yet realised, Theign, that those are the
American figures?"

His lordship looked at her fixedly and then did the same by Lord John,
after which he waited a little. "I've nothing to do with the American
figures--which seem to me, if you press me, you know, quite intolerably
vulgar."

"Well, I'd be as vulgar as anybody for a Hundred Thousand!" Lady
Sandgate hastened to proclaim.

"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?"

"How the deuce a different affair when just what the man himself
confesses is that, in spite of all the chatter of the prigs and pedants,
there's no really established ground for treating it as anything but
the same?" On which, as having so unanswerably spoken, Lord Theign shook
himself free again, in his high petu