gh examinations? No, influence is what he wants:
that's more important than any number of examinations. And you want him
to enter the service under those conditions, while his father and mother
sit cursing their luck here, in the Kerkhoflaan? Well then, let him
become a farmer: the future is with the proletariat in any case. Very
well, it's the fault of both of us, the silly, stupid fault of both of
us. But, if it's my fault, it's your fault too. Have you ever done
anything to get on? I, at least in my own mind, reckoned on the Van
Naghels; I thought to myself: My brother-in-law has no end of
connections, we shall go to his house; I don't care about it for my own
sake, but it will be a good thing, later, for the boy...."

"Oh? And have you no connections? Have your parents no relations? All
your old friends at the Plaats: which of them comes to see us? Which of
them, except Vreeswijck, has had the ordinary civility to call on your
wife? Not one of them, not one!" she almost screamed. "Not that I want
them here, any more than you want to dine at Van Naghel's; but, if you
attach so much importance to connections, for the sake of our son, you
could have done something else than cycle all over the Hague and
Scheveningen, you could have pointed out to your friends that, as they
condescend to know you in the sacred mysteries of that Plaats of yours,
the least they could do would be to look you up at home and not to go on
ignoring your wife, as though she were still your mistress...!"

"It'll always, always be like that!" he cried, raging impotently, almost
to the point of tears. "We can never alter it, if we live to be sixty,
if we live to be eighty!"

"Very well," she said, as though with a sudden intuition to join issue
with her husband's unreasonableness. "You wish it for your son's sake!
I'll do it! I shall speak to Bertha and I shall be the first to speak. I
shall tell her what I want of her, as a sister. But I shall also expect
you to have your son's interests at heart among your own acquaintances;
and I shall expect to be presented in the winter. I never thought of it
myself; but people have done nothing but talk about it from the moment
that we came here; and now I mean to do it. What is the objection? That
we shall rub shoulders with De Staffelaer's family! I don't care whom I
rub shoulders with. My intention was simply to live here, amid the
affection of my family; but, if that is to be denied me, if such
wretched