"No. And he'll be happier trying than he would be if he had it in him to succeed."
He was certainly happy, trying—though he was perhaps happier talking about how happy both Margaret and he were to be when he should succeed. He worked at his manuscript of "Winter" undiscouraged by the sudden abatement of Walter's enthusiasm; but he did nothing to force himself into the way of success. He had a faith in his future that made him almost court a present obscurity; and he looked out on the world from the grating of his ticket window, amused to see that the public mistook him for what he seemed to be. His letters to his mother were full of dark hints of this faith in himself, but to no one else did he write a word of it. He did not write to his aunt or his uncle at all; for he had learned the whole truth of Conroy's "lady in the case," and he preferred rather to be silent than to be a hypocrite.
That "lady" was the young woman whom Conroy had found to do the housework at the time Bert Pittsey took his staff position on the newspaper. He had found her in want, on the streets. And he was living with her, now—an idle remittance man"—no one knew quite where. When Bert Pittsey wished to see him, he looked either in the smoking-room of the Mills Hotel, south of Washington Square, or in a little Italian café and music-hall, near by, in Sullivan Street. Don, too, had gone to see him at this "charity house," but Conroy had refused to recognise him, beyond leaving the smoking-room when he saw his cousin come in; and Don had hurried away, ashamed of the appearance of having spied on his old friend's degradation.
