Now, Peter had never been a woman's man. To him women and their ways were new and wonderful. He suspected nothing. Why should he? He accepted Mrs. Randolph Lennox on her face value, which was priceless, as so many other excellent and unsophisticated young men had done. He believed in her and her stories and was very sorry that she had been unhappy. He believed that she was sincere and good and clean and that she liked him and was his friend.
Kenyon, who watched all this, called Peter an easy mark. He was. What else could he be in the expert and cunning hands of such a woman?
As for Mrs. Lennox, her performance,--it was rather in the nature of a performance,--was all the more brilliant and effective because Peter appealed to her more than any man she had ever met. His height and strength and squareness, his fearless honesty, his unself-conscious pride and boyish love of life,--she liked them all. She liked his clean-cut healthy face and thick hair and amazing laugh. But, above everything, she liked him for being untilled soil, virgin earth. It was this that piqued her seriously and set alight in her a desire which grew and grew, to test her charms upon him, to taste him, to stir him into a first great passion. And this was the real reason that she gave him so much of her time and company. The gratification of this desire was the thing for which she was working, upon which she had set her mind. Hers was not a record of failures. Peter stood a very poor chance of getting out whole.
Nicholas Kenyon has promised himself that, one of these days, when abject poverty forces him to work, he will write a whole book about Peter and Baby Lennox, and call it "Another Temptation of St. Anthony."
Not only did Kenyon watch this, to him, rather extraordinary incident, with keen interest, but so also did the members of his father's house-party, who came to regard Peter as a kind of freak. They all knew,--because they were all psychologists,--that Mrs. Lennox was badly smitten, as they put it, on this young American. They all knew,--because one of the women made it her business to spy,--that their temporary hostess was going through all the tricks of her trade to seduce this unconscious boy.