walk about the streets here every day, feeling as if every one were
looking at me and pointing at me! When I go to the Witte or the Plaats,
among all the men I used to know, I feel out of place, I feel like an
interloper whom they don't want to own. It's your fault, it's your
fault!"

"Indeed!"

"Why were you absolutely bent on coming back to Holland?"

"And you?"

"I?"

"Yes, you, you! Didn't you sometimes long for your parents, for Holland!
Didn't you yourself say that it would be good for our boy?"

"For our boy!" he shouted, refusing to listen, in his impotent, seething
rage. "For our boy!"

And he laughed more bitterly, more scornfully than she had ever heard
him before:

"For our boy! A lot I can do for him here! However hard he may work,
whatever tact he may show, even though he enters the career which I had
to abandon, he will always, always be reminded of the scandal of his
parents! For our boy! Let him become a farmer, if he must be a Dutchman
in Holland, hidden somewhere from all our family, our friends and our
acquaintances! And it's all, all your fault!"

"You are unreasonable!" she cried, wincing under his insults. "If we
have anything to reproach ourselves with, then it falls upon both of us;
and you have not the right to let me, me, a woman, bear the burden of
our misery alone!"

"That misery would at least not have been discussed, mocked at,
criticized, ridiculed, traduced," he shouted, raging and stamping, "if
you had not insisted on coming back to Holland!"

"Was I the only one to wish it?"

"Very well," he admitted, losing all his self-control, "I did too. But
we were both fools, to return to this rotten country and these rotten
people!"

"I don't need them. I only longed for my family."

"For your family! The Saetzemas, with whom we have quarrelled already,
to whom we never speak except at Mamma's; the Van Naghels, who are no
use to us: is that how you want to live, for your boy, in Holland, here,
buried away in your Kerkhoflaan, in your house, in your rooms, with no
one but Vreeswijck, who sometimes does us the honour to come and dine
with us? Whom do we know? Who comes to see us? Who cares a jot about
us?"

"I only wanted the affection of my family!"

"And for the sake of that affection, do you want to go on living here
like this, buried away, when you want your boy to pursue his career
later on? Ha, ha, he'll go far, like that! Do you imagine that he'll
succeed simply throu