Van Oudijck gazed at him in stupefaction. The regent was now coming to blows with the councillor, who addressed him in beseeching tones. On the road, the population collected, silent, dismayed; the last guests were leaving the club, where the lights were growing dim. Among them were Léonie van Oudijck, Doddie and Addie de Luce. All three still bore in their eyes the weary voluptuousness of the last waltz. "Addie," said the resident, "you're an intimate friend of the regent's. Just see if he knows you." The young man spoke to the tipsy madman, in soft Javanese accents. At first the regent kept on with his words of objurgation, with his gigantic, raving gestures; then, however, the softness of the language seemed to hold a well-known memory for him. He gave Addie a long look. His gestures subsided, his drunken glory evaporated. It was as though his blood suddenly understood that young man's blood, as though their souls recognized each other. The regent nodded dolefully and began a long lament, with his arms raised on high. Addie tried to help him into a carriage, but the regent resisted and refused. Then Addie took his arm in his own with gentle force and walked on with him slowly. The regent, still lamenting, with tragic gestures of despair, suffered himself to be led. The councillor followed with one or two underlings, who had run after the regent out of the palace, helplessly. The procession vanished in the darkness. Léonie, wearily smiling, stepped into the assistant-resident's carriage. She remembered the gambling-quarrel at Patjaram; she took pleasure in observing the gradual deterioration which was occurring so visibly, this visible degradation by a passion controlled by neither tact nor moderation. And where she was concerned she felt stronger than ever, because she enjoyed her passions and controlled them and made them the slaves of her enjoyment.... She despised the regent; and it gave her a romantic satisfaction, an artistic pleasure, to watch the successive phases of that deterioration. In the carriage she glanced at her husband, who sat in gloomy silence. And his gloom delighted her, because she thought him sentimental, with his championing of the Javanese nobility, the result of a sentimental instruction, which Van Oudijck took even more sentimentally. And she delighted in his sorrow. And from her husband she glanced at Doddie, detecting in the dance-weary eyes of her step-daughter a jealousy due to that last, that very last waltz of Léonie's with Addie. And she rejoiced in this jealousy. She felt happy, because sorrow had no hold upon her, any more than passion. She played with the things of life and they glided off her and left her as unperturbed and calmly smiling and unwrinkled and creamy white as before.