She looked at me with a slight smile. “Of course you guess what I’m going to do with it?” she asked.
“Yes, I think so. You ought to have it properly settled on her, you know. It should be carefully tied up.”
The suggestion seemed to annoy her.
“No,” she said sharply. “What she does with it, and what becomes of it, have nothing to do with me. I shall have done my part. I shall be—free.”
“I wish you would take the advice of somebody you trust.”
That softened her suddenly. She put her hand out across the table and pressed mine for a moment. “I trust you very much. I have no other friend I trust so much. Believe that, please. But I must act for myself here.” She smiled again, and with the old touch of irony added, “It will satisfy your friends at the Bittleton Club?”
“It’s a great deal too much,” I protested, with a shake of the head. “Thirty would have been adequate; fifty, generous; a hundred thousand is quixotic.”
“I’ve chosen the precise sum most carefully,” Miss Gladwin assured me. “And it’s anything but quixotic,” she added, with a smile.
A queer little calculation was going on in my brain. Wisdom (or interest, which you will) and twenty-five thousand a year against love and three thousand—was that, in her eyes, a fair fight? Perhaps the reckoning was not so far out. At any rate, love had a chance—with three thousand pounds a year. There is more difference between three thousand pounds and nothing than exists between three thousand and all the rest of the money in the world.
“Is Miss Tyler aware of your intentions?”