thing funny; and yet he was very serious, much too serious for a child. Your boy, your boy is certainly a man of the future. Sometimes you see a thing like that in a child: then you say to yourself, ‘He’ll be this, he’ll be that, he’ll be the other, later on, when he grows up.’ Do you follow me? No, I see you don’t follow me. It’s just your motherly vanity that feels flattered! Oh, how small you are! That is your human wretchedness! Don’t you see the sunniness in your boy? No, you don’t see it. I saw it at once. It was most attractive. Not one of Bertha’s or Gerrit’s or Adolphine’s children has it. I can’t explain it to you, you know, if you don’t understand. . . . Yes, Sissy, life is not gay. You are forty-two and I am only thirty-five, but I find it no gayer than you do. I see through everything too clearly. I should never be able, consciously, to join in anything that had to do with human wretchedness, to join in rushing after an unnecessary object. That is why I do nothing, except observe. I’m a dilettante, you see. My income is enough to live on; and I loathe myself for playing the capitalist with a bit of money like that, like the middle-classes; but I can’t help it, you know. I ought to have been rich, very rich. I should have planted a castle on a mountain-top, amid the whiteness of the Alps, and I would have done a great deal to mend human wretchedness; but I would not have had it around me. I hate it so: I turn sick at the smell of a beggar; and meantime my heart breaks and I feel a physical compassion for the poor devil. It’s the
