“Oh, more or less.” I fancy my smile was pale. “Not absolutely. We shouldn’t like that!” I went on.
“No—I suppose we shouldn’t. Of course we have the others.”
“We have the others—we have indeed the others,” I concurred.
“Yet even though we have them,” he returned, still with his hands in his pockets and planted there in front of me, “they don’t much count, do they?”
I made the best of it, but I felt wan. “It depends on what you call ‘much’!”