Page:Later Life (1919).djvu/202

194 had flashed, after that brightness the room remained small, those people remained small, she herself remained small. ..

She herself had never lived: oh, she had so often suspected it! But those other people: had they also never, never lived? Mamma, in the narrow circle of her children's and grandchildren's affection; Uncle and Aunt, in their interests as sugar-planters; Karel and Cateau, in their narrow, respectable, complacent comfort; Adolphine, in her miserable struggle for social importance; and the others, Gerrit, Dorine, Ernst, Paul: had they ever, ever lived? Her husband: had he ever lived? Or was it all just a mere existence, as she herself had existed; a vegetation rooted in little thoughts and habits, in little opinions and prejudices, in little religions or philosophies; and feeling pleasant and comfortable therein and looking down upon and condemning others and considering one's self fairly good and fairly high-minded, not so bad as others and at least far more sensible in one's opinions and beliefs than most of one's neighbours? . . . Oh, people like themselves; people in their "set," in other sets, with their several variations of birth, religion, position, money; decent people, whom Brauws sometimes called "the bourgeois:" had they ever lived, ever looked out beyond the very narrow circle which their dogmas drew around them? What a small and insignificant merry-go-round it was! And what was the