“Didn’t he let us know at Dedborough,” Lord John asked of the master of that seat, “that he had no use, as he said, for lower values?”
“I’ve heard him remark myself,” said their companion, rising to the monstrous memory, “that he wouldn’t take a cheap picture—even though a ‘handsome’ one—as a present.”
“And does he call the thing round the corner a cheap picture?” the proprietor of the work demanded.
Lord John threw up his arms with a grin of impatience. “All he wants to do, don’t you see? is to prevent your making it one!”
Lord Theign glared at this imputation to him of a low ductility. “I offered the thing, as it was, at an estimate worthy of it—and of me.”
“My dear reckless friend,” his young adviser protested, “you named no figure at all when it came to the point——!”
“It didn’t come to the point! Nothing came to the point but that I put a Moretto on view; as a thing, yes, perfectly”—Lord Theign accepted the reminding gesture—“on which a rich American had an eye and in which he had, so to speak, an interest. That was what I wanted, and so we left it—parting each of us ready but neither of us bound.”
“Ah, Mr. Bender’s bound, as he’d say,” Lady Sand-gate interposed—“‘bound’ to make you swallow the enormous luscious plum that your appetite so morbidly rejects!”
“My appetite, as morbid as you like”—her old friend had shrewdly turned on her—“is my own affair, and if the fellow must deal in enormities I warn him to carry them elsewhere!”
Lord John, plainly, by this time, was quite exasperated at the absurdity of him. “But how can’t you see that it’s only a plum, as she says, for a plum and an eye for an eye—since the picture itself, with this huge ventilation, is now quite a different affair?”