“Yes, Staniford, that's it. I hate your going out there all alone. Now, if you were taking some nice girl with you!” Dunham said, with a lover's fond desire that his friend should be in love, too.
“To those wilds? To a redwood shanty in California, or a turf hovel in Colorado? What nice girl would go? 'I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.'”
“I don't like to have you take any risks of degenerating,” began Dunham.
“With what you know to be my natural tendencies? Your prophetic eye prefigures my pantaloons in the tops of my boots. Well, there is time yet to turn back from the brutality of a patriarchal life. You must allow that I've taken the longest way round in going West. In Italy there are many chances; and besides, you know, I like to talk.”
It seemed to be an old subject between them, and they discussed it languidly, like some abstract topic rather than a reality.
“If you only had some tie to bind you to the East, I should feel pretty safe about you,” said Dunham, presently.
“I have you,” answered his friend, demurely.
“Oh, I'm nothing,” said Dunham, with sincerity.
“Well, I may form some tie in Italy. Art may fall in love with me, there. How would you like to have me settle in Florence, and set up a studio instead of a ranch,—choose between sculpture and painting, instead of cattle and sheep? After all, it does grind me to have lost that money! If I had only been swindled out of it, I shouldn't have cared; but when you go and make a bad thing of it yourself, with your eyes open, there's a reluctance to place the responsibility where it belongs that doesn't occur in the other case. Dunham, do you think it altogether ridiculous that I should feel there was something sacred in the money? When I remember how hard my poor old father worked to get it together, it seems wicked that I should have stupidly wasted it on the venture I did. I want to get it back; I want to make money. And so I'm going out to Italy with you, to waste more. I don't respect myself as I should if I were on a Pullman palace car, speeding westward. I'll own I like this better.”
“Oh, it's all right, Staniford,” said his friend. “The voyage will do you good, and you'll have time to think everything over, and start fairer when you get back.”