HARLAN was astonished, but he took his little defeat well; and Martha in turn encountered a surprise, for he showed a discomfited kind of pleasure. “So Ornaby Addition’s going to get its rapid transit at last,” he said. “That’s not so bad, you know. Why, Dan might come out pretty well on the thing after all!”
“But doesn’t that annoy you, Harlan?” she asked.
“You mean that I _want_ to see my brother beaten? That I really haven’t good will toward him?”
“No, indeed I don’t. I mean: Wouldn’t it annoy you to find you’d always been mistaken about him?”
“But I’m not. I grew up in the same house with him, and I ought to know him. If he does happen to do anything with his wild old idea after all, it’ll be by the grace of a series of miracles no one could possibly have foreseen.”
“That is to say,” Martha observed, “you’d call him ‘a fool for luck.’”
“And you were just telling me _I_ didn’t change!” she cried.
“Yes,” he returned placidly;—“it seems we’re neither of us wiser than we used to be. We sit here talking of Dan and his Addition just as we’d have been talking about them if you’d never been away. You really ought to be speaking with a slight foreign accent and unable to put your mind on anything later than the seventeenth century.”
She nodded, agreeing. “Yes, it’s queer; and it makes me _feel_ a little queer. You go away and stay for ever and ever; then you come back home and by the time your trunk’s unpacked you’re ready to wonder if you’ve been away at all;—maybe you’ve just had a long dream. Of course, too, I knew what was going on at home—not through papa!—but some of the girls of our old set here have been faithful about writing, in spite of their every single one of ’em getting married. That makes me feel I belong to the seventeenth century—almost ‘_cinquecento_!’”
“I’d prefer the ‘_cinquecento_,’” Harlan said, and immediately added: “Not that I care for it myself.”
“What!” she cried, her eyes widening. “You’d even criticize the Renaissance?”
It appeared that he would, and willingly. Offhand he called the Renaissance “a naïve movement amusingly overrated and with the single merit that it was better than what had gone before.” Martha was indignant, and they had an argument in which she proved to be no match for him. He had not been abroad since his junior vacation as an undergraduate, but he knew a great deal more about Italy than she did, though she had just come from long residence there. She continued to disagree with him, and presently was surprised by the suspicion that she enjoyed hearing him talk, and in a way, found him congenial in spite of their differences.