In these days, when Constance felt herself becoming so strangely young and alive—she who for so long believed that she had never, never lived—she was compelled to step outside that life dominated purely by feeling. Van Vreeswijck came to her one evening and sat talking for hours. She liked him; she valued him as a good friend who, notwithstanding that he really belonged to the most insufferable section of the Court set, had shown that he was not too much afraid of degrading himself by associating with Van der Welcke, with her or even with Brauws, though he loudly and sweepingly condemned Brauws' views. She, in her new pride of life, looked down upon him, with a kindly contempt, as one of the little people in the narrow little circle, a humming-top spinning around itself and around other humming-tops, just another figure in the merry-go-round which they represented to her, all of them; but she valued his unaffected friendship and, though she thought him anything but a great soul, she did not think him a base or evil soul. And so she spoke to him sympathetically that evening and promised to help him.
She promised; and yet it was exceedingly difficult. A new honesty had sprung up in her, making her hesitate to whom to turn first. She had meant to
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