Perceval Gibbon

“ I remember many such cases which would make you stare for the foolishness of men and the worthlessness of some women. There was the Heer Mostert, Predikant at Dopfontein, who fell to blasphemy and witchcraft when his wife Paula was sick and muttered emptily among her pillows."
The old lady shifted in her wide chair and took her eyes from me at last.
"She was pretty, if you like," she said. "A tall girl, with a small red mouth, and hair that swathed her head like coils of bronze. ”

“ But for an idle man it becomes the air he breathes. He is all-dependent on it, and it is a small and breakable thing.
"Look how men have been wrecked upon a morsel of pink-and-white, how strong brains have scattered like seed from a burst pod for a trifle of hunger in a pair of eyes! ”

“ She wrought upon him with the kind arts God gives a woman to pay her for being a woman, and soon she had softened something of the miserable madness that possessed him, and he kneeled beside the bed, sobbing rendingly, and prayed. ”

“ Katje made an observation.
"Her mother," pursued the Vrouw Grobelaar, still holding me fixed, "spent seventeen years in one room, because she could not go through the door; and when she died they took the roof on and hoisted her out like a bullock from a well. But as I was saying, it is not well that idle men—those with leisure for their littlenesses, like schoolmasters and doctors and Predikants should have pretty wives, or they tend to waste themselves. A man with real work and money matters and the governing of cattle and land and Kafirs to fill his day, for such a one it is very well. ”