It may help the time
to pass away, and prevent the attacks of mold and rust. Later on, if
things do not shape themselves according to my hopes, these dangers will
be of little import. These sheets may then mildew with the dampness of
this land, or fly away to sea with the shrewd breezes that sweep over our
coast, for all I shall care. At any rate they will have served their
purpose.
Of course I am trying to swallow my medicine like a little man. If there
is a being I despise it is the fellow who whimpers. There is little that
is admirable in professional pugilism, saving the smile often seen on a
fighter's face after he has just received a particularly hard and
crushing blow. Indeed, that smile is the bruiser's apology for his life.
Lest it be inferred that I have been fighting, I hasten to declare that
it was a rather one-sided contest in which I was defeated, lock, stock
and barrel, by a mere slip of a girl towards whom I had only lifted up my
hands in supplication.
"We are both very young, John," she explained to me, with an
exasperating, if unconscious, imitation of the doctors she had observed
as they announced very disagreeable things to their patients. "Our lives
are practically only beginning. Until now we have been like the
vegetables that are brought up in little wooden boxes. We are to be taken
up and planted in a field, where we are to grow up into something
useful."
"And we shall enjoy a great advantage over the young cabbages and
lettuces," I chimed in.
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