"But she's that sort, you think. The sort that marries princes and has no traditions. Where did they come from? Do you know that?"
"I haven't an idea. Yet, stay. Was it not tooth-paste?--Toner's Peerless Tooth-Paste. Obsolete; yet I seem to see, reminiscently, in far-away nursery days, the picture of a respectable old gentleman with side-whiskers, on a tube. A pretty pink glazed tube with a gilt top to it. Perhaps it's that. Since it was Toner's it would be the father's side; not the warbling mother's. Well, many of us might wish for as unambiguous an origin nowadays. And, in America, we did all sorts of useful things when we first, all of us, came over in the Mayflower!" said Mrs. Aldesey with her dragging smile.
Oldmeadow gazed upon his friend with an ironically receptive eye. "Have they ever known anyone decent? Anyone like yourself? I don't mean over here. I mean in America."
"No one like me, I imagine; if I'm decent. Mrs. Toner essayed a season in New York one winter, and it was then I had my glimpse of her, at the opera, in the Queen Louise dress. A pretty woman, dark, with a sort of soulful and eminently respectable coquetry about her; surrounded by swarms of devotees--all male, to me unknown; and with something in a turban that I took to be a Yogi in the background. She only tried the one winter. She knew what she wanted and where she couldn't get it. We are very dry in New York--such of us as survive. Very little moved by warblings or astral bodies or millions. As you intimate, she'll have done much better over here. You _are_ a strange mixture of materialism and ingenuousness, you know."
"It's only that we have fewer Mrs. Toners to amuse us and more to do with millions than you have," said Oldmeadow; but Mrs. Aldesey, shaking her head with a certain sadness, said that it wasn't as simple as all that.
"Have you seen her? Have you seen Adrienne?" she took up presently, making him his second cup of tea. "Is she pretty? Is he very much in love?"
"I'm going down to Coldbrooks on Saturday to see her," said Oldmeadow, "and I gather that it's not to subject her to any test that Barney wants me; it's to subject me, rather. He's quite sure of her. He thinks she's irresistible. He merely wants to make assurance doubly sure by seeing me bowled over. I don't know whether she's pretty. She has powers, apparently, that make her independent of physical attractions. She lays her hands on people's heads and cures them. She cured Charlie Lumley of insomnia at Saint Moritz three years ago."