"Do you think she may make him happy?" he asked. It was sweet to him to know that she had no need of a refuge from him. She could take counsel with him as candidly as if there had been no tacit avowal between them. She looked round at him as they went on walking and he saw pain and perplexity in her eyes.
"What do you think, Roger?" she said. "Can she?"
"Well, might she, if Barney is stupid enough?"
"I don't feel he would have to be stupid to be happy with her, Roger. You are not fair to her. What I wonder is whether he will be strong enough not to be quite swept away."
"You think she'll overpower him? Leave him with no mind of his own?"
"Something like that perhaps. Because she's very strong. And she is so different. Everything in her is different. She has nothing--nothing with us, or we with her. We haven't done the same things or seen the same sights or thought the same thoughts. I hardly feel as if the trees could look the same to her as they do to us or the birds sound the same. And she'll want such different things."
"Perhaps she'll want his things," Oldmeadow mused. "She seems to like them quite immensely already."
"Ah, but only because she's going to do something to them," said Nancy. "Only because she's going to change them. I don't think she'd like anything she could do nothing for."
Nancy had quite grown up. She had seen further than he had. He felt her quiet comment big with intuitive wisdom.
"You see deep, my dear," he said. "There's something portentous in your picture, you know."
"There is something portentous about her, Roger. That is just what I feel. That is just what troubles me."
"She may be portentous, in relation to us, and what she may do to us," said Oldmeadow, "but I'm convinced, for all her marvels, that she's a very ordinary young person. Don't let us magnify her. If she's not magnified she won't work so many marvels. They're largely an affair, I'm sure of it, of motors and pendants. She's ordinary. That's what I take my stand on."
"If she's ordinary, why do you feel, too, that she'll sweep Barney away?" Nancy was not at all convinced by his demonstration.
"Why, because he's in love with her. That's all. Her only menace is in her difference; her complacency. What it comes to, I suppose, is that we must hope, if they're to be happy, that he'll like her things."