The early hours of the day were often cool, washed clean by the abundant rains; and in the young sunshine of these morning hours the earth emitted a tender haze, a blue softening of every hard line and colour, so that the Lange Laan, with its villa-residences and fenced gardens, seemed to be surrounded with the vagueness and beauty of a dream-avenue: the dream-columns rose insubstantially, like a vision of pillared tranquillity; the lines of the roofs acquired distinction in their indefiniteness; the hues of the trees and the outlines of their leafy tops were etherealized into tender pastels of misty rose and even mistier blue, with a single brighter gleam of morning yellow and a distant purple streak of dawn. And over all this matutinal world fell a cool dew, like a fountain that rose from that drenched ground and fell back in pearly drops in the child-like gentleness of the first sunbeams. It was as though every morning the earth and her people were newly created, as though mankind were newly born to a youth of innocence and paradisal unconsciousness. But the illusion of the dawn lasted but a minute, barely a few moments: the sun, rising higher in the sky, shone forth from the virginal mist; boastfully it unfurled its proud halo of piercing rays, pouring down its burning gold, full of godlike pride because it was reigning over its brief moment of the day, for the clouds were already mustering, greyly advancing, like battle-hordes of dark phantoms, pressing eerily onwards: deep bluish-black and heavy lead-grey phantoms, overmastering the sun and crushing the earth under white torrents of rain. And the evening twilight, short and hurried, letting fall veil upon veil of crape, was like an overwhelming melancholy of earth, nature and life, in which one forgot that paradisal moment of the morning; the white rain rustled down like a flood-tide of melancholy; the road and the gardens were dripping, drinking up the falling torrents until they shone like marshy pools and flooded meadows in the dusky evening; a chill, spectral mist rose on high with a slow movement as of ghostly draperies, which hovered over the puddles; and the chilly houses, scantily lit with their smoking lamps, round which clouds of insects swarmed, falling on every hand and dying with singed wings, became filled with a yet chillier sadness, an over-shadowing fear of the menacing world out of doors, of the all-powerful cloud-hordes, of the boundless immensity that came whispering on the gusty winds from the far-off unknown, high as the heavens, wide as the firmament, against which the open houses appeared unprotected, while the inmates were small and petty for all their civilization and science and soulful feelings, small as wriggling insects, insignificant, abandoned to the play of the giant mysteries blowing up from the distance. Léonie van Oudijck, in the half-lit back-verandah of the residency, was talking to Theo in a soft voice: and Oorip squatted beside her.