“That that mendacious young cad who has bamboozled Grace,” Lord Theign broke in, “tried to befool us, for his beggarly reasons, into claiming for it?”
Lady Sandgate renewed her mild influence. “Ah, the knowing people haven’t had their last word—the possible Mantovano isn’t exploded yet!” Her noble friend, however, declined the offered spell. “I’ve had enough of the knowing people—the knowing people are serpents! My picture’s to take or to leave—and it’s what I’ve come back, if you please, John, to say to your man to his face.”
This declaration had a report as sharp and almost as multiplied as the successive cracks of a discharged revolver; yet when the light smoke cleared Lady Sand-gate at least was still left standing and smiling. “Yes, why in mercy’s name can’t he choose which?—and why does he write him, dreadful Breckenridge, such tiresome argumentative letters?”
Lord John took up her idea as with the air of something that had been working in him rather vehemently, though under due caution too, as a consequence of this exchange, during which he had apprehensively watched his elder. “I don’t think I quite see how, my dear Theign, the poor chap’s letter was so offensive.”
In that case his dear Theign could tell him. “Because it was a tissue of expressions that may pass current—over counters and in awful newspapers—in his extraordinary world or country, but that I decline to take time to puzzle out here.”
“If he didn’t make himself understood,” Lord John took leave to laugh, “it must indeed have been an unusual production for Bender.”
“Oh, I often, with the wild beauty, if you will, of so many of his turns, haven’t a notion,” Lady Sandgate confessed with an equal gaiety, “of what he’s talking about.”
“I think I never miss his weird sense,” her younger guest again loyally contended—“and in fact as a general thing I rather like it!”
“I happen to like nothing that I don’t enjoy,” Lord Theign rejoined with some asperity—“and so far as I do follow the fellow he assumes on my part an interest in his expenditure of purchase-money that I neither feel nor pretend to. He doesn’t want—by what I spell out—the picture he refused at Dedborough; he may possibly want—if one reads it so—the picture on view in Bond Street; and he yet appears to make, with great emphasis, the stupid ambiguous point that these two ‘articles’ (the greatest of Morettos an ‘article’!) haven’t been ‘by now’ proved different: as if I engaged with him that I myself would so prove them!”
Lord John indulged in a pause—but also in a suggestion. “He must allude to your hoping—when you allowed us to place the picture with Mackintosh—that it would show to all London in the most precious light conceivable.”