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228 children were in bed, their life together became strangely unreal, as though both were asking themselves why, why? And it grew worse daily. He was now living exactly as she wished; and it seemed to him as if he had no life of his own. The keeping up of his reading, in the evenings, became mechanical; and mechanically he went once, sometimes twice, a week to Driebergen, remaining there for half the day. They saw him looking strange, unsettled, old, with wrinkles in his forehead and a gloom of despair in his eyes.

"My dear old chap," Van der Welcke said, one day, "I can see that things are not going well with you. Do you remember how your father, not so very long ago, with the only bit of wisdom that ever fell to his share, advised you to seek your own life for yourself? . . . You're seeking it less and less . . . for yourself. Things are not well with you down there . . . at the Hague."

"Father, I have so little right to seek my own life for myself."

"And yet we all do it."

"There was a time, once, when you didn't. You then gave up your life for me."

"I did that quite naturally. I don't know what's happening inside you . . . but it looks to me as if you were forcing yourself. Here you're at home, here you feel a man: you love this house, you love the work you used to do here . . ."

"I don't belong to myself any more."

"You never did belong to yourself. As a child, you belonged to your silly parents . . . who got the better of you entirely; and now you belong to your wife. I expect it's your fate."

"If it has to be . . ."

"I should so much like to see you happy, Addie. Bless my soul, old chap, we should all like to see