“I wish Nancy had a few labels,” said Mrs. Averil. “I wish she could have travelled and studied as Miss Toner—Adrienne that is—has done. She is such a little ignoramus. Adrienne may bore you and me, but Nancy will never interest anyone—except you and me.”
It was always amusing to Oldmeadow, if a little sardonically so, to note that any conception of himself as a possible suitor for Nancy had never entered Mrs. Averil’s mind. As a friend he was everything a mother could desire; as a match for Nancy almost unimaginable. Well, he could not give a wife even one hunter and he never had had any intention of falling in love with his dear nymph; yet that other people might not do so was a suggestion he repudiated with warmth.
“Oh; in love, yes,” Mrs. Averil agreed. “I don’t deny that she’s very loveable and I hope she may marry well. But that’s not the same thing as being interesting, is it? A man may be in love with a woman who doesn’t interest him.”
“I dispute that statement.”
“I’m sure dear Eleanor never interested her husband—devoted to the day of his death as he was. There’s something in my idea. To be interesting one must offer something new. If Nancy had been interesting to Barney she would now, I think, have been in Adrienne’s place. Not that it would have been a marriage to be desired for either of them.”
So he and Mrs. Averil had been thinking the same thoughts.
“And you contend that if Nancy had been to China and read Goethe and Dante in the originals he’d have been interested? I think he was quite sufficiently interested and that if Miss Toner hadn’t come barging into our lives he’d have known he was in love.”
“Going to China is a figure of speech and stands for all the things she hasn’t got and doesn’t know. My poor little Nancy. All the same, she isn’t a bore!” said Mrs. Averil with as near an approach to acerbity as she could show.
“No; she isn’t a bore. The things she knows have to be found out, by degrees, through living with her. Barney hasn’t been to China, either, so, according to your theory, Nancy didn’t find him interesting.”
At this Mrs. Averil’s eyes met his and, after a moment of contemplation, they yielded up to him the secret they saw to be shared. “If only it were the same for women! But they don’t need the new. She’s young. She’ll get over it. I don’t believe in broken hearts. All the same,” Mrs. Averil stopped in their walk, ostensibly to examine the growth of a fine pink lupin, “it hasn’t endeared Adrienne to me. I’m too terre-à-terre, about that, too, not to feel vexation, on Nancy’s account. And what I’m afraid of is that she knows she’s not endeared to me. That she guesses. She’s a bore; but she’s not a bit stupid, you know.”