“Hinduism,” said my Uncle Spencer, as we threaded our way between the booths and the whirling machines, “has sadly degenerated from its original Brahmanistic purity.” And he began to expound to me, raising his voice to make itself heard through the noise of the steam organs, the principles of Brahmanism. My Uncle Spencer had a great weakness for oriental religions. “Well,” asked Mlle Leeauw, when we got back for dinner, “and how did you enjoy the dancers?” I told her that my Uncle Spencer had thought that I should find the circus more amusing. Antonieke nodded with a significant air of understanding. “Poor man,” she said, and she went on to wonder how Louiseke, who was going to see the dancers that evening, would enjoy the show. I never knew precisely what happened; for a mystery and, as it were, a zone of silence surrounded the event, and my curiosity about everything to do with Louiseke was too feeble to carry me through it. All I know is that, two or three days later, near the end of the kermesse, young Albert Snyders, the lawyer’s son, came up to me in the street and asked, with the gleeful expression of one who says something which he is sure his interlocutor will find disagreeable: “Well, and what do you think of your Louiseke and her carryings on with the black man?” I answered truthfully that I had heard nothing about any such thing, and that in any case Louiseke wasn’t our Louiseke, and that I didn’t care in the least what she did or what might happen to her. “Not heard about it?” said young Snyders incredulously. “But the black man goes to her house every evening, and she gives him gin, and they sing together, and people see their shadows dancing on the curtains. Everybody’s talking about it.” I am afraid that I disappointed young Snyders. He had hoped to get a rise out of me, and he miserably failed. His errors were two: first, to have supposed that I regarded Louiseke as our Louiseke, merely because her sister happened to be my Uncle Spencer’s housekeeper; and, secondly, to have attributed to me a knowledge of the world sufficient to allow me to realise the scandalousness of Louiseke’s conduct. Whereas I disliked Louiseke, took no interest in her actions, and could, moreover, see nothing out of the ordinary in what she was supposed to have done. Confronted by my unshakable calm, young Snyders retired, rather crestfallen. But he revenged himself before he went by telling me that I must be very stupid and, what I found more insulting, a great baby not to understand.