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Chapter 28 In spite of the suggestion about the reticule, Morris appeared to think poorly of the plan, for he gave Mrs Penniman no encouragement whatever to visit his office, which he had already represented to her as a place peculiarly and unnaturally difficult to find. But as she persisted in desiring an interview - up to the last, after months of intimate colloquy, she called these meetings' interviews' - he agreed that they should take a walk together, and was even kind enough to leave his office for this purpose during the hours at which business might have been supposed to be liveliest. It was no surprise to him, when they met at a street corner, in a region of empty lots and undeveloped pavements (Mrs Penniman being attired as much as possible like a 'woman of the people'), to find that, in spite of her urgency, what she chiefly had to convey to him was the assurance of her sympathy. Of such assurances, however, he had already a voluminous collection, and it would not have been worth his while to forsake a fruitful avocation merely to hear Mrs Penniman say, for the thousandth time, that she had made his cause her own. Morris had something of his own to say. It was not an easy thing to bring out, and while he turned it over, the difficulty made him acrimonious. 'Oh yes, I know perfectly that he combines the properties of a lump of ice and a red-hot coal,' he observed.' Catherine has made it thoroughly clear, and you have told me so till I am sick of it. You needn't tell me again; I am perfectly satisfied. He will never give us a penny; I regard that as mathematically proved.' Mrs Penniman at this point had an inspiration.' Couldn't you bring a lawsuit against him?' She wondered that this simple expedient had never occurred to her before. 'I will bring a lawsuit against you,' said Morris,' if you ask me any more such aggravating questions. A man should know when he is beaten,' he added, in a moment.' I must give her up!' Mrs Penniman received this declaration in silence, though it made her heart beat a little. It found her by no means unprepared, for she had accustomed herself to the thought that, if Morris should decidedly not be able to get her brother's money, it would not do for him to marry Catherine without it.' It would not do,' was a vague way of putting the thing; but Mrs Penniman's natural affection completed the idea, which, though it had not as yet been so crudely expressed between them as in the form that Morris had just given it, had nevertheless been implied so often, in certain easy intervals of talk, as he sat stretching his legs in the Doctor's well-stuffed arm-chairs, that she had grown first to regard it with an emotion which she flattered herself was philosophic, and then to have a secret tenderness for it. The fact that she kept her tenderness secret proves, of course, that she was ashamed of it; but she managed |
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