Hills Like White Elephants

     I must admit that I had to read this piece twice before I understood what the conflict was.  Hemingway never explicitly says that the girl is pregnant.  I guessed the first time through that that probably was the case from the content of the conversation, but the fact that they were drinking alcohol really threw me off.  The second time through, it was clearer to me.  He wants her to have an abortion.  She doesn't want to have one, but really wants to make him happy with her.
     One thing that I really like about this piece was how Hemingway used the four drinks to give an indication of what the pace of the conversation was like.  It can be hard, when reading dialogue, to get a sense of time and pause.  In a real life dialogue, there are natural pauses and one has to wait for the next line.  In a story, the reader can breeze through them at their own pace.  Having a mechanism like a drink, or a number of drinks (four each in this case) gives the reader a sense of how much space there is in between each line and how long the dialogue is actually taking.