family group, the
What-do-you-call-'ems?--seven full-length figures, each one a gem, for
which he paid her her price before he left the house."

She could but make it more richly resound--almost stricken, lost in her
wistful thought: "Seven full-length figures? Her price?"

"Eight thousand--slap down. Bender knows," said Lord John, "what he
wants."

"And does he want only"--her wonder grew and grew--

"What-do-you-call-'ems'?"

"He most usually wants what he can't have." Lord John made scarce more
of it than that. "But, awfully hard up as I fancy her, Lady Lappington
went _at_ him."

It determined in his friend a boldly critical attitude. "How
horrible--at the rate things are leaving us!" But this was far from the
end of her interest. "And is that the way he pays?"

"Before he leaves the house?" Lord John lived it amusedly over. "Well,
_she_ took care of that."

"How incredibly vulgar!" It all had, however, for Lady Sandgate, still
other connections--which might have attenuated Lady Lappington's
case, though she didn't glance at this. "He makes the most scandalous
eyes--the ruffian!--at my great-grandmother." And then as richly to
enlighten any blankness: "My tremendous Lawrence, don't you know?--in
her wedding-dress, down to her knees; with such extraordinarily
speaking eyes, such lovely arms and hands, such wonderful flesh-tints:
universally considered the masterpiece of the artist."

Lord John seemed to look a moment not so much at the image evoked, in
which he wasn't interested, as at certain possibilities lurking behind
it. "And are you going to _sell_ the masterpiece of the artist?"

She held her head high. "I've indignantly refused--for all his pressing
me so hard."

"Yet that's what he nevertheless pursues you to-day to keep up?"

The question had a little the ring of those of which the occupant of a
witness-box is mostly the subject, but Lady Sandgate was so far as this
went an imperturbable witness. "I need hardly fear it perhaps if--in
the light of what you tell me of your arrangement with him--his pursuit
becomes, where I am concerned, a figure of speech."

"Oh," Lord John returned, "he kills two birds with one stone--he sees
both Sir Joshua and you."

This version of the case had its effect, for the moment, on his fair
associate. "Does he want to buy _their_ pride and glory?"

The young man, however, struck on his own side, became at first but the
bright reflector of her thought. "Is that