Part 63 (2/2)

'When it is hot I keep myself quiet,' she went on. 'You seem to be of another mind.'

'I make no difference for the weather.'

'Don't you? What energy! Then you are always at work?'

'Who said so?'

'I said so, as an inference. When the weather has been cool enough to allow me to take notice, I have noticed that you were busy about something. You tell me now that weather makes no difference.'

'Life is too short to allow weather to cut it shorter,' said Pitt, throwing himself down on a mat. 'I think I have observed that you too always have some work in hand whenever I have seen you.'

'My work amounts to nothing,' said the young lady. 'At least you would say so, I presume.'

'What is it?'

Miss Betty displayed her roll of muslin, on the free portion of which an elegant line of embroidery was slowly growing, multiplying and reproducing its white buds and leaves and twining shoots. Pitt regarded it with an unenlightened eye.

'I am as wise as I was before,' he said.

'Why, look here,' said the young lady, with a slight movement of her little foot calling his attention to the edge of her skirt, where a somewhat similar line of embroidery was visible. 'I am making a border for another gown.'

Pitt's eye went from the one embroidery to the other; he said nothing.

'You are not complimentary,' said Miss Frere.

'I am not yet sure that there is anything to compliment.'

The young lady gave him a full view of her fine eyes for half a second, or perhaps it was only that they took a good look at him.

'Don't you see,' she said, 'that it is economy, and thrift, and all the household virtues? Not having the money to buy tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, I am manufacturing it.'

'And the gown must be trimmed?'

'Unquestionably! You would not like it so well if it were not.'

'That is possible. The question remains'--

'What question?'

'Whether Life is not worth more than a bit of tr.i.m.m.i.n.g.'

'Life!' echoed the young lady a little scornfully. 'An hour now and then is not Life.'

'It is the stuff of which Life is made.'

'What is Life good for?'

'That is precisely the weightiest question that can occupy the mind of a philosopher!'

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