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visit is due.”
    She looked at him coldly, politely, smilingly. There was a feeling of irritation in her. She felt a desire to ask him frankly why he had come.
    “How is that?” she asked, her mannerly smile converting her face into a veritable mask.
    “I feared I should not see you for a long time, and I should consider it a great privilege to be allowed to know you more intimately.”
    His tone was in the highest degree respectful. She raised her eyebrows, as if she did not understand, but the accent of his voice was so very courteous that she could not find a cold word with which to answer him.
    “Are those your two children?” he asked, with a glance towards Dolf and Christie.
    “Yes,” she replied. “Get up, boys, and shake hands with Meneer.”
    The children approached timidly, and put out their little hands. He smiled, looked at them penetratingly with his small, deep-set eyes, and drew them to him.
    “Am I mistaken, or is not the little one very like you?”
    “They both resemble their father,” she replied.
    It seemed to her she had set a shield of mistrust about herself, from which the children were excluded, within which she found it impossible to draw them. It troubled her that he held them, that he looked at them as he did.
    But he set them free, and they went back to their little stools, gentle, quiet, well-behaved.
    “Yet they both have something of you,” he insisted.
    “Possibly,” she said.
    “Mevrouw,” he resumed, as if he had something important to say to her, “I wish to ask you a direct question: tell me honestly, quite honestly, do you think me indiscreet?”
    “Because you pay me a visit? No, I assure you, Mr Quaerts. It is very polite of you. Only if I may be candid.”
    She gave a little laugh.
    “Of course,” he said.
    “Then I will confess to you that I fear you will find little in my house to amuse you, I see nobody …”
    “I have not called on you for the sake of the people I might meet at your house.”
    She bowed, smiling as if he had paid her a special compliment.
    “Of course I am very pleased to see you. You are a great friend of Dolf’s, are you not?”
    She tried continually to speak differently to him, more coldly, defiantly; but he was too courteous, and she could not do it.
    “Yes,” he replied, “Dolf and I have known each other a long time. We have always been great friends, though we are so entirely different.”
    “I like him very much; he is always very kind to us.”
    She saw him look smilingly at the little table. Some reviews were scattered about it, and a book or two; among these a little volume of Emerson’s essays.
    “You told me you did not read much,” he said, mischievously.
    “I should think …”
    And he pointed to the books.
    “Oh,” said she, carelessly, with a slight shrug of her shoulders, “a little …”
    She thought him tiresome; why should he remark that she had hidden herself from him? Why, indeed,
had
she hidden herself from him?
    “Emerson,” he read, bending forward a little. “Forgive me,” he added quickly. “I have no right to spy upon your pursuits. But the print is so large; I read it from here.”
    “You are far-sighted?” she asked, laughing.
    “Yes.”
    His politeness, a certain respectfulness, as if he would not venture to touch the tips of her fingers, placed her more at her ease. She still felt antipathy towards him, but there was no harm in his knowing what she read.
    “Are you fond of reading?” asked Cecile.
    “I do not read much: it’s too great a pleasure to me for that; nor do I read all that appears, I am too eclectic.”
    “Do you know Emerson?”
    “No …”
    “I like his essays very much. They look so far into the future. They place one upon a delightfully exalted level.”
    She suited her phrase with an expansive gesture, and her eyes lighted up.
    Then she observed that he was following her attentively, with his respectfulness. And she recovered herself; she no longer wished to