Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/232

220 brazen and cracked falsetto, had just concluded a dirgelike ditty, and gone her weary way.

This had decided Wilson.

Now he drew a chair close beside his friend, who lay drowsily regarding him.

'Look here,' he said, 'this is getting on to my nerves. I want to go out and away into some fresh air. Do you care to come?'

'Go out?' murmured Randal, 'get away? Why, it's ten times worse in the town, or down on the Boulevard de la Croisette, or in a boat.'

'Let us take a carriage and drive up on to one of the hills. If there is a breeze anywhere, it will be there. And then we can lie down under the pines, and smoke till the heat passes, and it 's time to come back to dinner.'

'We shall be cooked alive in the roads getting there.'

'We'll have a cab with an awning.'

Randal stretched himself.

'Be it so,' he said. 'Milton was wrong. It is good-nature, not ambition, which is really the last infirmity of noble mind, and in no way is good-nature better exemplified than in letting other people look after you. No doubt you are right, and it will be much pleasanter up in the pine-woods. You are still young enough, Allan, to think things out. All