We come and ask for
it. He welcomes us. We ask for it again. He is equally
pleasant. I'm agreeable to spend the whole week bargaining
with him. But I know that at the end of it I shall descend
empty-handed to the plains. It might be finer of me to make
up my mind. But I'm not a fine character. And nothing
hangs on it."
"Perhaps I am extreme," she said humbly. "I've been
trying to run you, just like your mother. I feel you ought
to fight it out with Harriet. Every little trifle, for some
reason, does seem incalculably important today, and when you
say of a thing that 'nothing hangs on it,' it sounds like
blasphemy. There's never any knowing--(how am I to put
it?)--which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't
have things hanging on it for ever."
He assented, but her remark had only an aesthetic value.
He was not prepared to take it to his heart. All the
afternoon he rested--worried, but not exactly despondent.
The thing would jog out somehow. Probably Miss Abbott was
right. The baby had better stop where it was loved. And
that, probably, was what the fates had decreed. He felt
little interest in the matter, and he was sure that he had
no influence.
It was not surprising, therefore, that the interview at
the Caffe Garibaldi came to nothing. Neither of them took
it very seriously. And before long Gino had discovered how
things lay, and was ragging his companion hopelessly.
Philip tried to look offended, but in the end he had to
laugh.
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