This recognition took a great deal of the vigor from his intended conversation with Peyton Morris: anything in the way of patronage, he reflected, would be as useless as it would be false. But he had no impulse to forego his purpose; he was engaged to help Claire who was too proud to help herself; yes, by heaven, and too right for the least humiliation. If Claire suffered, it must be because the world was too inferior for hope of any kind.
Lee was not unaware of the incongruity of his position, for he was equally ignoring the needs of two others, Peyton and Mina Raff. It was evident to him now, since he had seen her in a picture, that she was well worth the greatest consideration. She lay outside the stream of ordinary responsibilities. What held him steady was the belief that she and Peyton were not so important to each other as they thought; Claire needed him more badly than Mina. There was a possibility—no, it was probable—that Claire deserted would develop into an individual as empty and as vacantly sounding as a drum. She had said as much. Her heritage, together with its splendors of courage and charm, signally carried that menace.
So much, joined to what already was thronging his thoughts, brought Lee's mind to resemble the sheet of an enormous ledger covered with a jumble of figures apparently beyond any reduction to an answer. He was considering Claire and Mina Raff, Mina and Claire, at a hunt breakfast at Willing Spencer's in Nantbrook Valley, north of Eastlake, when, with a plate of food in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, he collided with Peyton Morris, his face pinched and his eyes dull from a lack of rest. The Spencer house was sparely furnished, a square unimpressive dwelling principally adapted to the early summers of its energetic children; and Peyton and Lee Randon allowed themselves to be crowded into the bare angle formed by a high inner door.
“Claire told you,” the younger said.
“Yes,” Lee replied briefly. It wouldn't, after all, be difficult to talk to Peyton; he was obviously miserable from the necessity of suppressing what absorbed his entire consciousness.
“Well, I suppose you think there's nothing to be said for me,” his voice was defiant; “and that I ought to be shot.”
“Very much to the contrary,” Lee asserted; “there is so much to say that it's difficult to know where to begin. With another situation practically the same, I might have agreed with you thoroughly; but, with Claire and what I have gathered of you, in this special one I can't.”
“It isn't absolutely necessary,” the other pointed out; “Mina and I will have a lot to ignore.”
“The first thing you'll have to manage,” Lee observed sharply, “is to grow up. You are not in a place to be helped by leather-headed satire and visions of solitary grandeur. My interest comes only from Claire and some personal curiosity; Mina Raff doesn't require anyone's assistance. Of you all, her position is clearest. I don't know if you can be brought to see it, but this is only incidental, a momentary indulgence, with her.”