“In certain cases—and up to a certain point.” She shook out the long fur of her muff, one of those silvery flexible furs which clothe a woman with a delicate sumptuousness. Everything about her, at the moment, seemed rich and cold—everything, as Mrs. Peyton quickly noted, but the blush lingering under her dark skin; and so complete was the girl’s self-command that the blush seemed to be there only because it had been forgotten.
“I dare say you think me strange,” she continued. “Most people do, because I speak the truth. It’s the easiest way of concealing one’s feelings. I can, for instance, talk quite openly about Mr. Peyton under shelter of your inference that I shouldn’t do so if I were what is called ‘interested’ in him. And as I am interested in him, my method has its advantages!” She ended with one of the fluttering laughs which seemed to flit from point to point of her expressive person.
Mrs. Peyton leaned toward her. “I believe you are interested,” she said quietly; “and since I suppose you allow others the privilege you claim for yourself, I am going to confess that I followed you here in the hope of finding out the nature of your interest.”
Miss Verney shot a glance at her, and drew away in a soft subsidence of undulating furs.
“Is this an embassy?” she asked smiling.
“No: not in any sense.”
The girl leaned back with an air of relief. “I’m glad; I should have disliked—” She looked again at Mrs. Peyton. “You want to know what I mean to do?”
“Yes.”
“Then I can only answer that I mean to wait and see what he does.”
“You mean that everything is contingent on his success?”
“I am—if I’m everything,” she admitted gaily.
The mother’s heart was beating in her throat, and her words seemed to force themselves out through the throbs.
“I—I don’t quite see why you attach such importance to this special success.”
“Because he does,” the girl returned instantly. “Because to him it is the final answer to his self- questioning—the questioning whether he is ever to amount to anything or not. He says if he has anything in him it ought to come out now. All the conditions are favourable—it is the chance he has always prayed for. You see,” she continued, almost confidentially, but without the least loss of composure—“you see he has told me a great deal about himself and his various experiments—his phrases of indecision and disgust. There are lots of tentative talents in the world, and the sooner they are crushed out by circumstances the better. But it seems as though he really had it in him to do something distinguished—as though the uncertainty lay in his character and not in his talent. That is what interests, what attracts me. One can’t teach a man to have genius, but if he has it one may show him how to use it. That is what I should be good for, you see—to keep him up to his opportunities.”
Mrs. Peyton had listened with an intensity of attention that left her reply unprepared. There was something startling and yet half attractive in the girl’s avowal of principles which are oftener lived by than professed.
“And you think,” she began at length, “that in this case he has fallen below his opportunity?”
“No one can tell, of course; but his discouragement, his abattement, is a bad sign. I don’t think he has any hope of succeeding.”
The mother again wavered a moment. “Since you are so frank,” she then said, “will you let me be equally so, and ask how lately you have seen him?”
The girl smiled at the circumlocution. “Yesterday afternoon,” she said simply.
“And you thought him—”
“Horribly down on his luck. He said himself that his brain was empty.”
Again Mrs. Peyton felt the throb in her throat, and a slow blush rose to her cheek. “Was that all he said?”
“About himself—was there anything else?” said the girl quickly.
“He didn’t tell you of—of an opportunity to make up for the time he has lost?”
“An opportunity? I don’t understand.”
