That was all--but that was a great deal! Blanche Farrow and Lionel Varick had at any rate one thing in common--they both felt a horror of poverty, and all that poverty implies.
Gradually Miss Farrow had discovered a few particulars about her friend's dead wife.

Millicent Fauncey had been the only child of a rather eccentric Suffolk squire, a man of great taste, known in the art world of London as a collector of fine Jacobean furniture, long before Jacobean furniture had become the rage.

After her father's death his daughter, having let Wyndfell Hall, had wandered about the world with a companion till she had drifted across her future husband's path at an hotel in Florence.
"What attracted me," Lionel Varick had explained rather awkwardly on the only occasion when he had really talked of his late wife to Blanche Farrow, "was her helplessness, and, yes, a kind of simplicity." Blanche had looked at him a little sharply.

She had never known Lionel attracted by weakness or simplicity before.

All women seemed attracted by him--but he was by no means attracted by all women.
"Poor Milly didn't care for Wyndfell Hall," he had gone on, "for she spent a very lonely, dull girlhood there.