23
“Oh, more or less.” I fancy my smile was pale. “Not absolutely. We shouldn’t like that!” I went on.
“No – I suppose we shouldn’t. Of course we have the others.”
“We have the others – we have indeed the others,” I concurred.
“Yet even though we have them,” he returned, still with his hands in his pockets and planted there in front of me, “they don’t much count, do they?”
I made the best of it, but I felt wan. “It depends on what you call ‘much’!”
“Yes” – with all accommodation – “everything depends!” On this, however, he faced to the window again and presently reached it with his vague, restless, cogitating step. He remained there a while, with his forehead against the glass, in contemplation of the stupid shrubs I knew and the dull things of November. I had always my hypocrisy of
