“It sounds reasonable enough. You might put it more simply by saying that you were tired. But by now you ought to be rested.”
“Therefore I ought to be stirring myself so as to get tired again?”
“If you don’t stir, you’ll rust.”
“Rust is a painless death for useless mechanism.”
She shot an impatient side-glance at him. “Either you’re a hundred years old,” she said, “or that’s sheer pose.”
“Perhaps it is a sort of pose. If so, it’s a self-protective one.”
“Suppose I asked you to come to New York?”
Intrepid though she was, her soul quaked a little at her own words, foreseeing those mail-order-cut clothes and the resolute butterflyness of the tie greeting her on Fifth Avenue.
“What to do?”
“Sell tickets at the Grand Central Station, of course!” she shot back at him. “Ban, you are aggravating! ‘What to do?’ Father would find you some sort of place while you were fitting in.”