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Show 63 But John does not sit in the chair in her little room; he stands by her desk, his hands planted on it. "What did you decide?" "About what?" "You said you were going on the trip to make up your mind. About whether"- he fishes for a careful circumlocution-"you still intend to carry out your plan." "Oh, that," she laughs, relieved, "sure, eventually." She tells him what she has been thinking in these past weeks, what it has meant to her to see the roots of her family, her immediate ancestors and the remote, prehistoric ones, of her new free sense of the evanescence and fragility of a single human life, the way one figure yields to the next, and the next, at the centuries-old hearths of the inns. "I'm not in any hurry," she says. "But it's an extraordinary thing, to feel your life is complete. I think it probably is getting on to be time to die, though it is very pleasant as it goes on." "You'd still do it, then?" John is still standing, his hands fists. She remembers something. "You were going to bring home some tablets from your lab." Robeck stands upright, takes his hand from the desk. He looks at her with a coldness she has almost never seen in him, and he turns to leave the room. At the door he pauses,' stops, turns back to her: "No. Of course not." |