Darrow smiled again, perhaps at her studied inclusion of himself.
“Oh, Dick‘s all right,” he said. “He’ll pull himself together in no time.”
He spoke with an emphasis which might have struck her, if her sympathies had not again been deflected by the allusion to her son.
“Not if he doesn’t win,” she exclaimed.
Darrow took the tea she had poured for him, knocking the spoon to the floor in his eagerness to perform the feat gracefully. In bending to recover the spoon he struck the tea-table with his shoulder, and set the cups dancing. Having regained a measure of composure, he took a swallow of the hot tea and set it down with a gasp, precariously near the edge of the tea-table. Mrs. Peyton rescued the cup, and Darrow, apparently forgetting its existence, rose and began to pace the room. It was always hard for him to sit still when he talked.
“You mean he’s so tremendously set on it?” he broke out.
Mrs. Peyton hesitated. “You know him almost as well as I do,” she said. “He’s capable of anything where there is a possibility of success; but I’m always afraid of the reaction.”
“Oh, well, Dick’s a man,” said Darrow bluntly. “Besides, he’s going to succeed.”
“I wish he didn’t feel so sure of it. You mustn’t think I’m afraid for him. He’s a man, and I want him to take his chances with other men; but I wish he didn’t care so much about what people think.”
“People?”
“Miss Verney, then: I suppose you know.”
Darrow paused in front of her. “Yes: he’s talked a good deal about her. You think she wants him to succeed?”
“At any price!”
He drew his brows together. “What do you call any price?”
“Well—herself, in this case, I believe.”
Darrow bent a puzzled stare on her. “You mean she attached that amount of importance to this competition?”
“She seems to regard it as symbolical: that’s what I gather. And I’m afraid she’s given him the same impression.”
Darrow’s sunken face was suffused by his rare smile. “Oh, well, he’ll pull it off then!” he said.
Mrs. Peyton rose with a distracted sigh. “I half hope he won’t, for such a motive,” she exclaimed.
“The motive won’t show in his work,” said Darrow. He added, after a pause probably devoted to the search for the right word: “He seems to think a great deal of her.”
Mrs. Peyton fixed him thoughtfully. “I wish I knew what you think of her.”
“Why, I never saw her before.”
“No; but you talked with her to-day. You’ve formed an opinion: I think you came here on purpose.”
He chuckled joyously at her discernment: she had always seemed to him gifted with supernatural insight. “Well, I did want to see her,” he owned.
“And what do you think?”
He took a few vague steps and then halted before Mrs. Peyton. “I think,” he said, smiling, “that she likes to be helped first, and to have everything on her plate at once.” III
At dinner, with a rush of contrition, Mrs. Peyton remembered that she had after all not spoken to Darrow about his health. He had distracted her by beginning to talk of Dick; and besides, much as Darrow’s opinions interested her, his personality had never fixed her attention. He always seemed to her simply a vehicle for the transmission of ideas.
