Lady Sandgate’s dismay yielded to her wonder, and her wonder apparently in turn to her amusement. “‘Give it away,’ my dear friend, to a man who only longs to smother you in gold?”
Her dear friend, however, had lost patience with her levity. “Give it away—just for a luxury of protest and a stoppage of chatter—to some cause as unlike as possible that of Mr. Bender’s power of sound and his splendid reputation: to the Public, to the Authorities, to the Thingumbob, to the Nation!”
Lady Sandgate broke into horror while Lord John stood sombre and stupefied. “Ah, my dear creature, you’ve flights of extravagance——!”
“One thing’s very certain,” Lord Theign quite heedlessly pursued—“that the thought of my property on view there does give intolerably on my nerves, more and more every minute that I’m conscious of it; so that, hang it, if one thinks of it, why shouldn’t I, for my relief, do again, damme, what I like?—that is bang the door in their faces, have the show immediately stopped?” He turned with the attraction of this idea from one of his listeners to the other. “It’s my show—it isn’t Bender’s, surely!—and I can do just as I choose with it.”
“Ah, but isn’t that the very point?”—and Lady Sandgate put it to Lord John. “Isn’t it Bender’s show much more than his?”
Her invoked authority, however, in answer to this, made but a motion of disappointment and disgust at so much rank folly—while Lord Theign, on the other hand, followed up his happy thought. “Then if it’s Bender’s show, or if he claims it is, there’s all the more reason!” And it took his lordship’s inspiration no longer to flower. “See here, John—do this: go right round there this moment, please, and tell them from me to shut straight down!”
“‘Shut straight down’?” the young man abhorrently echoed.
“Stop it to-night—wind it up and end it: see?” The more the entertainer of that vision held it there the more charm it clearly took on for him. “Have the picture removed from view and the incident closed.”
“You seriously ask that of me!” poor Lord John quavered.
“Why in the world shouldn’t I? It’s a jolly lot less than you asked of me a month ago at Dedborough.”