“Don’t talk to me of burdens, dear Katherine,” said Peter. “Don’t try to spoil my humble little pleasure. If I can make you and yours happier, what more can I ask?” He looked at her with kind, tired eyes.
“I won’t thwart you, but Hilda will.”
“Hilda will find it difficult when we are married. That must be soon, Katherine.”
Katherine looked pensively out of the window.
“We will see,” she replied, with a pretty evasiveness.
It was fine and cold as Odd walked down the Boulevard St. Germain that afternoon. He walked at a tremendous pace, for human nature hopes to cheat thought by physical effort. Indeed, Peter did not think much, and was convinced that his mind was a comparatively happy blank as he paused before the tall house where Hilda was pursuing her avocations. If he made any definite reflections while he walked up and down between the doorway and the next corner, they were on his last few conversations with Hilda; and then on rather abstract points merely. He had drawn the child out. He had penetrated the reserved mind that acquired for enjoyment, not for display. He had found out that Hilda knew Italian literature, from Dante to Leopardi, almost as well as he himself did, and loved it just as well. The fiction of Russia and Scandinavia was deeply appreciated by her, and the essayists of France. Her tastes were as delicately discriminative as Katherine’s, but lacked that metallic assurance of which lately Peter had become rather uncomfortably aware. As for the English tongue, from the old meeting-ground of Chaucer they could range with delightful sympathy to Stevenson’s sweet radiance.
Peter thought quite intently of this literary survey and evaded any trespassing beyond its limits. His reticence was not put to a prolonged test. Hilda met him before half-a-dozen trips to the corner were accomplished. She showed no signs of conscious guilt, though Peter was not sure that she was not a “foolish baby.”
“Let us walk,” she said, “it is such a lovely day.”
“We will walk at least till the sun goes. We will just have time to catch the sunset on the Seine.”
“Yes; what a lovely day! I wish I were ten, with short skirts, and a hoop, that I could run and roll.”