Zeno’s Conscience: quotes (15)

Italo Svevo

With great, ominously calm severity, he replied: “I explained to you the state of our knowledge at that instant. But who can say what may happen by tomorrow, or in half an hour’s time? By keeping your father alive, I have left the door open to all possibilities.”

Then he put on his glasses, and with his fussy clerk’s mien, he added further, endless explanations about the importance that a doctor’s intervention could have in the economic destiny of a family. An extra half hour of respiration could decide the fate of an inheritance.