"And where do the rest of us come in!" Barney ejaculated. He was so happy in the triumph of his beloved that his eyes, their sleepiness banished, were almost as brilliant as Palgrave's.
"But you're always coming in with Mrs. Chadwick," said Miss Toner. She looked at him, if with a touch of tender humour, exactly as she looked at his mother; but then she looked at them both as if they were precious to her. "I don't want you to come in at all for that month. I want her to forget you ever existed. There ought to be waters of Lethe for everyone every now and then, even in this life. We come out, after the plunge into forgetfulness, far brighter and stronger and with a renovated self to love the better with. Afterwards--after she's had her dip--you'll all come in, if you want to, with me. I'll get a car big enough. You, too, Miss Averil; and Mr. Oldmeadow; though he and Barney and Palgrave may have to take turns sitting on the portmanteaus."
"Barney" and "Palgrave" already. Her unpretentious mastery alarmed almost as much as it amused him. He thanked her, with his dry smile, saying that he really preferred to see the Alps on his legs and asked, to temper the possible acerbity, "Do you drive yourself?" for it seemed in keeping with his picture of her as an invading providence that she should with her own hand conduct the car of fate. He could see her, somehow, taking the hairpin curves on the Galibier.
But Miss Toner said she did not drive. "One can't see flowers if one drives oneself; and it would hurt dear Macfarlane's feelings so. Macfarlane is my chauffeur and he's been with me for years; from the time we first began to have motors, my mother and I, out in California. Apart from that, I should like it, I think, with the sense of risk and venture it must give. I like the sense of high adventure--of 'Childe Roland to the dark tower came'; don't you, Palgrave? It's life, isn't it? The pulse of life. Danger and venture and conquest. And then resting, on the heights, while one hears the bells beneath one."
This, thought Oldmeadow, as he adjusted his glass the better to examine Miss Toner, must prove itself too much, even for Palgrave to swallow. But Palgrave swallowed it without a tremor. His eyes on hers he answered: "Yes, I feel life like that, too."