"It's no longer any use your warning me. I love you, Eva, Eva...." "I don't believe there's another country where there's so much love going about as in India! I suppose it's the heat...." "Don't crush me with your sarcasm. No other woman ever made such an appeal to my whole soul and body as you do, Eva...." She shrugged her shoulders: "Don't be angry, Van Helderen, but I can't stand these commonplaces. Let us be sensible. I have a charming husband, you have a dear little wife. We're all good, pleasant friends together." "You're so cold!" "I don't want to spoil the happiness of our friendship." "Friendship!" "Friendship is what I said. There is nothing I value so highly, except my domestic happiness. I couldn't live without friends. I am happy in my husband and my child; next to these I need friends, above all things." "So that they can admire you, so that you can rule over them!" said he, angrily. She looked him in the face: "Perhaps," she said, coolly. "Perhaps I have a need of admiration and of ruling over others. We all have our weaknesses." "I have mine," he said, bitterly. "Come," she said, in a kinder tone, "let us remain friends." "I am terribly unhappy," he said, in a dull voice. "I feel as if I had missed everything in life. I have never been out of Java and I feel there's something lacking in me because I have never seen ice and snow. Snow: I think of it as a sort of mysterious unknown purity, which I long for, but which I never seem to meet. When shall I see Europe? When shall I cease to rave about Il Trovatore and manage to visit Bayreuth? When shall I come within range of you, Eva? I'm feeling for everything with my antennæ, like a wingless insect.... What is my life?... With Ida, with three children, whom I foresee growing up like their mother!... I shall remain controller for years and then--possibly--be promoted to assistant-resident ... and so remain. And then at last I shall receive my dismissal--or ask for it--and go to Sukabumi to live, to vegetate on a small pension. I feel everything in me longing for idleness...." "You like your work, for all that; you're a first-rate official. Eldersma always says that in India a man who doesn't work and who doesn't love his work is lost." "Your nature is not made for love and mine is not made for work: not for that and nothing else. I can work for an aim that I see before me, a beautiful aim; but I can't work ... just for work's sake and to fill the emptiness in my life." "Your aim is India...."