He nodded. “Just like I said—‘Tell—Thurley—to—use—her—own judgment,’—and then she looks up at me and she says, ‘An hour’s drive, Ali Baba—not too fast.’” His rough hand was across his eyes.
“Are you quite sure, Ali Baba, that she knew what she was saying?”
“As sure as I am what you are askin’,” the old man answered.
Miss Clergy’s will was dated the year that Thurley went with her to New York. It left, requiring neither bond nor security, everything to Thurley Precore.
But the excitement over the death and the disposal of the fortune was increased by Thurley’s prompt use of it. Even the war lost its prominence when Thurley in remarkably short time gave out a statement declaring her intentions.
Her contracts would be kept but after the present season Thurley Precore was to retire for a year at least, in which she would devote herself—secretly, she whispered, “to being a gray angel and helping Bliss,” but to the public she named it “to the philanthropic enterprise which, with Miss Clergy’s money, was to be started.”
She wrote Bliss Hobart as school-girlish and impulsive a note as one could imagine, setting forth her gray angel theories in superlative fashion, even underlining and putting exclamation points in pairs and punctuating sentences by a wriggling up and down mark which she said he was to consider as “a grin.”
“Of course you’ll be rushed to death when this reaches you,” she concluded, “but you must hear me out. Remember, I listened to all you told me! Never could I spend all that money for myself nor in a sense would it be right. Miss Clergy should have lived down her disappointment, married and raised her boys to fight and her girls to wait and serve. Why should I, stranger that I am, use the money for personal pleasures? I will not even buy a bankrupt title with it.” Here she drew a very large “grin” mark.
“I am buying all the deserted lake houses—we have begun negotiations for them and together with the Fincherie there will be a little city of ex-soldiers learning new trades, forgetting empty sleeves and wheel-chair means of travelling, shell shock, snagged souls—all the wilful things which prevent settling down to every day living.