“Adelientje!” Paul beckoned. “Do come here, Adelientje! Your husband is so poetic, you must really listen to him.”
The fair-haired little mother came up.
“I feel that, if any one says anything about Holland, about my native land, criticizes it, speaks a disrespectful word of my sovereign, I feel something here, here, in my breast. . . .”
“Adelientje, do listen! Your husband is not an orator, but still he feels that he feels something; in short, he feels! Loud cheers for the captain of hussars with the soft note in his voice and the mystic feelings!”
“Gerrit, they’re teasing you!” said Adeline.
Gerrit shrugged his shoulders, a little angrily, a little uncomfortably, and stretched his long legs across the carpet.
“Gerrit,” said Constance, “I’m glad you said what you did.”
“It’s all nonsense,” growled Gerrit. “There is a tendency, not only in Paul,—he’s a humbug—but in all sorts of people in our set, Constance, of which you were speaking so scornfully just now, to run Holland down, to think nothing Dutch good, to think our language ugly, to think everything French, English or German better than Dutch. Those are your smart Dutch people, Constance, your Hague people, whom you meet in Bertha’s drawing-room, Constance. If they go abroad for a couple of months, they’ve forgotten their mother-tongue when they come back; but let them be three years without going
