“Yes, very,” said Barney, relapsing now into a slight sulkiness. “At least, perhaps not very, as rich Americans go. She gave away a lot of her fortune, I know, when her mother died. She founded a place for children—a convalescent home, or crèche—out in California. And she did something in Chicago, too.”
And Miss Toner had evidently done something in London at the Lumleys’. It couldn’t be helped about Nancy, and if the American girl was pretty and, for all her nonsense, well-bred, it might not be a bad thing, since there was so much money. The Chadwicks were not at all well off, and Coldbrooks was only kept going by Mrs. Chadwick’s economies and Barney’s labours at his uncle’s stock-broking firm in the city. Oldmeadow could see Eleanor Chadwick’s so ingenuous yet so practical eye fixed on Miss Toner’s gold, and he, too, could fix his. Miss Toner sounded benevolent, and it was probable that her presence as mistress of Coldbrooks would be of benefit to all Barney’s relatives. All the same, she sounded as irrelevant in his life as the Wyndham Lewis.
“Adrienne Toner,” he heard himself repeating aloud, for he had a trick, caught, no doubt, from his long loneliness, of relapsing into absent-minded and audible meditations. The cadence of it worried him. It was an absurd name. “You know each other pretty well already, it seems,” he said.
“Yes; it’s extraordinary how one seems to know her. One doesn’t have any formalities to get through with her, as it were,” said Barney. “Either you are there, or you are not there.”
“Either on the yacht, or not on the yacht, eh?” Oldmeadow reached out for his pipe.
“Put it like that if you choose. It’s awfully jolly to be on the yacht, I can tell you. It is like a voyage, a great adventure, to know her.”
“And what’s it like to be off the yacht? Suppose I’m not there? Suppose she doesn’t like me?” Oldmeadow suggested. “What am I to talk to her about—of course I’ll come, if you really want me. But she frightens me a little, I confess. I’m not an adventurous person.”
“But neither am I, you know!” Barney exclaimed, “and that’s just what she does to you: makes you adventurous. She’ll be immensely interested in you, of course. You can talk to her about anything. It was down at a week-end at the Lumleys’ I first met her, and there were some tremendous big-wigs there, political, you know, and literary, and all that sort of thing; and she had them all around her. She’d have frightened me, too, if I hadn’t seen at once that she took to me and wouldn’t mind my being just ordinary. She likes everybody; that’s just it. She takes to everybody, big and little. She’s just like sunshine,” Barney stammered a little over his s’s. “That’s what she makes one think of straight off; shining on everything.”
“On the clean and the unclean. I see,” said Oldmeadow. “I feel it in my bones that I shall come into the unclean category with her. But it’ll do me the more good to have her shine on me.”