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Rh want your boy to pursue his career later on? Ha, ha, he’ll go far, like that! Do you imagine that he’ll succeed simply through examinations? No, influence is what he wants: that’s more important than any number of examinations. And you want him to enter the service under those conditions, while his father and mother sit cursing their luck here, in the Kerkhoflaan? Well then, let him become a farmer: the future is with the proletariat in any case. Very well, it’s the fault of both of us, the silly, stupid fault of both of us. But, if it’s my fault, it’s your fault too. Have you ever done anything to get on? I, at least in my own mind, reckoned on the Van Naghels; I thought to myself: My brother-in-law has no end of connections, we shall go to his house; I don’t care about it for my own sake, but it will be a good thing, later, for the boy. . . .”

“Oh? And have you no connections? Have your parents no relations? All your old friends at the Plaats: which of them comes to see us? Which of them, except Vreeswijck, has had the ordinary civility to call on your wife? Not one of them, not one!” she almost screamed. “Not that I want them here, any more than you want to dine at Van Naghel’s; but, if you attach so much importance to connections, for the sake of our son, you could have done something else than cycle all over the Hague and Scheveningen, you could have pointed out to your friends that, as they condescend to know you in the sacred mysteries of that Plaats of yours, the