“Fiddlesticks!” Mr. Carroll interrupted, “It will run your life more if you neglect it.”
“Yes, that’s a point for you. I knew an Italian family in Rome, delightful people,—several branches of the family there were—lived all over the city. They were always going places together en masse. But it took them forever to get assembled. Once they stood in the rain in three separate bunches in three distinct and distant parts of Rome because they’d all forgotten at just what time they were to meet and where. No, you’re a slave if you disregard time and a slave if you bow down to it. You’re had either way.”
“Pshaw!” said Mr. Carroll.
“I rather think that there’s a little more to it,” Phil observed quietly. “I think Mr. Carroll’s side is right. It is better to be prompt. But not because you save time that way and are more efficient. Rather because you establish an apparent medium of smoothness to live in, make everything seem permanent, eternal and of value. To have the nine-seven train pull gently out of the Pennsylvania Station at precisely nine-seven gives you a feeling of confidence, a sense that everything’s going to be all right. An illusion, of course, but essential. A lot of bohemian marriages break up just because they don’t have it there, stable and making marriage seem stable.”
Mr. Carroll nodded. “Something in that, maybe,” he observed.
But dinner was announced, and they went in.
“Did you find a house?” Mr. Carroll inquired after a while.
“Yes,” said Phil. “I’m awfully pleased.”
“Where?”
Stacey told him.