Page:Dr Adriaan (1918).djvu/195

Rh her fingers at him covetously and as though she did indeed grip him in her hot embrace. . . only to lose him again at once! . ..

Her days passed in constant monotony. She was a healthy, superficial, rather vain, very young woman, with a few vulgar aspirations; and she suffered in her surroundings because she had an undoubted need for healthy and superficial affection. She would have been happy leading a simple, very carnal, very material married life, with plenty of money, plenty of enjoyment, with children around her; and then she would have laughed with pride and been good, as far as she was able. As it was, she felt that, except physically, she was hardly the wife of her husband and, despite her children, hardly accepted by his family and hardly suffered in their house. And she peevishly blamed them all, thinking that they were not kind to her, and she failed to perceive that what separated her from them all was a lack of spiritual concord, of harmony, of sympathy, because she had nothing that appealed to them and they had nothing that appealed to her, because the emanations from her soul and theirs never reached each other but flowed in two directions, because everything that they understood in one another, even without words, she did not understand, even though it were explained to her in words, because she looked upon them as sick, mad, egoistical and nerve-ridden, because they looked upon her as shallow and vulgar. It was an antipathy of blood and of soul: nobody was to blame; and even that she did not understand. The only one to blame, perhaps, was Addie, because, when taking her for his wife, he had not listened to the soul within his soul and had allowed himself to be led only by instinct and by his material philosophy of regeneration: