“Hardly that,” Oldmeadow smiled. “Even in the country. You don’t think Miss Toner does wrong things. If they take up Miss Toner’s creed instead of going to church, they won’t come to much harm. The principal thing is that there should be something to take up. After all,” he was reassuring himself as well as Mrs. Chadwick, “it hasn’t hurt her. It’s made her a little foolish; but it hasn’t hurt her. And your children will never be foolish. They’ll get all the good of it and, perhaps, be able to combine it with going to church.
“Foolish, Roger?” Mrs. Chadwick, relieved of her headache, but not of her perplexity, gazed wanly at him. “You think Adrienne foolish?”
“A little. Now and then. You mustn’t accept anything she says to you just because she can cure you of a headache.”
“But how can you say foolish, Roger? She’s had a most wonderful education?”
“Everything that makes her surer of herself and makes other people surer of her puts her in more danger of being foolish. One can be too sure of oneself. Unless one is a saint—and even then. And though I don’t think she’s irreligious I don’t think she’s a saint. Not by any means.”
“I don’t see how anyone can be more of one, nowadays, Roger. She heals people and she says prayers, and she is always good and gentle and never thinks of herself. I’m sure I can’t think what you want more.”
A touch of plaintiveness and even of protest had come into Mrs. Chadwick’s voice.
“Perhaps what I want is less,” he laughed. “Perhaps she’s too much of a saint for my taste. I think she’s a little too much of one for your taste, really—if you were to be quite candid with yourself. Has she spoken to you at all about Barney? Are you quite sure you’ll have to reckon with her for yourself and the children?”
At this Mrs. Chadwick showed a frank alarm. “Oh, quite, quite sure!” she said. “She couldn’t be so lovely to us all if she didn’t mean to take him! Why do you ask, Roger? You haven’t any reason for thinking she won’t?”
“None whatever. Quite the contrary.” He didn’t want to put poor Mrs. Chadwick to the cruel test of declaring whether she would rather have the children go to church and lose Miss Toner and all her money or have them stay away and keep Miss Toner. After all such a test was not to be asked of her. Miss Toner wanted people to follow their own light. “I only wondered if she talked to you about him. Asked any girlish leading questions.”