blast of this domestic tempest, accentuating only each pause in the
torrent of his wife's eloquence by an angry growl, "There is no treasure!
Go away, woman!" Exasperated by the sight of his patiently bent back,
she would at last walk round so as to face him across the table, and
clasping her robe with one hand she stretched the other lean arm and claw-
like hand to emphasise, in a passion of anger and contempt, the rapid
rush of scathing remarks and bitter cursings heaped on the head of the
man unworthy to associate with brave Malay chiefs. It ended generally by
Almayer rising slowly, his long pipe in hand, his face set into a look of
inward pain, and walking away in silence. He descended the steps and
plunged into the long grass on his way to the solitude of his new house,
dragging his feet in a state of physical collapse from disgust and fear
before that fury. She followed to the head of the steps, and sent the
shafts of indiscriminate abuse after the retreating form. And each of
those scenes was concluded by a piercing shriek, reaching him far away.
"You know, Kaspar, I am your wife! your own Christian wife after your own
Blanda law!" For she knew that this was the bitterest thing of all; the
greatest regret of that man's life.

All these scenes Nina witnessed unmoved. She might have been deaf, dumb,
without any feeling as far as any expression of opinion went. Yet oft
when her father had sought the refuge of the great dusty rooms of
"Almayer's Folly," and her mother, exhausted by rhetorical efforts,
squatted wearily on her heels with her back against the leg of the table,
Nina would approach her curiously, guarding her skirts from betel juice
besprinkling the floor, and gaze down upon her as one might look into the
quiescent crater of a volcano after a destructive eruption. Mrs.
Almayer's thoughts, after these scenes, were usually turned into a
channel of childhood reminiscences, and she gave them utterance in a kind
of monotonous recitative--slightly disconnected, but generally describing