and eat one another up with their family-criticism. That your gentle nature should be shocked at the spectacle was only to be expected.”
“So we are all strangers to one another,” said Constance; and a chilly feeling passed over her, a melancholy rose within her at the sound of those words of Paul’s, half banter, half earnest. “We are strangers to one another. That feeling which I felt to be deep and true within myself, when I was abroad, and which drove me back to my family and my country is what you call atavistic and has no reason for existence, since we no longer live in Mosaic times. So we are strangers to one another, we who, for Mamma’s sake, continue to greet one another as relations once a week, at her Sundays, because otherwise we should give her pain; and my longing for you all, whom I had not seen for twenty years, my yearning for you, which brought me back to my own country, was no more than an illusion, a phantom? . . .”
“Well, Connie, perhaps I was cruel; but, really, you are so pastoral! Country, native country! My dear child, what beautiful phrases: how well you remember your Dutch! I have forgotten the very words.”
“Sis, dear,” Gerrit interrupted, “don’t listen to the fellow: he’s talking nonsense. He denies everything because he loves to hear himself speak and because he is a humbug: to-morrow he will be defending the country and the family just as he is demolishing them to-night. No, Sis, believe me,
