fault of my stomach or my nerves: they simply turn. It’s very unfortunate when you’re built that way. . . . How do you like my new overcoat, with the velvet turn-back cuffs? They’re rather neat, aren’t they? Pity they’re getting wet. But it’s good velvet, it doesn’t spoil. . . . And yet, yesterday, I was really alarmed when I saw my back in two looking-glasses. I had no idea that I had such a rotten back, a back full of human wretchedness, in spite of my fine overcoat. The line went like that, with a sort of hump. It was terrible; it upset me for all the rest of the day. Then, in the evening, I sat down at my piano and played Isolde’s Liebestod; and then it all passed. . . . You can’t make your little brother out, eh? A mad chap, you think, what? Yes, I am—almost—the maddest of the bunch. Bertha is very well-balanced; only, her eyes are always blinking. . . . Karel: what he might have become, I don’t know; but now he is a round nought, kept in equilibrium by the roundness of Cateau with her owl’s eyes. . . . Then you have Gerrit: he looks well-balanced, but isn’t; puts on a jovial and genial air; and is a melancholy dreamer all the time. You don’t believe it? You’ll see it for yourself, when you know him better. . . . Next come you: well, you yourself tell me you’ve had a strange life with your two husbands. . . . After that, they all go down-hill: Ernst behaves very oddly; Dorine too is sometimes queer, with that everlasting trotting about; and I look at all their queerness and have a tile loose myself. . . . So you think we are a very
