ds. In reality, she was never satisfied, for all her
boasting. In reality, she reproached life with its horrible injustice.
As a child, she was a plain, unattractive girl, whereas Bertha was at
least passable and Constance was decidedly pretty. That Dorine was not
pretty either did not console her; she did not even notice it. Both
Bertha and Constance had been presented at Court, one as a young woman,
the other as a mere girl. After Constance' marriage, however, her father
and mother had conceived a sort of weariness of society; and, whenever
Mamma did suggest that it was perhaps time for Adolphine to be presented
too, Papa used to say:

"Oh, what good has it done the others?"

And, for one reason or another, Adolphine had never been presented. She
never forgave her parents, nor, for that matter, her sisters; but she
always said that she did not care in the least for all that fuss about
the Court. She was married early, at twenty; she accepted Van Saetzema
almost for fear lest life should show itself unjust once more if she
refused him. And Van Saetzema had proposed to her, even as hundreds of
men propose to hundreds of women, for one or other of those very small
reasons of small people which work like tiny wheels in small souls and
which others are not able to understand, so that they ask themselves in
amazement:

"Why on earth did So-and-so do this or that; why did this or that happen
to So-and-so; why did So-and-so marry So-and-so?..."

Van Saetzema had a fine-sounding name, was a doctor of laws, had a
little money: Adolphine had risked it. But, while Van Naghel, after
practising at the bar in India, was making his way through interest,
through his political tact, through the influence of Papa van Lowe, who
liked him, while Van Naghel was placed on all sorts of committees, each
of which raised him one rung higher in the official world of the Hague,
until he was elected a member of the Second Chamber and at last entered
the Cabinet as colonial secretary, Van Saetzema remained quietly jogging
on at the Ministry of Justice, with out ever obtaining any special
promotion, without ever receiving any special opportunity, without being
pushed on much by Papa van Lowe, just as though Papa, with a sort of
step-fatherly disdain, had thought this as little worth while as having
Adolphine presented at Court. Van Saetzema was now chief clerk, was a
respected public servant, performing his work accurately and well and
even valu