Page:Small Souls (1919).djvu/189

Rh I never worked like that. He gets it from his grandfather; that seriousness also. He makes straight for his object. I was always more superficial, younger too. The poor kid doesn’t know what it means to be young. He will never be young, never go off his head. Perhaps, though—who knows?—later, at Leiden, perhaps he will be really lively, really go off his head. I wish it him with all my heart, my boy, my little chap. . . . I wonder what he thinks of his parents? He knows that his mother married before she married his father; but what does he know besides? What does he think? Does he judge us yet, that boy of mine? Will he condemn us later on? Oh, my boy, my boy, never throw up your life for a woman! . . . But it was a matter of honour, my father wished it. . . . Oh, Addie, may it never happen to you! But it sha’n’t happen to you, my boy. There is something about him which makes me see that that sort of thing can never happen to him. He will go far: wait and see if he doesn’t! . . . What does he get from me and what from Constance? Difficult, this question of heredity. I always think of it when I look at him like this. He takes after me, physically. That seriousness is his grandfather’s. Now what does he get from the Van Lowes? Perhaps that tinge of melancholy he sometimes has. But he’s a Van der Welcke, he’s a regular Van der Welcke. . . . He’s singularly well-balanced, that boy: what is harsh and rugged in Papa is ever so much softened in him. Perhaps that’s from the Van Lowes. . . . It’s