Uneasy Money

Lord Dawlish

Bill Chalmers is the poorest man of his rank in Britain, happily installed as secretary of Brown's until his fiancée Claire refuses to marry him on four hundred a year. He is generous to a fault—handing shillings to strangers while Claire scolds—and cheerfully unambitious, content with golf and friends. When fortune abruptly reverses, his easygoing decency collides with Claire's calculations, setting the novel's romantic and moral machinery in motion.

Elizabeth Boyd

Elizabeth runs the Boyd bee farm at Flack's, managing finances, a wayward brother, and a household with brisk maternal pragmatism. She is practical but not above a strategic half-truth—she lets Nutty believe in a hallucinated monkey to scare him sober. Her grounded competence and quiet humor make her the emotional counterweight to Bill's drifting English charm, and the farm becomes the stage where their worlds collide.

Dudley Pickering

Pickering built a fortune from the Little Pick to the Pickering Giant, and everyone—papers, Bradstreet, and Pickering himself—speaks well of him. He is a colossal bore on the single subject of automobiles, yet beneath the shy, monosyllabic exterior lurks a man capable of sudden geysers of eloquence when love taps the vein. His thirty millions tempt Claire even as his dullness repels her, making him both rival and comic engine of the plot.

Nutty Boyd

Nutty has been living it up in New York on money that was never really his, playing host to horse leeches until his Uncle Ira's will played him false. His drinking has produced a vivid imaginary monkey that climbs wardrobes and crosses carpets, and his repentance is as theatrical as his extravagance. He is the prodigal whose return—and whose terror of Eustace the monkey—anchors the Boyd household's comic and financial stakes.

Claire Fenwick

Claire is engaged to Bill but has quietly omitted that fact during the voyage, letting Dudley Pickering fall in love with her while she weighs thirty millions against her self-respect. She wants to keep her good opinion of herself, which means she needs an ostensible cause—however trivial—to break the engagement. Her cool manipulation of both men, and her talent for pathos-laden scenes, drives the romantic complications of the early and middle chapters.

Lady Pauline Wetherby

Lady Wetherby arranges for Claire and Dudley Pickering to share a ship, then works the drawing-room piano and moonlight to push them together. She is frank about the appeal of thirty millions and cheerfully admits to scheming, treating matchmaking as a practical art. Her rented summer home near Flack's—and her escaped monkey Eustace—draws the English and American strands of the plot into the same neighborhood.