Text stringlengths 1 42.7k ⌀ | Speaker stringclasses 528 values | Text_10_word_context stringlengths 44 42.8k | Text_20_word_context stringlengths 74 42.8k | Text_100_word_context stringlengths 291 43.2k | Text_200_word_context stringlengths 562 43.7k | Text_400_word_context stringlengths 1.08k 44.7k | Text_800_word_context stringlengths 2.14k 46.9k | Text_1600_word_context stringlengths 4.15k 51.3k | Text_variable_400_to_1200_word_context stringlengths 1.3k 48k | Book stringclasses 47 values |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
--Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. | No speaker | Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it.</|quote|>“Ah, don’t tell me how | we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it.</|quote|>“Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too | getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it.</|quote|>“Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that | adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it.</|quote|>“Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly | begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it.</|quote|>“Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace | Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it.</|quote|>“Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of | her friend, who evidently found amusement in the tone of it. “And you’re not disposed to take the time to find out? He’s at least better than the others.” “The ‘others’?” --Lady Grace was blank for them. “The others of his set.” “Oh, his set! That wouldn’t be difficult--by what I imagine of some of them. But he means well enough,” the girl added; “he’s very charming and does me great honour.” It determined in her companion, about to leave her, another brief arrest. “Then may I tell your father?” This in turn brought about in Lady Grace an immediate drop of the subject. “Tell my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying--with some people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it.</|quote|>“Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of | quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it.</|quote|>“Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, | The Outcry |
“Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” | Grace | young friend’s gesture checked it.<|quote|>“Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!”</|quote|>To which, however, Lady Grace | Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it.<|quote|>“Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!”</|quote|>To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will | he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it.<|quote|>“Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!”</|quote|>To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has | him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it.<|quote|>“Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!”</|quote|>To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of | I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it.<|quote|>“Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!”</|quote|>To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince | to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it.<|quote|>“Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!”</|quote|>To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses | “And you’re not disposed to take the time to find out? He’s at least better than the others.” “The ‘others’?” --Lady Grace was blank for them. “The others of his set.” “Oh, his set! That wouldn’t be difficult--by what I imagine of some of them. But he means well enough,” the girl added; “he’s very charming and does me great honour.” It determined in her companion, about to leave her, another brief arrest. “Then may I tell your father?” This in turn brought about in Lady Grace an immediate drop of the subject. “Tell my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying--with some people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it.<|quote|>“Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!”</|quote|>To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance | want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it.<|quote|>“Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!”</|quote|>To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s | The Outcry |
To which, however, Lady Grace added: | No speaker | too ugly and too wrong!”<|quote|>To which, however, Lady Grace added:</|quote|>“But perhaps that will be | how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!”<|quote|>To which, however, Lady Grace added:</|quote|>“But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then | the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!”<|quote|>To which, however, Lady Grace added:</|quote|>“But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” | Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!”<|quote|>To which, however, Lady Grace added:</|quote|>“But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and | appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!”<|quote|>To which, however, Lady Grace added:</|quote|>“But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares | very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!”<|quote|>To which, however, Lady Grace added:</|quote|>“But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his | better than the others.” “The ‘others’?” --Lady Grace was blank for them. “The others of his set.” “Oh, his set! That wouldn’t be difficult--by what I imagine of some of them. But he means well enough,” the girl added; “he’s very charming and does me great honour.” It determined in her companion, about to leave her, another brief arrest. “Then may I tell your father?” This in turn brought about in Lady Grace an immediate drop of the subject. “Tell my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying--with some people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!”<|quote|>To which, however, Lady Grace added:</|quote|>“But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that | rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!”<|quote|>To which, however, Lady Grace added:</|quote|>“But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the | The Outcry |
“But perhaps that will be just her way!” | Grace | which, however, Lady Grace added:<|quote|>“But perhaps that will be just her way!”</|quote|>And then as her companion | ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added:<|quote|>“But perhaps that will be just her way!”</|quote|>And then as her companion seemed for the moment not | see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added:<|quote|>“But perhaps that will be just her way!”</|quote|>And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of | the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added:<|quote|>“But perhaps that will be just her way!”</|quote|>And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the | to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added:<|quote|>“But perhaps that will be just her way!”</|quote|>And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, | to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added:<|quote|>“But perhaps that will be just her way!”</|quote|>And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must | --Lady Grace was blank for them. “The others of his set.” “Oh, his set! That wouldn’t be difficult--by what I imagine of some of them. But he means well enough,” the girl added; “he’s very charming and does me great honour.” It determined in her companion, about to leave her, another brief arrest. “Then may I tell your father?” This in turn brought about in Lady Grace an immediate drop of the subject. “Tell my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying--with some people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added:<|quote|>“But perhaps that will be just her way!”</|quote|>And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance | to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added:<|quote|>“But perhaps that will be just her way!”</|quote|>And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even | The Outcry |
