"Well, it's the fact. That's all there is to say. There isn't anything more to discuss."
"I don't mean to discuss it, of course. There was just one thing I thought of—a—sort of suggestion."
Finding himself neither questioned nor forbidden, he continued: "Do you think it would be such a bad way out of the—the difficulty, if Donald were just to go on here for a while?"
Still Mary waited, hardly encouraging him, examining a "New School," silently laying it down in the packing-case at her feet.
"I know you feel," said Charles, inspecting the top of her hat, "that settling down to this consulting work, in a city that offers so many distractions all the time, won't be a good thing for Donald—from any point of view. Staying here won't take the place of the chance with Gebhardt he's throwing away, of course—that's pretty serious. Still, there ought to be plenty of good work for him to do here—isn't there?—for a few months, a year or two, if necessary. That would give him—and you—a little time to adjust things to—the new conditions. And then from the point of view of the Flowers, too,—of Mrs. Flower, in fact,—it occurred to me it mightn't be a bad sort of working compromise.... What do you think?"
"I think it is very sensible," she replied, with the same labored courtesy. "It is what I suggested, too."
"Oh," said Charles, and paused. "But Donald didn't want to give up Blake & Steinert, I suppose?"
"I haven't suggested it to Donald."
That brought a considerable silence.
"It's—settled, then?"