"But twenty years ago, they tell me, even then people were enchanted with ... Il Trovatore. Oh, it's terrible! Sometimes, suddenly, it crushes me. Sometimes, all of a sudden, I feel that I have not grown used to India and that I never shall; and I began to long for Europe, for life!" "But Eva," Eldersma began, in alarm, dreading lest she should really go home one day, leaving him alone in what would then be his utterly joyless working-life at Labuwangi: "sometimes you do appreciate India: your house, the pleasant, spacious life...." "Materially...." "And don't you appreciate your own work--I mean the many things which you are able to do here?" "What? Getting up parties? Arranging theatricals?" "It's you who are the real rezidente [9]," said Ida, gushingly. "Thank goodness, we're coming back to Mrs. van Oudijck," said Mrs. Doom de Bruijn, teasingly. "And to professional secrecy," said Dr. Rantzow. "No," sighed Eva, "we want something new. Dances, parties, picnics, trips into the mountains ... we've exhausted all that. I know nothing more. The Indian depression's coming over me. I'm in one of my dejected moods. Those brown faces of my 'boys' around me suddenly strike me as uncanny. India frightens me at times. Do none of you feel the same? A vague dread, a mystery in the air, something menacing.... I don't know what it is. The evenings are sometimes so full of mystery and there is something mysterious in the character of the native, who is so remote from us, who differs from us so...." "Artistic feelings," said Van Helderen, chaffingly. "No, I don't feel like that. India is my country." "You type!" said Eva, chaffing him in return. "What makes you what you are, so curiously European? I can't call it Dutch." "My mother was a Frenchwoman." "But, after all, you're a creole: born here, brought up here.... And you have nothing of a creole about you. I think it's wonderful to have met you: I like you as a change.... Help me, can't you? Suggest something new. Not a dance, not a trip into the mountains. I want something new. Else I shall get a craving for my father's paintings, for my mother's singing, for our beautiful, artistic house at the Hague. If I don't have something new, I shall die. I'm not like your wife, Van Helderen, always in love." "Eva!" Ida entreated. "Tragically in love, with her beautiful, sombre eyes. Always, first with her husband and then with somebody else. I am never in love. Not even any longer with my husband. He is ... with me. But I have not an erotic temperament. There's a great deal of love-making in India, isn't there, doctor?... Well, we've ruled out dances, excursions into the mountains and love-making. What then, in Heaven's name, what then?" "I know of something," said Mrs. Doorn de Bruijn; and a sudden anxiety came over her placid melancholy. She gave a side-glance at Mrs. Rantzow; the German woman grasped her meaning. "What is it?" asked the others, eagerly.