their friends, their rooms, their tables. It was especially where her children were concerned that Adolphine had that mania for having and doing everything in a very imposing fashion, a fashion at least as imposing as that in which Bertha had and did things for hers. As Adolphine, however, was the only one of the Van Lowes who was, by exception, thrifty, her thrift often waged a severe struggle with her yearning for what was imposing. And so, whereas everything relating to the Van Naghels’ household and the education of their children was conducted, as a matter of course, on the most expensive lines, which they both recognized as expensive, but which their tastes and their manner of life made it impossible to alter, everything at Adolphine’s was done cheaply. And so, whereas Louise and Emilie and Marianne had been to expensive boarding-schools near London and Paris—great country-houses, where the daughters of wealthy men received a fashionable education, with dancing-lessons in ball-dresses, drawing-, painting- and music-lessons given by well-known masters—Adolphine, though inwardly eaten up with jealousy, pronounced those boarding-schools simply absurd and quite beyond her means and discovered one near Cleves, to which she sent Floortje and Caroline: a very respectable establishment, but one where German shopkeepers’ daughters were taken in and where a very different tone prevailed from that of the aristocratic schools near Paris and London. This, however, did not prevent Adolphine from extolling her boarding
