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386 least they could do would be to look you up at home and not to go on ignoring your wife, as though she were still your mistress. . .!”

“It’ll always, always be like that!” he cried, raging impotently, almost to the point of tears. “We can never alter it, if we live to be sixty, if we live to be eighty!”

“Very well,” she said, as though with a sudden intuition to join issue with her husband’s unreasonableness. “You wish it for your son’s sake! I’ll do it! I shall speak to Bertha and I shall be the first to speak. I shall tell her what I want of her, as a sister. But I shall also expect you to have your son’s interests at heart among your own acquaintances; and I shall expect to be presented in the winter. I never thought of it myself; but people have done nothing but talk about it from the moment that we came here; and now I mean to do it. What is the objection? That we shall rub shoulders with De Staffelaer’s family! I don’t care whom I rub shoulders with. My intention was simply to live here, amid the affection of my family; but, if that is to be denied me, if such wretched libels as this are to be published, if you reproach me with not thinking of my son’s future, then I shall alter my line of conduct and talk to Bertha. You, on your side, talk to your friends at the Plaats and, if you have any pride about you, refuse to have anything more to do with them unless they accept your wife and yourself as belonging to their set. I will stand it no longer! I wished for nothing more than