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12 had succeeded in hushing up a Hague scandal, just like a grown-up man. . . When you came to think of it, it was simply absurd, incredible; you would never have believed it if you read it in a book; and it was the positive truth: the schoolboy had prevented the cabinet-minister or his son from lighting a duel with the schoolboy's father! . . . And now Van der Welcke had to choke with laughter at the thought of it; and, as he spurted along the roads, like a professional, with his back bent into an arch, he roared with laughter all by himself and thought:

"Lord, what an extraordinary beggar he is!"

But the boy's mother, after scene upon scene with him, the father; his mother, furious that her husband should have dared to raise his hand against that revered brother-in-law, "his excellency;" his mother, driven out of her senses, with every nerve on edge after all that she had had to endure that Sunday: his mother the boy had not been able to restrain; a woman is always more diflicult to manage than a man; a mother is not half so easy as a father! Constance, after one of those scenes which followed one upon the other as long as the atmosphere remained charged with electricity, had said:

"I'm sick of it all; I'm going away; I'm going abroad!"

And even the fact that she was leaving her son behind her did not bring her to reason. She packed her trunks, told Truitje to keep house for the master