moment. . . . They were all strangers: her mother, in her second childhood, imagining herself at the Hague and very often at Buitenzorg;[1] she herself and Gerrit's widow and their children; Emilie: all, all strangers, all with their manifold life and ceaseless bustle filling the once silent and serious house. . . . And Mathilde, a stranger. . . . And, so strange, even Mathilde and Addie's children, little Constant and Jetje, were two little strangers, though they bore the family name. . . . Why did she feel this? Perhaps because she still considered that the great gloomy house belonged to the old man. It was as though he lived there still, as though he still walked outside, in the garden. It was as though the great, gloomy house was still filled with his rancour towards her and hers. . . . Yes, she had been living here for ten years, but the old man still bore rancour because she was there and because so many of hers had come with her to the house in which they had no business, in which she herself was an intruder as were all who had intruded themselves along with her. . . . It was a feeling which had so often oppressed her, during those ten years, and which would always oppress her. . . . And she would not utter it to anybody, for Van der Welcke had given Addie free leave to bring the troop with him; and he himself loved the troop. . . .
Oh, how the angles between her and her husband had been rubbed smooth with the years, whether they passed slow or fast! . . . How they had learnt to put up with each other! . . . They were growing old: she fifty-six, he a little younger; it was true, no affection had come between them, but so much softening of all that had once been sharp and unkind between them, so that they had been
- ↑ The governor-general's house near Batavia.
