stretch their wings; and then the family-bonds get loosened. If children marry, then each child has his own family—for so long as it lasts—and his own interests; and the bonds that bound together the patriarchal family of the desert flap lightly in the wind. Now how can you expect criticism, the greatest and cheapest ‘fun’ that man can have at his fellow-man’s expense, not to be directed at relations, when the word ‘relation’ is really only a synonym for ‘stranger’? There is no such thing as the family in modern society. Each man is himself. But in natures such as yours and Mamma’s there remains something nice and atavistic that belongs to the patriarchal family of the desert: you would like to see the family exist, with family-love, love of parents for children and children for parents, of brothers and sisters and even nephews and nieces and uncles and aunts and cousins. Mamma, who has a simple nature, has instituted, for the satisfying of that feeling, a weekly evening at which we, who are related by blood but not by interest, meet out of deference for an old woman whom we do not want to grieve, whom we wish to leave in her illusion. You, my noble, gentle one, with your more complex character, feel a more powerful yearning for the old patriarchal life of the desert, especially after the sorrow and loneliness which you have known in your life. And you come to the Hague, with your pastoral ideas, to find yourself in the midst of polished cannibals, who rend one another daily into tiny pieces
