m the other's eyes, she bragged and boasted of all her
belongings. The fact that she was a Van Lowe appeared in this, that she
included her husband and children and puffed them up also in her general
self-glorification. And in all her bragging one could easily detect a
shade of reproach against her family, her acquaintances, the Hague,
because nothing about her was properly valued: not she, nor her husband,
nor her house, nor her furniture, nor her ideas, nor the street she
lived in. And she explained at great length to the friend or sister her
way of thinking, of managing, of calculating, of bringing up children,
of furnishing, of giving dinners, of ordering a dress, as though all of
this was of such immense interest to the friend or sister that nothing
more immense could be imagined. If, thereupon, the friend or sister, for
the sake of conversation, in her turn described her own thoughts, or
arrangements, or methods of entertaining, Adolphine was unable to listen
to a word and showed plainly that the affairs of the sister or friend
did not interest her in the least and that, for instance, the quality of
the covering of her, Adolphine's, chairs, or the fresh air of the street
in which she, Adolphine, lived, or the velvet of the collar of the
great-coat of Van Saetzema, Adolphine's husband, was of much greater
importance. For she wanted the sister or friend to realize, above
anything else, that in her, Adolphine's, life everything was of the best
and finest kind: things animate and inanimate, things movable and
immovable alike. Adolphine's cook, the sister or friend was assured,
cooked better than any other cook, especially than Bertha's cook;
Adolphine's dog, a pug, was the sweetest pug of all the pugs in the
world. And, while she bragged like this, she was filled with a
deep-seated dread, asked herself, almost unconsciously:

"Can my cook really cook? And isn't my pug, if the truth were told, an
ill-tempered little brute?"

But these were deeply-hidden doubts; and, to her family and friends,
Adolphine boasted loudly of all and everything that belonged to her and
insisted upon an admiring appreciation of her children and furniture. It
was part of her nature to want to be high-placed--she was her father's
child--to be rich, to have everything fine and imposing and
distinguished about her; and it was as though fate had compelled her,
from a child, to have everything a little, a trifle less good than her
family and frien