“It’s in Prue and I.”
“Never read it; thought it was sentimental.”
“It is, but in a good sense. Tittbottom’s spectacles are the best thing in it. He had only to put them on and he saw the inner-self of anyone on whom he looked. Well, I have cultivated the Tittbottom habit. I see the impatience, the illness, the ignorance, the misunderstanding, back of the words, and then I can’t be hurt. Might as well be insulted because a leaf turns brown.”
“I believe you would forgive a criminal for being bad!”
“Quite so. I would even forgive a good man for being good!”
The racket about them was most persistent: the rattling of hand-trucks, the bumping of trunks, the roaring conversation of hundreds of embarking passengers—more than one steamer had arrived that morning—and the shouts and whistles that gave direction to machinery. But the noise instead of interfering with the dialogue cut the two off from the rest of the world, isolated them, as it were, in their own private room with invisible walls.
“Well,” she said, “whatever you are, I’m glad now that you are coming with us.”
“I knew you wanted me to come with you to ‘Red Jacket’ even when you said you didn’t.”
“You ‘sensed’ right then. I did. But I was fearfully afraid of exposure. I am yet. That’s why I’m going to ask you to be very nice to mother on the train, and then when you ‘sense’ the proper moment tell her the whole story of our trip to the top of the hill in Naples, your real name and everything.”
“But——”