private houses.

Mrs. Peyton expended all the ingenuities of tenderness in keeping up
her son's courage; and she was seconded in the task by a friend whose
acquaintance Dick had made at the Beaux Arts, and who, two years before
the Peytons, had returned to New York to start on his own career as an
architect. Paul Darrow was a young man full of crude seriousness, who,
after a youth of struggling work and study in his native northwestern
state, had won a scholarship which sent him abroad for a course at the
Beaux Arts. His two years there coincided with the first part of Dick's
residence, and Darrow's gifts had at once attracted the younger student.
Dick was unstinted in his admiration of rival talent, and Mrs. Peyton,
who was romantically given to the cultivation of such generosities, had
seconded his enthusiasm by the kindest offers of hospitality to the young
student. Darrow thus became the grateful frequenter of their little
_salon_; and after their return to New York the intimacy between
the young men was renewed, though Mrs. Peyton found it more difficult
to coax Dick's friend to her New York drawing-room than to the informal
surroundings of the Rue de Varennes. There, no doubt, secluded and absorbed
in her son's work, she had seemed to Darrow almost a fellow-student; but
seen among her own associates she became once more the woman of fashion,
divided from him by the whole breadth of her ease and his awkwardness.
Mrs. Peyton, whose tact had divined the cause of his estrangement, would
not for an instant let it affect the friendship of the two young men. She
encouraged Dick to frequent Darrow, in whom she divined a persistency of
effort, an artistic self-confidence, in curious contrast to his social
hesitancies. The example of his obstinate capacity for work was just the
influence her son needed, and if Darrow would not come to them she insisted
that Dick must seek him out, must never let him think that any social
discrepancy could affect a friendship based on deeper things. Dick, who had