"Yes."
"Here, in this bare room of yours?"
"Yes, here, in this bare room of mine."
"But, Dorine, that's not possible!"
"But, good gracious, Gerrit, don't I tell you that it is!"
She stamped her foot angrily and gave him a resentful glance. Behind her dark eyes he saw a whole world of secret bitterness, a fierce grudge which smouldered in the depths of her soul. And it suddenly struck him that she looked very old, though he knew that she was only just thirty-nine. Her hair, drawn into a knot at the back, was beginning to go grey, there were deep wrinkles in her forehead, now that she was out of temper; and the lines of her cheeks and chin and her sharp, bitter mouth gave her almost the look of an old woman. Her figure too appeared withered and shrunken. And he suddenly thought her so much to be pitied in her lonely life as an unmarried woman without interests, over whose head the years had passed bringing none of the sweetness of the changing seasons—for it seemed as if she had never known a spring, as if she would never know a summer, as if there would only be the dreary autumn which was now beginning to loom dimly before her, as if there had never been anything for her in life, as if there never would be anything for her, never anything but that weary passing of the monotonous,
