Lord John, when he had gone, found relief in a quick comment. “Very sharp, no doubt—but he wants taking down.”
The master of Dedborough wouldn’t have put it so crudely, but the young expert did bring certain things home. “The people my daughters, in the exercise of a wild freedom, do pick up——!”
“Well, don’t you see that all you’ve got to do—on the question we’re dealing with—is to claim your very own wild freedom? Surely I’m right in feeling you,” Lord John further remarked, “to have jumped at once to my idea that Bender is heaven-sent—and at what they call the psychologic moment, don’t they?—to point that moral. Why look anywhere else for a sum of money that—smaller or greater—you can find with perfect ease in that extraordinarily bulging pocket?”
Lord Theign, slowly pacing the hall again, threw up his hands. “Ah, with ‘perfect ease’ can scarcely be said!”
“Why not?—when he absolutely thrusts his dirty dollars down your throat.”
“Oh, I’m not talking of ease to him,” Lord Theign returned—“I’m talking of ease to myself. I shall have to make a sacrifice.”
“Why not then—for so great a convenience—gallantly make it?”
“Ah, my dear chap, if you want me to sell my Sir Joshua——!”
But the horror in the words said enough, and Lord John felt its chill. “I don’t make a point of that—God forbid! But there are other things to which the objection wouldn’t apply.”
“You see how it applies—in the case of the Moret-to—for him. A mere Moretto,” said Lord Theign, “is too cheap—for a Yankee ‘on the spend.’”