Page:Small Souls (1919).djvu/391

Rh about us; and our life if not happy, was at least quiet. Here there’s always something, always something! It’s no life at all, our life here!”

“And you, weren’t you longing to come back? Was I the only one who longed?” she cried, hurt by his unreasonableness.

But he did not hear her; and all his pent-up bitterness burst forth:

“I walk about the streets here every day, feeling as if every one were looking at me and pointing at me! When I go to the Witte or the Plaats, among all the men I used to know, I feel out of place, I feel like an interloper whom they don’t want to own. It’s your fault, it’s your fault!”

“Indeed!”

“Why were you absolutely bent on coming back to Holland?”

“And you?”

“I?”

“Yes, you, you! Didn’t you sometimes long for your parents, for Holland! Didn’t you yourself say that it would be good for our boy?”

“For our boy!” he shouted, refusing to listen, in his impotent, seething rage. “For our boy!”

And he laughed more bitterly, more scornfully than she had ever heard him before:

“For our boy! A lot I can do for him here! However hard he may work, whatever tact he may show, even though he enters the career which I had to abandon, he will always, always be reminded of the scandal of his parents! For our boy! Let him