And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: | No speaker | will be just her way!”<|quote|>And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow:</|quote|>“By letting Kitty off her | Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!”<|quote|>And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow:</|quote|>“By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty | as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!”<|quote|>And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow:</|quote|>“By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever | light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!”<|quote|>And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow:</|quote|>“By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing | an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!”<|quote|>And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow:</|quote|>“By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I | his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!”<|quote|>And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow:</|quote|>“By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of | of his set.” “Oh, his set! That wouldn’t be difficult--by what I imagine of some of them. But he means well enough,” the girl added; “he’s very charming and does me great honour.” It determined in her companion, about to leave her, another brief arrest. “Then may I tell your father?” This in turn brought about in Lady Grace an immediate drop of the subject. “Tell my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying--with some people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!”<|quote|>And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow:</|quote|>“By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than | ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!”<|quote|>And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow:</|quote|>“By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in | The Outcry |
“By letting Kitty off her debt.” | Grace | moment not quite to follow:<|quote|>“By letting Kitty off her debt.”</|quote|>“You mean that Kitty goes | her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow:<|quote|>“By letting Kitty off her debt.”</|quote|>“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins | piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow:<|quote|>“By letting Kitty off her debt.”</|quote|>“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” | And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow:<|quote|>“By letting Kitty off her debt.”</|quote|>“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s | requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow:<|quote|>“By letting Kitty off her debt.”</|quote|>“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably | still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow:<|quote|>“By letting Kitty off her debt.”</|quote|>“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and | of some of them. But he means well enough,” the girl added; “he’s very charming and does me great honour.” It determined in her companion, about to leave her, another brief arrest. “Then may I tell your father?” This in turn brought about in Lady Grace an immediate drop of the subject. “Tell my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying--with some people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow:<|quote|>“By letting Kitty off her debt.”</|quote|>“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the | be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow:<|quote|>“By letting Kitty off her debt.”</|quote|>“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each | The Outcry |
“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” | Lady Sandgate | letting Kitty off her debt.”<|quote|>“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”</|quote|>“Kitty goes free.” “She has | not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.”<|quote|>“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”</|quote|>“Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every | gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.”<|quote|>“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”</|quote|>“Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the | by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.”<|quote|>“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”</|quote|>“Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some | me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.”<|quote|>“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”</|quote|>“Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, | away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.”<|quote|>“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”</|quote|>“Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s | means well enough,” the girl added; “he’s very charming and does me great honour.” It determined in her companion, about to leave her, another brief arrest. “Then may I tell your father?” This in turn brought about in Lady Grace an immediate drop of the subject. “Tell my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying--with some people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.”<|quote|>“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”</|quote|>“Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try | me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.”<|quote|>“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”</|quote|>“Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her | The Outcry |
“Kitty goes free.” | Grace | Lord John wins your promise?”<|quote|>“Kitty goes free.”</|quote|>“She has her creditor’s release?” | that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”<|quote|>“Kitty goes free.”</|quote|>“She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if | too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”<|quote|>“Kitty goes free.”</|quote|>“She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a | Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”<|quote|>“Kitty goes free.”</|quote|>“She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave | too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”<|quote|>“Kitty goes free.”</|quote|>“She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly | on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”<|quote|>“Kitty goes free.”</|quote|>“She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had | great honour.” It determined in her companion, about to leave her, another brief arrest. “Then may I tell your father?” This in turn brought about in Lady Grace an immediate drop of the subject. “Tell my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying--with some people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”<|quote|>“Kitty goes free.”</|quote|>“She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, | Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”<|quote|>“Kitty goes free.”</|quote|>“She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial | The Outcry |
“She has her creditor’s release?” | Lady Sandgate | your promise?” “Kitty goes free.”<|quote|>“She has her creditor’s release?”</|quote|>“For every shilling.” “And if | free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.”<|quote|>“She has her creditor’s release?”</|quote|>“For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then | too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.”<|quote|>“She has her creditor’s release?”</|quote|>“For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he | dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.”<|quote|>“She has her creditor’s release?”</|quote|>“For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the | you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.”<|quote|>“She has her creditor’s release?”</|quote|>“For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in | want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.”<|quote|>“She has her creditor’s release?”</|quote|>“For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide | determined in her companion, about to leave her, another brief arrest. “Then may I tell your father?” This in turn brought about in Lady Grace an immediate drop of the subject. “Tell my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying--with some people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.”<|quote|>“She has her creditor’s release?”</|quote|>“For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out | “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.”<|quote|>“She has her creditor’s release?”</|quote|>“For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what | The Outcry |
“For every shilling.” | Grace | “She has her creditor’s release?”<|quote|>“For every shilling.”</|quote|>“And if he only fails?” | your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?”<|quote|>“For every shilling.”</|quote|>“And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said | Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?”<|quote|>“For every shilling.”</|quote|>“And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and | “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?”<|quote|>“For every shilling.”</|quote|>“And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in | being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?”<|quote|>“For every shilling.”</|quote|>“And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a | for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?”<|quote|>“For every shilling.”</|quote|>“And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. | to leave her, another brief arrest. “Then may I tell your father?” This in turn brought about in Lady Grace an immediate drop of the subject. “Tell my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying--with some people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?”<|quote|>“For every shilling.”</|quote|>“And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in | civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?”<|quote|>“For every shilling.”</|quote|>“And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted | The Outcry |
