Miss Abbott gave a little sigh.
“But why should you mind? Do you suppose that I shall have the slightest influence over him?”
“No. But—I can’t repeat all that I said in the church. You ought never to see him again. You ought to bundle Harriet into a carriage, not this evening, but now, and drive her straight away.”
“Perhaps I ought. But it isn’t a very big ‘ought.’ Whatever Harriet and I do the issue is the same. Why, I can see the splendour of it—even the humour. Gino sitting up here on the mountain-top with his cub. 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. “Well, you are right,” he said. “This affair is being managed by the ladies.”
“Ah, the ladies—the ladies!” cried the other, and then he roared like a millionaire for two cups of black coffee, and insisted on treating his friend, as a sign that their strife was over.
“Well, I have done my best,” said Philip, dipping a long slice of sugar into his cup, and watching the brown liquid ascend into it. “I shall face my mother with a good conscience. Will you bear me witness that I’ve done my best?”
“My poor fellow, I will!” He laid a sympathetic hand on Philip’s knee.