She hated, quite
frankly, that he should go about the house with a glum face because an old
man, whom he had never taken the trouble to go and see when he was alive,
was now dead. She showed him that she hated it.
He turned desperately to his work. There had been a hint, only the other
day, from the newspaper for which he wrote, that his reviews had not,
lately, been up to his usual standard. He knew that they seemed to him
twice as difficult to do as they had seemed a year ago and that therefore
he did them twice as badly.
He flung himself upon his book and swore that he would dissipate the
shadows that hid it from him. One of the shadows he saw quite clearly
was Cards' attitude to his work. It was strange, he thought almost
pathetically, how closely his feeling for Cards now resembled the feeling
that he had had, those years ago, at Dawson's. He still worshipped
him--worship was the only possible word--worshipped him for all the things
that he, Peter, was not. One could not be with him, Peter thought, one
could not watch his movements, hear his voice without paying it all the
most absolute reverence. The glamour about Cards was, to Peter, something
almost from another world. Peter felt so clumsy, so rough and ugly and
noisy and out-of-place when Cards was present that the fact that Cards was
almost always present now made life a very difficult thing.
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