'I think,' said Henry, 'it's being in love that's going to help me. We've got to hold our heads up, you and I. Build the Gleaner into a real property. Win confidence. And there mustn't be any doubt. The way we step out and fight, you know. I've got to stand with you.'
Humphrey's eyes strayed to the sunlit window. He suppressed a little sigh.
'This note's right enough, in a way,' Henry went on. 'It wouldn't be fair to compromise her.' He leaned earnestly over the table. 'It's really a hopeless love. I know that, Hump. But it isn't like the others.' It makes me feel ashamed of them. All of them. I've got to show her, or at least show myself, that it's this love that has made a man of me. Without asking anything, you know.'
Humphrey listened in silence as the talk ran on. The boy was changing, no question about that. Even back of the romantic strain that was colouring his attitude, the suggestion of pose in it, there was real evidence of this change. At least his fighting blood was up. And he was taking punishment.
Sitting there sipping his coffee, Humphrey, half listening, soberly considered his younger friend. Henry was distinctly odd, a square peg in a round world. He was capable of curiously outrageous acts, yet most of them seemed to arise from a downright inability to sense the common attitude, to feel with his fellows. He could be heedless, neglectful, self-centred; but Humphrey had never found meanness or unkindness in him. And he was capable of a passionate generosity. He had, indeed, for Humphrey, the fascination that an erratic and ingenuous but gifted person often exerts on older, steadier natures. You could be angry at him; but you couldn't get over the feeling that you had to take care of him. And it always seemed, even when he was out and out exasperating, that the thing that was the matter with him was the very quality that underlay his astonishing gifts; that he was really different from others; the difference ran all through, from his unexpected, rather self-centred ways of acting and reacting clear up to the fact that he could write what other people couldn't write. 'If they could,' thought Humphrey now, shrewdly, 'very likely they'd be different too.' Take this business of dressing up like a born suburbanite and going to church. It was something of a romantic gesture, But that wasn't all it was. The fight was real, whatever unexpected things it might lead him to do from day to day.
Herbert de Casselles, wooden-faced, dressed impeccably in frock coat, heavy 'Ascot' tie, gray striped trousers perfectly creased, (Henry had never owned a frock coat) ushered him half-way down the long aisle to a seat in Mrs Ellen F. Wilson's pew. He felt eyes on him as he walked, imagined whispers, and set his face doggedly against them all. He had set out in a sort of fervor; but now the thing was harder to do than he had imagined. The people looked cold and hostile. It was to be a long fight. He might never win. The more successful he might come to be, the more some of them would hate him and fight him down... It was queer, Herb de Casselles ushering him.
The organist slid on to his seat, up in the organ loft behind the pulpit; spread out his music and turned up the corners; pulled and pushed on stops and couplers; glanced up into his narrow mirror; adjusted his tie; fussed again with the stops; began to play.
Henry sat up stiffly, even boldly, and looked about. Across the church, in a pew near the front, sat the Watts: the Senator, on the aisle, looking curiously insignificant with his meek, red face and his little, slightly askew chin beard; Madame Watt sitting wide and high over him, like a stout hawk, chin up, nose down, beady eyes fixed firmly on the pulpit; Cicely Hamlin almost fragile beside her, eyes downcast—or was she looking at the hymns?
When Cicely was talking, with her nervous eagerness, her quick smile, her almost Frenchy gestures, she seemed gay. When in repose, as now, her delicate sensitiveness, her slightly sad expression, were evident, even to Henry.
Made him feel in the closing scene of The Prisoner of Zenda, where he was bidding the Princess who could never be his a last farewell; the mere sight of her thrilled him with a deep romantic sorrow.