Constance, when she was alone, burst into a fit of nervous sobbing. . . . Oh, that past, that wretched past, which always clung to her, which there was no shaking off! She thought life unjust and the family and everybody. She was not a wicked woman: there was only one mistake to be charged against her, the mistake of her heedless youth; and were the consequences to last for ever?. . . After all, what she now wished was so little, so very little, that she could not understand why it remained so unattainable. She merely asked to live quietly at the Hague, in her own country, and to be loved a little by all her relations, for whom she felt that strange, powerful feeling, that family-affection. That was all; she asked for nothing more. She demanded nothing more of life than to be allowed to grow old like that, with a little forgiveness and forbearance around her, and then to see her boy grow up into a man, while she, for the boy’s sake, would endure her life, as best she could, by the side of her husband. That was all, that was all. That was the only thing that she, with her small soul, asked of life; and she asked nothing more; and it was as though all sorts of secret enmities around her grudged it to her. Whereas she wished for nothing but peace and quietness, enmity seemed to eddy
