His wanderings had not mitigated his shame, only worsened it. Months of intermittent and uninformative letters had left his parents even less sympathetic than when he fled in April. Every time he moved from one unpaid, “futureless” job to the next, he reopened the wounds. “We are more and more worried with time,” Dorus wrote Theo in September, “and we fear that he will become unfit for practical life. It is bitterly sad.” They tried to talk sense to him. If he really wanted to be a preacher, they said, he should study for it—and find a paying job in the meantime. But their proposals were always met with “woolly” answers or ignored altogether. They took his evasiveness as a lack of conviction—or, worse, cowardice. “He doesn’t seem to have the courage to take up a course of study,” Anna concluded. “I cannot imagine him as a preacher,” Dorus added. “He will never find a living in it.” In the absence of progress, they brooded over what had gone wrong in Vincent’s life—in Vincent—to bring this trial upon them.
