Lavendar had a strong desire to take those 148 same hands in his and kiss them, but instead he rose and spread out his own long brown fingers on the edge of the wall, a man’s hands, fine and supple, but meant to work.
“I seem to have done nothing,” he exclaimed. “You look so young, so irresponsible, so like a bird on a bough, that I cannot associate dull care with you, yet you have lived more deeply than I. Life seems to have touched me on the shoulder and passed me by; these hands of mine have never done a real day’s work, Mrs. Loring, for they’ve been the servants of an unwilling brain. I hated my own work as a younger man, and, though I hope I did not shirk it, I certainly did nothing that I could avoid.” He paused, and went on slowly, “I’ve thought sometimes, of late I mean, that if life is to be worth much, if it is to be real life, and not mere existence, one must put one’s whole heart into it, and that two people––” He stopped; he was silent with embarrassment, conscious of having said too much.
“Can help each other. Indeed they can,” Mrs. Loring went on serenely, “if they have the same ideals. Hardly anyone, fortunately, is so alone as I, and so I have to help myself! Your sisters, now; don’t they help?”
“Not a great deal,” Lavendar confessed. “One would, but she’s married and in India, worse luck! The other is––well, she’s a candid sister.” He laughed, and looked up. “If my best friend could hear my sister Amy’s view of me, just have a little sketch of me by Amy without fear or favour, he, or she, would never have a very high opinion of me again, and I am not sure but that I should agree with her.”
“Nonsense! my dear friend,” exclaimed Robinette in a maternal tone she sometimes affected,––a tone fairly agonizing to Mark Lavendar; “we should never belittle the stuff that’s been put into us! My equipment isn’t particularly large, but I am going to squeeze every ounce of power from it before I die.”
“Life is extraordinarily interesting to you, isn’t it?”
“Interesting? It is thrilling! So will it be to you when you make up your mind to squeeze it,” said Robinette, jumping off the wall. “There is Carnaby signalling; it is time we went to the station.”
“Life would thrill me considerably more if Carnaby were not eternally in evidence,” said Lavendar, but Robinette pretended not to hear.