It was Guido who wanted me to join him in his new commercial
undertaking. I was dying to do so, but I never allowed him to guess how
much I wanted it. It was natural that having nothing to do, the idea of
working with a friend should have been sympathetic to me. But there was
something besides. I had not yet given up hopes of becoming a good man
of business, and I thought I should learn more by teaching Guido than
by taking lessons from Olivi. Many people can only learn by listening
to themselves, or at least cannot learn anything by listening to others.
I had other reasons for wishing to ally myself to Guido. I wanted to be
of use to him. In the first place I was very fond of him, and although
he made a show of being strong and sure of himself, he seemed to me a
weak creature who was in need of the protection I was so anxious to
give. Further, I sincerely felt, not only on Augusta’s account but on
my own, that the closer my relationship to Guido, the more evident
would appear my absolute indifference to Ada.
I was only waiting for a word from Guido in order to put myself
entirely at his disposal, and if he did not call upon me sooner it was
because he assumed I had a distaste for business, as I always refused
to have anything to do with it in my own family.
One day he said to me:
“I have been all through the Higher School of Commerce, but I still
don’t find it so very easy to arrange properly all the details
necessary in order to guarantee the sound running of a business. Of
course no business man need really know anything, for if he wants his
goods weighed he has only to get a weighing-machine, if he wants to go
to law he consults a solicitor, if he wants to know how his accounts
stand he calls in an accountant. But it seems hard to have to hand
over one’s accounts straight away to a stranger.”
It was the first open allusion to his proposal that I should join him;
to tell the truth my experience of accounts was confined to the few
months during which I had kept Olivi’s register, but, on the other
hand, I was certainly the only accountant who was not a stranger to
Guido.
Our first frank discussion of the possibility of going into business
together was when I went with him to choose the furniture for his
office. He ordered two writing-desks for the manager’s room. I asked
him, blushing, why he had ordered two? and he replied:
“The second one is for you.”