“And if he only fails?” | Lady Sandgate | creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.”<|quote|>“And if he only fails?”</|quote|>“Why then of course,” said | goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.”<|quote|>“And if he only fails?”</|quote|>“Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, | “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.”<|quote|>“And if he only fails?”</|quote|>“Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores | see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.”<|quote|>“And if he only fails?”</|quote|>“Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. | a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.”<|quote|>“And if he only fails?”</|quote|>“Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ | him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.”<|quote|>“And if he only fails?”</|quote|>“Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the | another brief arrest. “Then may I tell your father?” This in turn brought about in Lady Grace an immediate drop of the subject. “Tell my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying--with some people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.”<|quote|>“And if he only fails?”</|quote|>“Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the | I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.”<|quote|>“And if he only fails?”</|quote|>“Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite | The Outcry |
“Why then of course,” | Grace | “And if he only fails?”<|quote|>“Why then of course,”</|quote|>said now quite lucid Lady | creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?”<|quote|>“Why then of course,”</|quote|>said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more | just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?”<|quote|>“Why then of course,”</|quote|>said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, | all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?”<|quote|>“Why then of course,”</|quote|>said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ | she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?”<|quote|>“Why then of course,”</|quote|>said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ | my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?”<|quote|>“Why then of course,”</|quote|>said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, | I tell your father?” This in turn brought about in Lady Grace an immediate drop of the subject. “Tell my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying--with some people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?”<|quote|>“Why then of course,”</|quote|>said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower | friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?”<|quote|>“Why then of course,”</|quote|>said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; | The Outcry |
said now quite lucid Lady Grace, | No speaker | fails?” “Why then of course,”<|quote|>said now quite lucid Lady Grace,</|quote|>“she throws herself more than | shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,”<|quote|>said now quite lucid Lady Grace,</|quote|>“she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor | then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,”<|quote|>said now quite lucid Lady Grace,</|quote|>“she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could | we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,”<|quote|>said now quite lucid Lady Grace,</|quote|>“she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” | financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,”<|quote|>said now quite lucid Lady Grace,</|quote|>“she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; | so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,”<|quote|>said now quite lucid Lady Grace,</|quote|>“she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing | This in turn brought about in Lady Grace an immediate drop of the subject. “Tell my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying--with some people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,”<|quote|>said now quite lucid Lady Grace,</|quote|>“she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an | civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,”<|quote|>said now quite lucid Lady Grace,</|quote|>“she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the | The Outcry |
“she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” | Grace | now quite lucid Lady Grace,<|quote|>“she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”</|quote|>“Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate | “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace,<|quote|>“she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”</|quote|>“Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared | the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace,<|quote|>“she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”</|quote|>“Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight | and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace,<|quote|>“she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”</|quote|>“Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. | strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace,<|quote|>“she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”</|quote|>“Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, | her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace,<|quote|>“she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”</|quote|>“Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as | Lady Grace an immediate drop of the subject. “Tell my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying--with some people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace,<|quote|>“she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”</|quote|>“Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his | so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace,<|quote|>“she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”</|quote|>“Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her | The Outcry |
“Poor father indeed!” | Lady Sandgate | than ever on poor father.”<|quote|>“Poor father indeed!”</|quote|>--Lady Sandgate richly sighed it | Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”<|quote|>“Poor father indeed!”</|quote|>--Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create | off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”<|quote|>“Poor father indeed!”</|quote|>--Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s | Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”<|quote|>“Poor father indeed!”</|quote|>--Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry | friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”<|quote|>“Poor father indeed!”</|quote|>--Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s | ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”<|quote|>“Poor father indeed!”</|quote|>--Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified | my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying--with some people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”<|quote|>“Poor father indeed!”</|quote|>--Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead | quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”<|quote|>“Poor father indeed!”</|quote|>--Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” | The Outcry |
--Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. | No speaker | poor father.” “Poor father indeed!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess.</|quote|>“Yes--but he after all and | herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess.</|quote|>“Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores | “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess.</|quote|>“Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look | gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess.</|quote|>“Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, | your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess.</|quote|>“Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still | She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess.</|quote|>“Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding | that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying--with some people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess.</|quote|>“Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed | --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess.</|quote|>“Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant | The Outcry |
“Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” | Grace | woman a sense of excess.<|quote|>“Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”</|quote|>“To the point, you mean” | to create in the younger woman a sense of excess.<|quote|>“Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”</|quote|>“To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly | creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess.<|quote|>“Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”</|quote|>“To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You | which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess.<|quote|>“Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”</|quote|>“To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another | Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess.<|quote|>“Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”</|quote|>“To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account | me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess.<|quote|>“Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”</|quote|>“To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So | bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying--with some people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess.<|quote|>“Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”</|quote|>“To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of | frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess.<|quote|>“Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”</|quote|>“To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl | The Outcry |
“To the point, you mean” | Lady Sandgate | spite of everything adores her.”<|quote|>“To the point, you mean”</|quote|>--for Lady Sandgate could clearly | he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”<|quote|>“To the point, you mean”</|quote|>--for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing | then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”<|quote|>“To the point, you mean”</|quote|>--for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed | her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”<|quote|>“To the point, you mean”</|quote|>--for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful | added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”<|quote|>“To the point, you mean”</|quote|>--for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate | soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”<|quote|>“To the point, you mean”</|quote|>--for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the | people we don’t know--to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”<|quote|>“To the point, you mean”</|quote|>--for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of | him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”<|quote|>“To the point, you mean”</|quote|>--for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers | The Outcry |
--for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- | No speaker | “To the point, you mean”<|quote|>--for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder--</|quote|>“of really sacrificing you?” The | spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean”<|quote|>--for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder--</|quote|>“of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming | quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean”<|quote|>--for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder--</|quote|>“of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, | her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean”<|quote|>--for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder--</|quote|>“of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his | she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean”<|quote|>--for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder--</|quote|>“of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I | pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean”<|quote|>--for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder--</|quote|>“of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to | at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean”<|quote|>--for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder--</|quote|>“of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be | to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean”<|quote|>--for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder--</|quote|>“of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be | The Outcry |
“of really sacrificing you?” | Lady Sandgate | Sandgate could clearly but wonder--<|quote|>“of really sacrificing you?”</|quote|>The weight of Lady Grace’s | point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder--<|quote|>“of really sacrificing you?”</|quote|>The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her | more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder--<|quote|>“of really sacrificing you?”</|quote|>The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal | quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder--<|quote|>“of really sacrificing you?”</|quote|>The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should | fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder--<|quote|>“of really sacrificing you?”</|quote|>The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general | assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder--<|quote|>“of really sacrificing you?”</|quote|>The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful | keen.” Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder--<|quote|>“of really sacrificing you?”</|quote|>The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if | his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder--<|quote|>“of really sacrificing you?”</|quote|>The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly | The Outcry |
The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. | No speaker | wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?”<|quote|>The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal.</|quote|>“You think I _should_ be | Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?”<|quote|>The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal.</|quote|>“You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” | poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?”<|quote|>The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal.</|quote|>“You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had | letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?”<|quote|>The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal.</|quote|>“You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ | then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?”<|quote|>The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal.</|quote|>“You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad | her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?”<|quote|>The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal.</|quote|>“You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” | it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?” “No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.” This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then--if one’s to meet him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?”<|quote|>The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal.</|quote|>“You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough | hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?”<|quote|>The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal.</|quote|>“You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost | The Outcry |
“You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” | Grace | the girl a grave appeal.<|quote|>“You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?”</|quote|>Lady Sandgate replied, though with | and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal.<|quote|>“You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?”</|quote|>Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ | her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal.<|quote|>“You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?”</|quote|>Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you | “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal.<|quote|>“You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?”</|quote|>Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; | all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal.<|quote|>“You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?”</|quote|>Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, | “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal.<|quote|>“You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?”</|quote|>Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as | him--who he is?” “Oh, father knows--or ought to--that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal.<|quote|>“You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?”</|quote|>Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness | and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal.<|quote|>“You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?”</|quote|>Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have | The Outcry |
Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. | No speaker | sacrificed if I married him?”<|quote|>Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly.</|quote|>“_Could_ you marry him?” Lady | “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?”<|quote|>Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly.</|quote|>“_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do | clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?”<|quote|>Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly.</|quote|>“_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be | “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?”<|quote|>Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly.</|quote|>“_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, | and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?”<|quote|>Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly.</|quote|>“_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question | money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?”<|quote|>Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly.</|quote|>“_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect | next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?”<|quote|>Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly.</|quote|>“_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do | dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?”<|quote|>Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly.</|quote|>“_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the | The Outcry |
“_Could_ you marry him?” | Lady Sandgate | with an equal emphasis, indirectly.<|quote|>“_Could_ you marry him?”</|quote|>Lady Grace waited a moment | him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly.<|quote|>“_Could_ you marry him?”</|quote|>Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” | of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly.<|quote|>“_Could_ you marry him?”</|quote|>Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and | “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly.<|quote|>“_Could_ you marry him?”</|quote|>Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so | Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly.<|quote|>“_Could_ you marry him?”</|quote|>Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the | so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly.<|quote|>“_Could_ you marry him?”</|quote|>Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You | and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly.<|quote|>“_Could_ you marry him?”</|quote|>Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she | makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly.<|quote|>“_Could_ you marry him?”</|quote|>Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she | The Outcry |
Lady Grace waited a moment | No speaker | indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?”<|quote|>Lady Grace waited a moment</|quote|>“Do you mean for Kitty?” | though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?”<|quote|>Lady Grace waited a moment</|quote|>“Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should | deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?”<|quote|>Lady Grace waited a moment</|quote|>“Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even | Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?”<|quote|>Lady Grace waited a moment</|quote|>“Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for | checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?”<|quote|>Lady Grace waited a moment</|quote|>“Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration | that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?”<|quote|>Lady Grace waited a moment</|quote|>“Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels | told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?”<|quote|>Lady Grace waited a moment</|quote|>“Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, | the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?”<|quote|>Lady Grace waited a moment</|quote|>“Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at | The Outcry |
“Do you mean for Kitty?” | Grace | Lady Grace waited a moment<|quote|>“Do you mean for Kitty?”</|quote|>“For himself even--if they should | indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment<|quote|>“Do you mean for Kitty?”</|quote|>“For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that | made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment<|quote|>“Do you mean for Kitty?”</|quote|>“For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put | appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment<|quote|>“Do you mean for Kitty?”</|quote|>“For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and | me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment<|quote|>“Do you mean for Kitty?”</|quote|>“For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance | ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment<|quote|>“Do you mean for Kitty?”</|quote|>“For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity | tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment<|quote|>“Do you mean for Kitty?”</|quote|>“For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on | with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment<|quote|>“Do you mean for Kitty?”</|quote|>“For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She | The Outcry |
“For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” | Lady Sandgate | “Do you mean for Kitty?”<|quote|>“For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”</|quote|>Lady Grace had another delay. | Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?”<|quote|>“For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”</|quote|>Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s | some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?”<|quote|>“For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”</|quote|>Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. | the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?”<|quote|>“For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”</|quote|>Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” | and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?”<|quote|>“For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”</|quote|>Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped | any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?”<|quote|>“For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”</|quote|>Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as | he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship--which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?”<|quote|>“For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”</|quote|>Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you | “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?”<|quote|>“For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”</|quote|>Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came | The Outcry |
Lady Grace had another delay. | No speaker | that he cares for you.”<|quote|>Lady Grace had another delay.</|quote|>“Well, he’s his awful mother’s | should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”<|quote|>Lady Grace had another delay.</|quote|>“Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry | a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”<|quote|>Lady Grace had another delay.</|quote|>“Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she | of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”<|quote|>Lady Grace had another delay.</|quote|>“Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of | that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”<|quote|>Lady Grace had another delay.</|quote|>“Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This | it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”<|quote|>Lady Grace had another delay.</|quote|>“Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy | aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”<|quote|>Lady Grace had another delay.</|quote|>“Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for | that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”<|quote|>Lady Grace had another delay.</|quote|>“Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as | The Outcry |
“Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” | Grace | Lady Grace had another delay.<|quote|>“Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”</|quote|>“Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his | that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay.<|quote|>“Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”</|quote|>“Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only | I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay.<|quote|>“Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”</|quote|>“Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very | the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay.<|quote|>“Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”</|quote|>“Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as | way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay.<|quote|>“Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”</|quote|>“Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had | “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay.<|quote|>“Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”</|quote|>“Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding | of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay.<|quote|>“Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”</|quote|>“Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t | for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay.<|quote|>“Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”</|quote|>“Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, | The Outcry |
“Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” | Lady Sandgate | he’s his awful mother’s son.”<|quote|>“Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”</|quote|>“No--but I should only be | Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”<|quote|>“Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”</|quote|>“No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately | married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”<|quote|>“Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”</|quote|>“No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my | Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”<|quote|>“Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”</|quote|>“No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see | seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”<|quote|>“Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”</|quote|>“No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the | and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”<|quote|>“Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”</|quote|>“No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during | right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”<|quote|>“Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”</|quote|>“No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about | since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”<|quote|>“Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”</|quote|>“No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from | The Outcry |
“No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” | Grace | you wouldn’t marry his mother.”<|quote|>“No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”</|quote|>“Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically | his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”<|quote|>“No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”</|quote|>“Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly | with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”<|quote|>“No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”</|quote|>“Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and | really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”<|quote|>“No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”</|quote|>“Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but | to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”<|quote|>“No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”</|quote|>“Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was | your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”<|quote|>“No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”</|quote|>“Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally | was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”<|quote|>“No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”</|quote|>“Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” | what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”<|quote|>“No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”</|quote|>“Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in | The Outcry |
“Even when,” | Lady Sandgate | and intimately conscious of her.”<|quote|>“Even when,”</|quote|>Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, | only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”<|quote|>“Even when,”</|quote|>Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” | moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”<|quote|>“Even when,”</|quote|>Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything | face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”<|quote|>“Even when,”</|quote|>Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, | free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”<|quote|>“Even when,”</|quote|>Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, | and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”<|quote|>“Even when,”</|quote|>Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as | to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”<|quote|>“Even when,”</|quote|>Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant | strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”<|quote|>“Even when,”</|quote|>Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his | The Outcry |
Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, | No speaker | conscious of her.” “Even when,”<|quote|>Lady Sandgate optimistically put it,</|quote|>“she so markedly likes you?” | the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,”<|quote|>Lady Sandgate optimistically put it,</|quote|>“she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl | you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,”<|quote|>Lady Sandgate optimistically put it,</|quote|>“she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have | her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,”<|quote|>Lady Sandgate optimistically put it,</|quote|>“she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced | Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,”<|quote|>Lady Sandgate optimistically put it,</|quote|>“she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s | your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,”<|quote|>Lady Sandgate optimistically put it,</|quote|>“she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name | allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,”<|quote|>Lady Sandgate optimistically put it,</|quote|>“she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly | added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,”<|quote|>Lady Sandgate optimistically put it,</|quote|>“she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, | The Outcry |
“she so markedly likes you?” | Lady Sandgate | Lady Sandgate optimistically put it,<|quote|>“she so markedly likes you?”</|quote|>This determined in the girl | conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it,<|quote|>“she so markedly likes you?”</|quote|>This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t | himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it,<|quote|>“she so markedly likes you?”</|quote|>This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and | length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it,<|quote|>“she so markedly likes you?”</|quote|>This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. | “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it,<|quote|>“she so markedly likes you?”</|quote|>This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in | too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it,<|quote|>“she so markedly likes you?”</|quote|>This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly | over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it,<|quote|>“she so markedly likes you?”</|quote|>This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had | of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it,<|quote|>“she so markedly likes you?”</|quote|>This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. | The Outcry |
