derstand, but she would not let this appear, because Caroline would have thought her such a baby. If Auntie had never married an Italian, how could she have a son who was an Italian?
The nickname came to the ears of Herman Ruyvenaer, the youngest son of Uncle and Aunt, a lean little brown sinjo of fifteen, who mentioned the nickname at home to his sisters Toetie, Dot and Pop.
“Allah, it’s too bad!” said the girls. “It’s a shame of those boys, Mamma; just listen. . . .”
“Oh, no, I don’t believe it,” said Aunt Ruyvenaer, when she heard. “Gossip, I say; kassian, Constance!”
But Uncle Ruyvenaer told her that it was so.
“But how do you know?”
“Adolphine told me herself.”
“Oh, nonsense, she wasn’t there! . . . Kassian, that boy and his mother!”
And Aunt Lot and the girls refused to believe, were indignant; and Auntie called her husband an old gossip. But the nickname was often on the lips of the young boy- and girl-cousins and of their friends at home and at school. Once, Addie thought he heard a boy shout to him, by way of an abusive epithet:
“Italian!”
He did not understand, did not even apply the word to himself and walked on.
Another time, however, bicycling with the Van Saetzema boys, along the Wassenaar Road, he grew
