“Yes; that’s true, certainly,” Oldmeadow conceded. “Miss Toner isn’t a sheep. She’s the sort of person who sets the sheep moving. I’m not so sure that she knows where she is going, all the same.”
“You mean—Be careful; don’t you?” said Meg, looking up at him sideways with her handsome eyes. “I’m not such a sheep myself, when it comes to that, you know, Roger. I look before I leap—even after Adrienne,” she laughed; and Oldmeadow, looking back at her, laughed too—pleased with her, yet a little disconcerted by what she revealed of experience.
“The reason I like her so awfully,” Meg went on—while he reflected that, after all, she was now twenty-five—“and it’s a good thing I do, isn’t it, since it’s evident she’s going to take Barney; but the reason is that she’s so interested in one. More than anyone I ever knew—far and far away. Of course Mother’s interested; but it’s for one; about one; not in one, as it were. And then darling old Mummy isn’t exactly intelligent, is she; or only in such unexpected spots that it’s never much good to one; one can never count on it beforehand. Whereas Adrienne is so interested in you that she makes you feel more interested in yourself than you ever dreamed you could feel. Do you know what I mean? Is it because she’s American, do you think? English people aren’t interested in themselves, off their own bat, perhaps; or in other people either! I don’t mean we’re not selfish all right!” Meg laughed.
“Selfish and yet impersonal,” Oldmeadow mused. “With less of our social consciousness in use, with more of it locked up in automatism, possibly.”
“There’s nothing locked up in Adrienne; absolutely nothing,” Meg declared. “It’s all there—out in the shop-window. And it’s a big window too, even though some of the hats and scarves, so to speak, may strike us as funny. But, seriously, what is it about her, do you think? How can she care so much?—about everybody?”
He remembered Nancy’s diagnosis. “Not about everybody. Only about people she can do something for. You’ll find she won’t care about me.”
“Why should she? You don’t care for her. Why should she waste herself on people who don’t need her?” Meg’s friendliness of glance did not preclude a certain hardness.
“Why indeed? It could never occur to her, of course, that she might need somebody. I don’t mean that spitefully. She is strong. She doesn’t need.”
“Exactly. Like you,” said Meg. “She’s quite right to pay no attention to the other strong people. For of course you are very strong, Roger, and frightfully clever; and good, too. Only one has to be cleverer, no doubt, than we are to see your goodness as easily as Adrienne’s. It’s the shop-window again. She shows her goodness all the time; and you don’t.”’
Oldmeadow knocked the ashes out of his pipe and felt for his tobacco-pouch. “I show my spite. No; you mustn’t count me among the good. I suppose your mother’s headache came on this morning after she found out that Miss Toner doesn’t go to church.”