, on the stairs:
"Listen, the wind's getting up."
"There's a change in the weather," said Constance.
"That means thaw; it's a westerly wind and we shall have rain."
On entering the room, they found Ernst there. He often came round in the evenings. He watched Gerdy's cards and sat very still, never spoke much, feeling that they never understood what he said and that it was better to talk to them as little as possible, even though there was some good about them, even though they were not utterly depraved, even though they meant the suffering souls no harm, although once in a way, all of them, they would trample on them unconsciously, because they did not see and understand and because they were so stupid and so innately rough. . . . Nevertheless, rough and stupid as they were, they were his relations and he came and looked them up, feeling at home in the house of his sister Constance and her
