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Rh then, in the glass, she saw herself like that, to all appearance the same woman, with just something livelier in her eyes, her gait, her movements. But inside her everything was changed.

At home sometimes the past would still rise up before her, but different, quite different. She seemed to withdraw from her former personality and it was as though, far removed from the woman that she had once been, she was now for the first time able to judge her past from another point of view than her own. She saw suddenly what her father must have suffered, Mamma, the brothers even, the sisters. She realized for the first time the sacrifice which those old, pious people, Henri's parents, had made. She thought in dismay of the injury which she had done her first husband, De Staffelaer. She thought of them all, in dismay at herself, in compassion for them. And she felt sorry even for her husband and for what he had always querulously resented, his shattered career, which had constituted his grudge, his obsession, the excuse for his inertia: for Van der Welcke and even for that grudge she felt compassion. How young he was when she met him, when they had acted their comedy, their comedy which had become deadly earnest! And she had at once fettered him to herself, in ever-increasing antagonism! Then her eyes would rest on him with a more understanding glance, sometimes almost with a certain pity, as she looked into his eyes, his young