“So do I, Lady Grace!” he cried with the strongest emphasis. “And your father only doesn’t.”
“Yes,” she said for intelligent correction—“he sees it, there’s nothing in life he sees so much. But unfortunately he sees it all wrong.”
Hugh seized her point of view as if there had been nothing of her that he wouldn’t have seized. “He sees it all wrong then! My appeal the other day he took as a rude protest. And any protest——”
“Any protest,” she quickly and fully agreed, “he takes as an offence, yes. It’s his theory that he still has rights,” she smiled, “though he is a miserable peer.”
“How should he not have rights,” said Hugh, “when he has really everything on earth?”
“Ah, he doesn’t even know that—he takes it so much for granted.” And she sought, though as rather sadly and despairingly, to explain. “He lives all in his own world.”
“He lives all in his own, yes; but he does business all in ours—quite as much as the people who come up to the city in the Tube.” With which Hugh had a still sharper recall of the stiff actual. “And he must be here to do business to-day.”
“You know,” Lady Grace asked, “that he’s to meet Mr. Bender?”
“Lady Sandgate kindly warned me, and,” her companion saw as he glanced at the clock on the chimney, “I’ve only ten minutes, at best. The ‘Journal’ won’t have been good for him,” he added—“you doubtless have seen the ‘Journal’?”
“No”—she was vague. “We live by the ‘Morning Post.’”