“Mamma ought just to hear them, or to see them lounging along the streets; then she wouldn’t ask me every Sunday if I have been out with Jaap and Piet and Chris!”
And, though they did not like Addie, they were flattered when he came and asked:
“Are you fellows coming for a ride this afternoon?”
They did not like him and they gave him all sorts of nicknames among themselves: Old Fogey, the Baron, the Italian. . . .
Then Marietje would ask, gently:
“Why do you always talk so unkindly of Addie?”
And then the three boys laughed and teased Marietje with being in love with “the Baron.”
But Marietje, who was sixteen, shrugged her shoulders, feeling grown-up already: in a year’s time, she was going to boarding-school, near Cleves. No, she, who was sixteen, was not in love with a little cousin of thirteen, with a child; but she thought him a nice boy all the same. The three brothers and their friends had never danced, or talked, or bicycled with her, or paid her any attention, whereas Addie behaved like a gallant young cavalier. In that noisy, fussy, bawling household, the girl had always been a little fragile, a little pale, a little quiet, like a small, gentle alien that could not cope with the hard voices of Mamma and the sisters and the rough horseplay of the brothers; and Addie talked so nicely, so pleasantly, so politely, so gal-
