"Right," said Kenyon. "I'll think out a line of action and let you know to-morrow. There's no time to be lost."
Apart from the fact that he was going to wait up for Belle, he wanted to be alone. He was angry. It was just like his bad luck to come all the way to America and find that the two men who had it in their power to be of substantial use to him were both fully occupied,--one being hopelessly in love, the other in money trouble and in what he recognized as a difficult and even dangerous position. With characteristic selfishness he resented these things. They made it necessary for him to exercise his brain,--not for himself--which was his idea of the whole art of living--but for others. There were other things that he resented also. One was the fact that Peter was what he called a damned child. He had no admiration whatever for his friend's absolute determination to look only at the clean things of life. A thousand times since they had shared the same rooms he had cursed Peter because of his sweeping refusal to discuss a question which he knew to be of vital and far-reaching importance. At these times Peter had always said something like this: "My dear Nick, I'm not going to be a doctor, a woman-hunter, or a sloppy man about town. I don't want to know any details whatever of the things which stir up other men's curiosity. I've no room in my brain for them. They don't amuse me or interest me. I'm jolly well going to remain a damned child, whether you like it or not, so you may chuck trying to drag me into these midnight discussions of yours with the men who hang nudes all over their walls and gloat over filthy little French books."
And then there was Graham. He, like untold hundreds of his type, had a certain amount of precocity, but no knowledge. He had merely peeked at the truth of things through a chink. He had looked at life with the salacious eyes of a Peeping Tom. And what was the result? Worse than total ignorance. Deep down in whatever soul he had, Nicholas Kenyon honestly and truly believed in friendship between father and son. He knew--none better--because it was his business to observe, that a young man was frightfully and terribly handicapped who went out into the world unwarned, unadvised and uninitiated. He had often come across men like Peter and Graham whose lives had been absolutely ruined at the very outset for the reason that their fathers had either been too cowardly or too indifferent to give them the benefit of their own experience and early troubles. In fact, most of the men he knew--and he knew a great many--had been left to discover the essential truths and facts for themselves. The inevitable end of it was that they made their discoveries too late.