mplex, when I escort
my Queen; I feel that there exists for me a land where I was born, out
of which I have grown...."

"Adelientje!" Paul beckoned. "Do come here, Adelientje! Your husband is
so poetic, you must really listen to him."

The fair-haired little mother came up.

"I feel that, if any one says anything about Holland, about my native
land, criticizes it, speaks a disrespectful word of my sovereign, I feel
something here, here, in my breast...."

"Adelientje, do listen! Your husband is not an orator, but still he
feels that he feels something; in short, he feels! Loud cheers for the
captain of hussars with the soft note in his voice and the mystic
feelings!"

"Gerrit, they're teasing you!" said Adeline.

Gerrit shrugged his shoulders, a little angrily, a little uncomfortably,
and stretched his long legs across the carpet.

"Gerrit," said Constance, "I'm glad you said what you did."

"It's all nonsense," growled Gerrit. "There is a tendency, not only in
Paul,--he's a humbug--but in all sorts of people in our set, Constance,
of which you were speaking so scornfully just now, to run Holland down,
to think nothing Dutch good, to think our language ugly, to think
everything French, English or German better than Dutch. Those are your
smart Dutch people, Constance, your Hague people, whom you meet in
Bertha's drawing-room, Constance. If they go abroad for a couple of
months, they've forgotten their mother-tongue when they come back; but
let them be three years without going to Paris, London or Berlin,
they'll never, never, never forget their French, their English or their
German! Oh, they know their foreign languages so well!"

"Gerrit," said Paul, "what you say is true; but just try and say it in
fine Dutch, Gerrit!"

"And, Sis," continued Gerrit, stammering a little, but full of mettle,
"that is why I think it so nice that you, a woman like you, who have
lived for years in Rome, in just that smart, cosmopolitan world where
patriotism tends to disappear, that you, who have been away from your
country for twenty years, that just you have felt awaken in
yourself...."

"Bravo!" cried Paul. "His words are coming!"

"A feeling for your country, for your motherland, that made you long to
see Holland again. I would never have suspected it in you; and that,
Sissy, is why I should almost like to kiss you ... but we're at a
party...."

"And a party of Adolphine's into the bargain. And Adelientje is
jealous."