“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.