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178 the reliable driver, who always brought them safe home. The Sunday evenings were no longer the same, thought Gerrit, without those two characteristic, traditional figures, about whom they all cracked a lot of jokes, but who nevertheless had so long retained something of life's immutability and pathetic monotony. . . until suddenly the change came and the two figures disappeared. . . . They would go on living for years, perhaps, wrangling and quarrelling, clinging desperately to the world with their bony hands: for years, as though death couldn't get at them; but they would never sit there again, one by each of the conservatory-doors. . ..

But a great void had been caused by the dispersal of Bertha's little band. For Bertha never came to the Hague now; and all who had been to see her at Baarn were agreed that she was becoming very strange and sat in a very strange way at her window, almost without moving, as if, after her busy, stirring life, she, the society-woman, had suddenly, upon her husband's death, felt that there was no need to do anything more and had let that atmosphere of listlessness and apathy submerge her and become the element in which she vegetated. She hardly ever spoke, took no interest in anything, just sat and looked out of the window, never going outside the house; and, though she had the full use of her senses, she had lapsed into a sort of staring torpor, submitting to the passing of the years, the unnecessary,