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enjoyed showing Cateau Floortje’s trousseau, with its stacks of linen. Adolphine attached more importance to her own house, her own children, her own furniture, her own affairs, matters and things than to anything else in the world. She was never tired of displaying, for the extorted admiration of the sister or friend who came to visit her, the thickness of her carpets, the heaviness of her curtains, the taste with which she had arranged the ornaments in her drawing-room; and she praised all that belonged to her, cried it up as though for a sale, inviting the appreciation of her sister or friend. In her heart of hearts, she was always afraid of being eclipsed and, in order to conceal her fear from the other’s eyes, she bragged and boasted of all her belongings. The fact that she was a Van Lowe appeared in this, that she included her husband and children and puffed them up also in her general self-glorification. And in all her bragging one could easily detect a shade of reproach against her family, her acquaintances, the Hague, because nothing about her was properly valued: not she, nor her husband, nor her house, nor her furniture, nor her ideas, nor the street she lived in. And she explained at great length to the friend or sister her way of thinking, of managing, of calculating, of bringing up children, of furnishing, of giving dinners, of ordering a dress, as