at those faces. Not one is naturally cheerful. Nature, nature, Connie: there’s no such thing as nature among people like ourselves! We have not a gesture, not a word, not even a thought that is natural. It’s all pose and humbug with every one of us; and nobody is taken in by it. Really, it’s a disgusting business, a society like ours, what one calls good society. Can’t you understand an anarchist loving to fling a bomb into the midst of us: for instance, at Uncle Ruyvenaer’s stomach? No anarchist likes a stomach: the stomach is the trademark of the bourgeois. . . . Now they’re going to dance: look how hideously they’re spinning round the room. Just like palsied sparrows. We human beings are much too solemn and heavy to dance with any grace. Look, it’s almost ghastly. Through all that pretence at elegance and smartness and dancing and gaiety, you can see that one has a stomach-ache and another a head-ache, that Van Naghel is thinking of how they went for him in the Chamber yesterday and Adolphine wondering how she shall make her wedding-parties seem only half as grand as Bertha’s. . . .”
She let him talk and he never ended: he could go on prattling for ever. His mother, sisters and nieces often told him to stop, moved away and left him in the midst of his outpourings; but Constance liked him, saw, indeed, a good deal of truth in what he said, in spite of all his humbug. He saw through the people around him with an insight which surprised her and which she was startled to find was
