And So it comes that we are excellent friends.' She listened with a scarcely perceptible smile.
'Perhaps this seems to you a curiously dispassionate way of treating such a subject,' Wilfrid added, with a laugh.

'It illustrates what I meant in saying I doubted whether there was deep sympathy between us.
Your own feeling for your father is clearly one of devotedness.

You would think no sacrifice of your own wishes too great if he asked it of you.' 'I cannot imagine any sacrifice, which my father could ask, that I should refuse.' She spoke with some difficulty, as if she wished to escape the subject.
'Perhaps that is a virtue that your sex helps to explain,' said Wilfrid, musingly.
'You do not know,' he added, when a bee had hummed between them for half a minute, 'how constant my regret is that my mother did not live till I was old enough to make a friend of her.

You know that she was an Italian?
There was a sympathy taken out of my life.

I believe I have more of the Italian nature than the English, and I know my mother's presence would be priceless to me now that I could talk with her.