Page:Dr Adriaan (1918).djvu/95

coming quite like a stranger; and her heart was thumping; and she was almost sorry now that she had taken this step. There were plenty of other doctors besides Addie, who was still such an inexperienced boy, and yet . . . and yet . . . In her unstrung condition, the tears came to her eyes and she felt overcome with her sorrow, with all the bitterness of the last few melancholy years. It was all very sad at home: Van Saetzema, retired on a pension and now ailing . . . with cancer in the stomach; the boys—Jaap in the Indian Civil, Chris in the army, Piet a midshipman—never writing home, now that they no longer needed the paternal house; Caroline soured by not marrying; and the youngest, Marietje, so weak lately, so queer, that Adolphine did not know what to do with her! Added to all this, because, notwithstanding her economy, they had lived on too lavish a scale in her striving after Hague grandeur, they had run into debt and were now living in a small house, really vegetating, without seeing a spark of grandeur gleaming before their eyes. It was all over, there was nothing left for them: it was all loneliness and dying off . . . relations and friends; there was no family circle left at the Hague and it seemed as though such family-circle as had survived was now united—how strange!—in Van der Welcke and Constance' house at Driebergen. . . . Adolphine had long cherished a wonderful jealousy at this, as though, after Van Naghel's death and Bertha's, it ought to be her house which the family, however greatly dispersed, would look upon as the family-house. . . . It was not that she was hospitable by nature, but her vanity was injured; and to satisfy this she would not have objected even to taking Mamma to live with her, however doting and tiresome Mamma might have become. But there had never been any