“I think sometimes I’m a bit guilty that she at her age—that it should seem to be necessary, I mean—Maybe I imagine it, but it seems to me as though Elice was sort of fagged and different this winter.”
The visitor unbuttoned his coat leisurely.
“I hadn’t noticed it,” he refuted.
“No? I’m glad to hear you say it. You’d have noticed, I guess, if any one. Probably it’s all my imagination.” 148
“Elice herself hasn’t said anything, intimated anything?”
“Not a word or a hint. Certainly not.” Something akin to surprise spoke in the quick reply. “She even wanted to take on another out-of-town class, but I vetoed that. She’s as her mother was, Elice: always planning on doing just a little more.”
“Than she ought, you think?”
“Yes.”
Without apparent excuse, unconsciously, the visitor rebuttoned his double-breasted coat.
“Some people,” he commented, “work—more than they ought to, to forget; and others again do—various things.”