"I sew very badly, Mr. Hibbs, and I have no Latin."
"Forgive me. I think, though, you sew excellent well."
"Ha!"
"'Twas only a line of Tibullus that cometh now and then to my mind. Et teneam moriens deficiente manu.... I never read Tibullus with the boys. Not altogether suited, I felt, to their time of life. And yet sometimes, as in those particular lines, my dear, he is quite innocent, indeed expressing sentiments appropriate to a man of honorable feeling. 'May I'—(saith Tibullus, my dear)—'may I look on thee when cometh my last hour, and may I hold thy hand as I sink dying!'"
"I must tell Kate this one is nearly past mending, but if she'll make a pattern for me I believe I could follow it in my blundering fashion. He ought to have a change of them for every day. I know a place on Sudbury Street where they have better material than this, and cheap."
"I recall some other lines from the same poem—me mea paupertas vita traducat inerti, dum meus adsiduo luceat igne focus.... 'Let the humble fortune that is proper to me lead me through a quiet way of life, if only my hearth may glow with an unfailing fire!' You'd suppose that the sentiment of an aging man, wouldn't you? And yet they tell that Tibullus, he died young.... Charity...."
"Yes, Mr. Hibbs?"
"Charity, having spent, I must admit, very nearly twenty years—beginning, let us say, with the year I commenced study at Harvard, the which was the thirteenth year of my life—having spent so much time, I say, in what would seem, to some, a most arid employment, namely the cultivation of the abstract, the exploration (tentative, limited by the frailty of mine own poor powers) of the borders of philosophy—having spent thus much time in—shall I call it, perhaps, a sanctuary of loneliness?—not altogether unrewarding, you understand; not without the consolation of the poets; not without an occasional satisfaction, like unto discovery, within the region of the inquiry: nevertheless, out of such loneliness—out of——"
"Sir——"
"Nay, forgive me, Charity, I'm most clumsy with words, and could never speak bold and plain what's in my mind, the which plain speaking I do much admire to discover in others, but let me essay it. Having spent, I say, almost twenty years, yes, almost a full score in the—I must call it the dust of scholarship, save the mark—one may then, suddenly as it were, look out as through the window of a study, let us say, and observe that outside this not altogether despicable refuge there is—oh, spring perhaps, as it is even now, my dear—and one may presume to hope that one hath not remained so long out of the world, nor grown so old, but that—but that——"