“I bluffed her out of it. And say, Miss Greene!”
“Yes, Andy.”
“There may be something to that kid.”
“Glad you think so.”
Said Andy Dunne, expert on the human race slowly, consideringly, and more prophetically than he knew:
“I kinda think there’s fighting stuff some-wheres under that fat.”
CHAPTER VI
HAD Andy Dunne’s surmise been laid before Darcy, it might have brought sorely needed encouragement to her soul as the regenerative process went on. True she had presently passed the first crisis which athletic regimen develops for the untrained, and which is purely muscular. She no longer swung to and fro, a helpless pendulum, between the agonies of apprehension and the anguish of action. The steady exercise was telling in so far as her muscles were concerned; she had still to face the test of discipline. In this second and sterner crisis, Andy Dunne could help her but little. It was a question of her own power of will, a will grown slack and flabby from lack of exercise. Ahead of her loomed, only dimly discerned as yet, the ordeal of strenuous monotony; the deadly-dull, prolonged grind wherein endurance, as it hardens, is subjected to a constantly harsher strain, until the soul revolts as, in the earlier stage, the body had rebelled.
A subject like Gloria Greene, high and fine of spirit, the sage Mr. Dunne could have eased through the difficult phase by appeals to her pride and to the sense of partnership which the successful trainer must establish between himself and his pupil. With Darcy this was impracticable because Andy Dunne, as he would have admitted with a regretful grin, was “in wrong.” Darcy enthusiastically hated him.
At first sight she had estimated him as a stern spirit. Through successive changes that reckoning had been altered to “harsh,” then “brutal,” and now “Satanic.” Gloria’s judgment of her note of introduction as “a commutation ticket to Hades, first class,” was amply borne out.