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even though he was almost prematurely old? Was he, in the very smallest degree, a Van Lowe, with all their nerves, the morbidity, their semilunacy, so sickly in constitution one and all, that she could not stand any one of them? Bah, they turned her stomach: Adeletje, always ailing; Marietje, really very ill; Alex, so weak; Emilie, so crushed and melancholy: a Van Naghel, she, but still with Van Lowe blood in her: and Guy was a nice-looking boy, but so dull and sleepy; and Gerdy was a nice-looking girl, but full of eccentric ways, of course because she was a Van Lowe! Bah, they turned her stomach, that always ailing, half-mad family of her mother-in-law's, who had ensconced themselves in their house; and it was lucky that in Addie she found simply a Van der Welcke, Baron van der Welcke, a healthy fellow belonging to a healthy, normal family. That was how she looked at it: normal. That was how she looked at it while she let her husband swing her along the endless, endless streaks of ice; the snow-fields flew past; the horizons of leafless trees approached, changed their aspect, disappeared; the spreading sails of the windmills loomed up, disappeared, loomed up, with the silent tragedy of their despairing gestures outlined against the sky. That was how she looked at it: normal. True, Addie employed hypnotism from time to time, but that was the fashion nowadays: he could not lag behind when medicine was making progress in all directions. . . . And, utterly blind to the really duplicate soul that was her husband's, she saw him merely single, simple and normal, because she remembered now, in the joy of their sport on the ice, the vigorous embrace of his arms, the hunger and thirst of his unsated kisses. . . . Normal, quite normal; and oh, she felt herself so strong now to win him, to bind him to herself, because she herself