the tact to give a successful dinner, she was doomed to lack the tact to achieve the distinction for which she craved. Her very husband thwarted her: a simple man, a little boorish in his ways, who trudged daily to his office and back, conscientious about his work like a schoolboy finishing his exercises and devoid of any particular ability or political adroitness. He approved of what Adolphine did, but could not understand that craving, that vital need of hers for distinction. It was true that he had caught from his wife that exuberant satisfaction with his wife, his house, his children, his furniture and his friends. He too knew how to boast of his coat, his office, even his minister, his secretary-general. But Adolphine might have stood behind him with a whip and would still have urged him to the summits of earthly and Haguish greatness. He was ponderous, fog-brained, a man who worked by rote, who went his way like a draught-ox, year in, year out, with the same heavy tread of a Dutch steer under heavy Dutch skies: he bore within him the natural instinct to be an inferior, an underling, to remain in the background and there to go on working in an accurate, small-souled, worthy fashion, in the little groove in which he had first started.
They had three boys and three girls and they were not bad parents. They, both of them, loved their children and thought of their children’s welfare. But they knew as little of a system of education as of a system of dinner-giving; and such education as existed in their house was as ramshackle as
