Miss Haddon had allowed him to win a couple of games. Never before had he felt so absolutely certain of the unusual acuteness of his intellect.
IV
Three days later, Miss Haddon and Claude Melville were feeding chickens—under protest.
“I mean to give it up, of course,” the former said. “It's a degrading pursuit; it's almost as bad as the ‘things that Jimmy does,’ the things that give him such a marvellous complexion and keep his figure so magnificent.”
She threw a handful of grain to the frenzied denizens of the enlarged meat-safe before them, and added in a tone of pensive reflectiveness:
“Why is it, I wonder, that these actions which, as you have taught me, are unworthy of thinking people, tend to make the body so beautiful, the eyes so bright and clear, the cheeks rose-tinted, the limbs straight and supple?”
All the time that she was speaking her glance crept musingly over Claude's tall, but weak-looking and rather flaccid form, seeming to pause on his thin undeveloped arms, his lanky legs, and his slightly yellow face. That face began to flush. She sighed.
“There must be something radically wrong in the scheme of the universe,” she continued. “But, of course, one ought to live for the mind and for subtle sensations, even though they do make one look an object.”
Her eyes were on the chickens now, who were fighting like feathered furies, pouncing, clucking, running for safety, grain in beak, or, with a fiery anxiety, chasing the favoured brethren who had secured a morsel and were hoping to be permitted to swallow it. Claude glanced at her furtively out of the corner of his eye, and endeavoured, for the first time in his life, to stand erect and broaden his rather narrow chest.
Silently he resolved to give instructions to his tailor not to spare the padding in his future coats. He was glad, too, that knee-breeches, for which he had occasionally sighed, had not come into fashion again. After all, modern dress had its little advantages. Miss Haddon was still scattering grain, rather in the attitude of Millet's “Sower,” and still talking reflectively.