History of a Pleasure Seeker Read Online Free PDF Page A

this detail was lost on Piet, who had a fine and instinctive appreciation of beauty. He showed this by judicious questioning that began to ease his employer’s mistrust of good-looking young men.
    The arrival of Constance Vermeulen-Sickerts was preceded by a clattering of high heels and a potent aroma of lilies of the valley. She was twenty-one years old, short and blond and confident, and her glance took in the cut of Piet’s suit and the elegance of his shoes—his only pair, bought like everything else he owned from a cash-strapped undergraduate of means. She was a kindhearted person, though apt, like Louisa, to make snap judgments; and she felt rather sorry for Piet that her sister should have chosen the evening’s menu with the aim of testing the new tutor’s table manners. “Do sit down, Mr. Barol. We are not ceremonial in this house.” She took a chair next to the fire as her mother and sister entered the room.
    Louisa Vermeulen-Sickerts was dark and grave and looked older than her nineteen years. She was wrapped in a twist of pale gray muslin that made her mother’s green velvet look fussy and uncomfortable. “Good evening,” she said, with neutral friendliness.
    Jacobina rang a bell, and Didier Loubat appeared, carrying a silver stand of oysters on crushed ice. They all sat down. Piet took in the handwritten menu in front of him, the four crystal vases of orange roses that decorated the table, the two silver dishes piled high with blood oranges on the sideboard, and felt wonderfully proud of himself. If Louisa had expected him to be confounded by the oysters or the langoustines or the quail
à la minute
, she was disappointed—because Nina Barol had foreseen just this eventuality and twice a year had served Piet the delicacies of her youth so that he might dine in sophisticated company one day, without shame.
    They were waited on by Agneta Hemels and Hilde Wilken, who handed the dishes while Didier Loubat poured the wine and Mr. Blok carved the beef that followed the quail. Piet fielded the girls’ questions about his life in Leiden truthfully but without revealing that indoor plumbing was a novelty for him. When he ate the pickled asparagus with his fingers, as he knew from his mother was proper, he detected a silent exchange between them and felt that he had passed a further test. He noticed that both girls were offered the Château Margaux and that they spoke to their parents without formality. Constance was the voluble one, but Louisa appeared to appreciate her talkativeness and not resent it. She laughed with everyone else at her sister’s wicked account of a young man’s tumble on the van Sproncks’ ballroom floor the night before and only joined the talk when it turned to the guests’ clothes.
    “Louisa is in revolt against impractical female fashions,” said Constance, “and abhors killing animals to embellish them. She intends to open a shop.”
    “She’ll have crowned heads for clients one day, mark me.” Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts spoke in the genial tone of a man who applauds his child’s spirited imaginings, without remotely believing in them. He loved having two rich daughters. Watching Constance and Louisa converse with Piet across the table, he felt enormously blessed. That two such soft young women, whose sole labor was to dance and dine with their friends; to wear pretty clothes and flirt and enjoy themselves; who spent money with such innocent disregard for its value and were capable of being moved to tears by something as insignificant as a rabbit skinned for its pelt; that they should be his; that they should live in this house that was his, with its distinctions and taste, its furniture and china and carpets and clocks and exquisitely trained staff, the best-paid servants on the Herengracht—all this was a source of deep satisfaction to him.
    Such achievements might have led to the sin of pride, had it not been for Egbert. But as he looked at the young man who was now his