This was incontrovertibly true, but Betty chose to be irritated. Justin was so obviously successful. He might have had a little sympathy for the underdog, she thought. Everybody did not have a square, salient jaw like his. Weakness was not necessarily a crime.
“He looks as though life had mauled him,” she said. “It’s taken something vital out of him. He doesn’t care what happens any more.”
“If he can only mooch his three meals a day and enough cash to keep him supplied with bootleg poison,” the engineer added.
They were walking up to the Three Pines, a rocky bluff from which they could in the daytime see far down the valley. She stopped abruptly. If she did not stamp her foot, at least the girl’s manner gave eloquently the effect of this indulgence.
“He’s not like that at all—not at all. Don’t you ever sympathize with any one that’s in hard luck?” she cried out, her cheeks glowing with a suffusion of underlying crimson.
“Not when he lies down under it.”
She flashed at him a look resentful of his complacency. It held, too, for the first time a critical doubt. There was plenty to like about Justin Merrick, and perhaps there was more to admire. He got things done because he was so virile, so dominant. To look at the lines and movements of his sturdy body, at the close-lipped mouth and resolute eyes, was to know him a leader of men. But now a treasonable thought had wirelessed itself into her brain. Had he a mind that never ranged out of well-defined pastures, that was quite content with the social and economic arrangement of the world? Did there move in it only a tight little set of orthodox ideas?
“How do you know he lies down under it?” she asked with spirit. “How do we know what he has to contend with? Or how he struggles against it?”
If his open smile was not an apology, it refused, anyhow, to be at variance with her. “Maybe so. As you say, I didn’t see him and you did. We’ll let it go at that and hope he’s all you think he is.”
Betty, a little ashamed of her vagrant thoughts, tried to find a common ground upon which they could stand. “Don’t you think that men are often the victims of circumstance—that they get caught in currents that kinda sweep them away?”