which passed like flocks of snowy sheep through a blue meadow; the wind urged the sheep before it, like an impetuous drover. And, while she searched for those difficult words, her mind recalled the night before and the lightning yonder, above the sea, which she divined in the distance . . . It was strange, but now, in that morning light, with that placid sky at which she gazed, thinking of Van Vreeswijck and how to tell him in a single, merciful word with that summer blue full of fleecy white, at which she was gazing so fixedly after the ecstasy and winged bliss that had uplifted her the night before it was as if her calm, proud confidence in her knowledge of the future was wavering . . . She did not know why, for after all she thought that Henri would consent to their divorcing . . .
They would be divorced . . .
And Marianne would . . .
Suddenly, she began to write. She wrote more than she intended to write: she now wrote the truth straight away, in an impulse of honesty, and at the end of her letter she asked Van Vreeswijck to call on her that evening.
She had just finished, when Addie came in. He kissed her and waited until she had signed her letter.
"Why aren't you bicycling with Papa?" she asked.