This determined in the girl a fine impatience. | No speaker | “she so markedly likes you?”<|quote|>This determined in the girl a fine impatience.</|quote|>“She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she | Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?”<|quote|>This determined in the girl a fine impatience.</|quote|>“She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a | you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?”<|quote|>This determined in the girl a fine impatience.</|quote|>“She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” | look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?”<|quote|>This determined in the girl a fine impatience.</|quote|>“She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely | her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?”<|quote|>This determined in the girl a fine impatience.</|quote|>“She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed | dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?”<|quote|>This determined in the girl a fine impatience.</|quote|>“She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in | our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?”<|quote|>This determined in the girl a fine impatience.</|quote|>“She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of | of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?”<|quote|>This determined in the girl a fine impatience.</|quote|>“She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an | The Outcry |
“She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” | Grace | the girl a fine impatience.<|quote|>“She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”</|quote|>To this luminous account of | likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience.<|quote|>“She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”</|quote|>To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned | Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience.<|quote|>“She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”</|quote|>To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely | a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience.<|quote|>“She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”</|quote|>To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped | he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience.<|quote|>“She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”</|quote|>To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke | But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience.<|quote|>“She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”</|quote|>To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the | up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner----” Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.” “It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity. “Very good--though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me _this_--whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience.<|quote|>“She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”</|quote|>To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m | quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience.<|quote|>“She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”</|quote|>To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by | The Outcry |
To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. | No speaker | of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”<|quote|>To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst.</|quote|>“I see indeed--for the general | are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”<|quote|>To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst.</|quote|>“I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had | “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”<|quote|>To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst.</|quote|>“I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. | Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”<|quote|>To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst.</|quote|>“I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say | of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”<|quote|>To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst.</|quote|>“I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I | he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”<|quote|>To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst.</|quote|>“I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on | when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”<|quote|>To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst.</|quote|>“I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his | too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”<|quote|>To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst.</|quote|>“I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising | The Outcry |
“I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” | Lady Sandgate | as to a genial sun-burst.<|quote|>“I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.”</|quote|>The words had no note | the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst.<|quote|>“I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.”</|quote|>The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, | for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst.<|quote|>“I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.”</|quote|>The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question | his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst.<|quote|>“I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.”</|quote|>The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with | wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst.<|quote|>“I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.”</|quote|>The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for | his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst.<|quote|>“I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.”</|quote|>The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative | it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst.<|quote|>“I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.”</|quote|>The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first | Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst.<|quote|>“I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.”</|quote|>The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and | The Outcry |
The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. | No speaker | indeed--for the general immaculate connection.”<|quote|>The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility.</|quote|>“Well, we _haven’t_ had false | a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.”<|quote|>The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility.</|quote|>“Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had | and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.”<|quote|>The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility.</|quote|>“Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses | the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.”<|quote|>The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility.</|quote|>“Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in | of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.”<|quote|>The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility.</|quote|>“Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so | the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.”<|quote|>The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility.</|quote|>“Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, | And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.”<|quote|>The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility.</|quote|>“Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some | your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.”<|quote|>The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility.</|quote|>“Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had | The Outcry |
“Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” | Grace | with deprecation at the possibility.<|quote|>“Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”</|quote|>“Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady | in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility.<|quote|>“Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”</|quote|>“Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt | still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility.<|quote|>“Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”</|quote|>“Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. | This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility.<|quote|>“Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”</|quote|>“Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace | look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility.<|quote|>“Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”</|quote|>“Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It | the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility.<|quote|>“Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”</|quote|>“Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, | arrived?” The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?” “So particularly to speak to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility.<|quote|>“Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”</|quote|>“Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk | companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility.<|quote|>“Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”</|quote|>“Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be | The Outcry |
