“Oh, yes, I know--the inward approval, and all that. Well, I’m afraid I like the other kind: the drums and wreaths and acclamations. If I were Mr. Peyton, for instance, I’d much rather win the competition than--than be as disinterested as Mr. Darrow.”
Mrs. Peyton smiled. “I hope you won’t tell him so,” she said half seriously. “He is over-stimulated already; and he is so easily influenced by any one who--whose opinion he values.”
She stopped abruptly, hearing herself, with a strange inward shock, re-echo the words which another man’s mother had once spoken to her. Miss Verney did not seem to take the allusion to herself, for she continued to fix on Mrs. Peyton a gaze of impartial sympathy.
“But we can’t help being interested!” she declared.
“It’s very kind of you; but I wish you would all help him to feel that his competition is after all of very little account compared with other things--his health and his peace of mind, for instance. He is looking horribly used up.”
The girl glanced over her shoulder at Dick, who was just reentering the room at Darrow’s side.
“Oh, do you think so?” she said. “I should have thought it was his friend who was used up.”
Mrs. Peyton followed the glance with surprise. She had been too preoccupied to notice Darrow, whose crudely modelled face was always of a dull pallour, to which his slow-moving grey eye lent no relief except in rare moments of expansion. Now the face had the fallen lines of a death-mask, in which only the smile he turned on Dick remained alive; and the sight smote her with compunction. Poor Darrow! He did look horribly fagged out: as if he needed care and petting and good food. No one knew exactly how he lived. His rooms, according to Dick’s report, were fireless and ill kept, but he stuck to them because his landlady, whom he had fished out of some financial plight, had difficulty in obtaining other lodgers. He belonged to no clubs, and wandered out alone for his meals, mysteriously refusing the hospitality which his friends pressed on him. It was plain that he was very poor, and Dick conjectured that he sent what he earned to an aunt in his native village; but he was so silent about such matters that, outside of his profession, he seemed to have no personal life.