his parents and the others! . . . When he reflected upon the strange double projection of his soul, when he was meeting the girl, who was now his wife, at the Hague: meeting her just now and again. A strange projection one of them? Perhaps not, after all; but, because of the stormy night wind, sombrely sending its howl over the sombre heaths, he was not able . . . to read his own thoughts plainly. . . . Mathilde! The few meetings, at the Hague; then that feeling, when he chose her, of having been irresistibly compelled; and, combined with a vague wonder within himself, the pride also of introducing that good-looking and healthy young woman into his family. . . . He was proud that she did not belong to their class, especially on her mother's side, because it gave her an opportunity of triumphing over their arbitrary divisions; proud too that she was healthy, with her complexion of milk and roses, and above all did not suffer from "nerves," that all too common complaint among them all. . . . But they had not shared his pride; and after his marriage, some hint of antagonism seemed inevitably to arise between him and his father; his mother, too, for all the liberalism that had come to her late in life, remained antipathetic to this girl, whose gait and voice, whose movements and utterance all suggested a different environment from that to which Constance was accustomed; it was as if Aunt Adeline, Emilie, Uncle Gerrit's children, all their big household, had been unable to receive Mathilde in their midst without a certain supercilious mistrust. . . . They could none of them understand why he had married this woman. . . . And he had not failed to see how they always stirred themselves to be gentle and amiable towards her—because, when all was said and done, she was his wife—stirred themselves
