sound of
those words of Paul's, half banter, half earnest. "We are strangers to
one another. That feeling which I felt to be deep and true within
myself, when I was abroad, and which drove me back to my family and my
country is what you call atavistic and has no reason for existence,
since we no longer live in Mosaic times. So we are strangers to one
another, we who, for Mamma's sake, continue to greet one another as
relations once a week, at her Sundays, because otherwise we should give
her pain; and my longing for you all, whom I had not seen for twenty
years, my yearning for you, which brought me back to my own country, was
no more than an illusion, a phantom?..."

"Well, Connie, perhaps I was cruel; but, really, you are so pastoral!
Country, native country! My dear child, what beautiful phrases: how well
you remember your Dutch! I have forgotten the very words."

"Sis, dear," Gerrit interrupted, "don't listen to the fellow: he's
talking nonsense. He denies everything because he loves to hear himself
speak and because he is a humbug: to-morrow he will be defending the
country and the family just as he is demolishing then to-night, No, Sis,
believe me, there are such things as family and one's native country."

"Listen to the captain, the defender of his country, with the nice sound
in his voice!"

"There is such a thing as family. Not only with me, because my children
are still young, as Paul has been trying to explain, but everywhere,
everywhere. I feel that you are my sister, even though I didn't see you
for twenty years. I did not recognize you at once, perhaps; perhaps I
have not quite got you back yet: when I think of Constance, I always
think of my little sister who used to play in the river at
Buitenzorg...."

"Oh, Gerrit, don't begin about my bare feet again!" said Constance,
raising her finger.

"But I feel that you are not a stranger, that there is a bond between
us, a relationship, something almost mystical...."

"Oh, I say, what a poetic captain of hussars!" cried Paul. "Once he lets
himself go...!"

"And country, one's native country," Gerrit continued, impetuously,
"there is such a thing as one's country: I feel it in me, Paul, you
sceptic and philosopher, old before your time; I feel it in me, not as
something poetical and mystical, my boy, like the family-feeling, but as
something quite simple, when I ride at the head of my squadron; I feel
it as something big and primitive and not at all co