“Captain Cairns, can I have one word with you?”
Outside in the corridor she spoke to him tremulously. She was very pale, and she betrayed a nervousness and agitation strangely out of character with the melodramatic heroine of the Captain’s interrupted tale.
“Oh, Captain Cairns, do you think”--and after hesitating she used a phrase that on several occasions he had used himself--“do you think I have bitten off more than I can chew?”
“No,” said Mr. Cairns stoutly. “You’ve done a good morning’s work, and I, well, I’m proud of you.”
The venture turned up trumps. After three months of painful hope and fear they sold _Marian II._ and got back all their money. Then four months later they sold the last ship and wound up the modest syndicate with a profit of fifty thousand pounds. Meanwhile, operating alone, Miss Verinder had bought and sold two larger vessels and thereby gained nearly seventy thousand pounds. Then she bought ordinary shares in shipping companies, received fabulous dividends, and got out again. Then, as a last flutter, returning to an old fancy, she did something really big in oil. And then, literally and metaphorically, she folded her hands.
Long before this time Mr. Burnett, the stockbroker, had ceased to talk to her about his cousin Adela, or to lecture her in general terms on the foolishness of lonely widows and spinsters. He understood now that in a world which has gone upside down wise saws and ancient instances are out of place. He hung upon her words, he treated her with the deference due to an important client; as his clerks would have said, “he wished he had half her complaint.”
She herself was frightened by her success. In the inevitable reaction after so much nervous strain and excitement, she felt an almost superstitious fear of the flood of new capital that was rolling in upon her. She had dreaded poverty, and now it was as if some instinct warned her that she might have a greater cause to dread the consequences of wealth. She told no one anything about it--no, not even Tony. She guarded all knowledge of it as though it had been a guilty secret. She flushed and felt ashamed when affluent Mrs. Bell emitted groans under the war taxation, or when people spoke with scathing contempt of war profiteers. She longed for peace.