Possibly what? Oh, nothing. And yet, if he had stopped... well, at any rate, he would have gained time. The Duchessa had already begun to thaw. If he had stopped... He could formulate no precise conclusion to that if; but he felt dimly remorseful that he had not stopped, he felt that he had indeed been the least bit hasty. And his remorse was somehow medicine to his reviving hope.
“After all, I scarcely gave things a fair trial yesterday,” he said.
And the corollary of that, of course, was that he might give things a further and fairer trial some other day.
But his hope was still hard hurt; he was still in a profound dejection.
“The Signorino is not eating his dinner,” cried Marietta, fixing him with suspicious, upbraiding eyes.
“The Signorino is not well?” she questioned, anxious.
“Oh, yes--cosi, cosi; the Signorino is well enough,” he answered.
“The dinner”--you could perceive that she brought herself with difficulty to frame the dread hypothesis--“the dinner is not good?” Her voice sank. She waited, tense, for his reply.
“The dinner,” said he, “if one may criticise without eating it, the dinner is excellent. I will have no aspersions cast upon my cook.”
“Ah-h-h!” breathed Marietta, a tremulous sigh of relief.
“It is not the Signorino, it is not the dinner, it is the world that is awry,” Peter went on, in reflective melancholy. “'T is the times that are out of joint. 'T is the sex, the Sex, that is not well, that is not good, that needs a thorough overhauling and reforming.”
“The sex,” said Peter. “By the unanimous consent of rhetoricians, there is but one sex the sex, the fair sex, the unfair sex, the gentle sex, the barbaric sex. We men do not form a sex, we do not even form a sect. We are your mere hangers-on, camp-followers, satellites--your things, your playthings--we are the mere shuttlecocks which you toss hither and thither with your battledores, as the wanton mood impels you. We are born of woman, we are swaddled and nursed by woman, we are governessed by woman; subsequently, we are beguiled by woman, fooled by woman, led on, put off, tantalised by woman, fretted and bullied by her; finally, last scene of all, we are wrapped in our cerements by woman. Man's life, birth, death, turn upon woman, as upon a hinge. I have ever been a misanthrope, but now I am seriously thinking of becoming a misogynist as well. Would you advise me to-do so?”