without the rhapsody of an artist or a poet: he talked almost laconically about his vases, as though any other view would have been quite impossible. . . . Constance had not seen him since that day, because he was the only one who did not come regularly to Mamma’s Sunday-evenings. And she retained an impression of that afternoon spent with her brother Ernst as of something exotic and strangely symbolical, something, it was true, which she had liked and found pleasant and refined, but which, all the same, lacked the familiar cordiality of a brother and sister meeting again after a separation of years.
As regards Adolphine and her children, Constance, after a first sense of recoil, had, almost unconsciously, laid down rules for her feelings, though perhaps she did not see those rules so very clearly outlined in her mind. But, unconsciously, she positively refused to dislike Adolphine and, on the contrary, was positively determined to think everything about Adolphine pleasant and attractive: her husband, her house, her children and her ideas. If any one, even Mamma, said the least thing about Adolphine, she at once espoused her cause, violently. Through circumstances, such as the arranging of her own house and Emilie’s wedding, she had not, as yet, been often to the Van Saetzemas’; but she promised herself not to neglect this in future and, with the greatest tact, to advise Adolphine in all sorts of matters. It operated strangely in Constance: the feeling of recoil, which, after all, was there; an absolute determination to act against this feeling of
