'But didn't you mind giving up all your work?' I said.
He did not quite understand.
'My father wanted me to come back,' he said.
It was evident that Giovanni had had no definite conception of what he
was doing or what he wanted to do. His father, wishing to make a
gentleman of him, had sent him to school in Verona. By accident he had
been moved on into the engineering course. When it all fizzled to an
end, and he returned half-baked to the remote, desolate village of the
mountain-side, he was not disappointed or chagrined. He had never
conceived of a coherent purposive life. Either one stayed in the
village, like a lodged stone, or one made random excursions into the
world, across the world. It was all aimless and purposeless.
So he had stayed a while with his father, then he had gone, just as
aimlessly, with a party of men who were emigrating to America. He had
taken some money, had drifted about, living in the most comfortless,
wretched fashion, then he had found a place somewhere in Pennsylvania,
in a dry goods store. This was when he was seventeen or eighteen
years old.
All this seemed to have happened to him without his being very much
affected, at least consciously.
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