“There is no place of honour in a café.”
“And your room?—every one knows that you have been hoisted to the garret.”
“Every one knows that I love heights.”
All of which was said banteringly. They were playing at tossing questions and answers to and fro, as we tossed balls at school. Listening to them, my mind was for a moment distracted from its absorbing sentiment, and I inwardly condemned myself for this as for a fault.
The subject soon became a theme for cheap pleasantries. Every one in the café began to talk of Father Rambert’s end of the table, Father Rambert’s garret. He would shrug his shoulders and take it all laughingly.
“Really, isn’t all that true, Father Rambert?” asked Martinod one day.
“Why, to be sure it is true in a sense. If you make a point of it, it is true. But what is it that is true?”
As if everybody didn’t know what is true and what is not true! Grandfather was rather fond of dark sayings. That same afternoon we went home together, he gay and sprightly, I downcast because I had not, even at a distance (which I preferred), seen Nazzarena. At the top of the steps we met father, who was waiting for us, and who seemed much disturbed. He had a newspaper crumpled up in his hand, and handed it without a word to grandfather, who made no motion to take it.
“Do you know who wrote that?” he asked. How contemptuously he pronounced the word that! I felt that he was controlling himself, but that something serious was going on at our house.
“How should I know?” asked grandfather. “I never read the local papers.”