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204 conventionally civil to each other. With Gerrit it was pleasanter. Gerrit and Adeline would come now and then to take tea in the evening, after the children had gone to bed. Only it was a pity that Gerrit always insisted on crabbing and poking fun at the Van Naghels and their friends. This, Constance thought, was not very tactful towards Van der Welcke, because, though he and she did not go into society, it so happened that Van der Welcke had a good many old friends, at the club, who belonged to the aristocratic set. Gerrit was a boisterous, lively fellow, fair-haired, handsome, broad-shouldered and vigorous in his hussar’s uniform; but his boisterousness was sometimes, she thought, rather overdone; and she suspected that Van der Welcke did not like Gerrit, thought him a little vulgar. And so she was always on the alert to take up the cudgels for Gerrit against her husband; and Van der Welcke said nothing about Gerrit and was even amiable and talkative when Gerrit and Adeline were there. Adeline was a dear little woman, a fair-haired, little doll-mother, with her seven children, like a family of flaxen-haired dolls: the oldest a girl turned eight, the youngest a baby of a year or so; and Gerrit was always making jokes about not leaving off yet; and indeed Adeline was expecting another in the autumn. So Constance got on well with Gerrit and Adeline, but still she felt out of touch with this brother too, even though Gerrit had such a charming way of bringing back the memory of their early days, when they used to play in the river at