“Yes, you’ve been beatific!” | Lady Sandgate | scarcely even had bad moments.”<|quote|>“Yes, you’ve been beatific!”</|quote|>--Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, | _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”<|quote|>“Yes, you’ve been beatific!”</|quote|>--Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further | of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”<|quote|>“Yes, you’ve been beatific!”</|quote|>--Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your | she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”<|quote|>“Yes, you’ve been beatific!”</|quote|>--Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. | think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”<|quote|>“Yes, you’ve been beatific!”</|quote|>--Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, | that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”<|quote|>“Yes, you’ve been beatific!”</|quote|>--Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which | to you.” “Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”<|quote|>“Yes, you’ve been beatific!”</|quote|>--Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I | you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”<|quote|>“Yes, you’ve been beatific!”</|quote|>--Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since | The Outcry |
--Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. | No speaker | moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling.</|quote|>“This must be your friend,” | We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling.</|quote|>“This must be your friend,” she had only time to | Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling.</|quote|>“This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace | is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling.</|quote|>“This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So | sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling.</|quote|>“This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of | not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling.</|quote|>“This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in | was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.” “And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?” “No, only to tell me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling.</|quote|>“This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace | deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!”<|quote|>--Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling.</|quote|>“This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less | The Outcry |
“This must be your friend,” | Lady Sandgate | clipped together as for cycling.<|quote|>“This must be your friend,”</|quote|>she had only time to | the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling.<|quote|>“This must be your friend,”</|quote|>she had only time to say to the daughter of | “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling.<|quote|>“This must be your friend,”</|quote|>she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh | of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling.<|quote|>“This must be your friend,”</|quote|>she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the | delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling.<|quote|>“This must be your friend,”</|quote|>she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as | her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling.<|quote|>“This must be your friend,”</|quote|>she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other | me that his friend--who’s off there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling.<|quote|>“This must be your friend,”</|quote|>she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar | to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling.<|quote|>“This must be your friend,”</|quote|>she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl | The Outcry |
she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. | No speaker | “This must be your friend,”<|quote|>she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words.</|quote|>“So awfully kind of you--in | clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,”<|quote|>she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words.</|quote|>“So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great | Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,”<|quote|>she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words.</|quote|>“So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” | turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,”<|quote|>she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words.</|quote|>“So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange | mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,”<|quote|>she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words.</|quote|>“So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached | her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,”<|quote|>she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words.</|quote|>“So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question | there--was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said--that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,”<|quote|>she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words.</|quote|>“So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” | for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,”<|quote|>she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words.</|quote|>“So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, | The Outcry |
“So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” | Crimble | and broke into easy words.<|quote|>“So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.”</|quote|>“I left the great doings, | her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words.<|quote|>“So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.”</|quote|>“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to | terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words.<|quote|>“So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.”</|quote|>“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower | cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words.<|quote|>“So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.”</|quote|>“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising | account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words.<|quote|>“So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.”</|quote|>“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since | her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words.<|quote|>“So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.”</|quote|>“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, | as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him--I assure you quite resignedly--in her hands.” “She wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words.<|quote|>“So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.”</|quote|>“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his | supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words.<|quote|>“So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.”</|quote|>“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, | The Outcry |
“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” | Grace | a beautiful minute for me.”<|quote|>“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,”</|quote|>the girl returned, “so that | doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.”<|quote|>“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,”</|quote|>the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be | not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.”<|quote|>“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,”</|quote|>the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed | alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.”<|quote|>“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,”</|quote|>the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. | words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.”<|quote|>“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,”</|quote|>the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have | Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.”<|quote|>“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,”</|quote|>the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated | wants” --it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark-- “to talk of you to him.” “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.”<|quote|>“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,”</|quote|>the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, | position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.”<|quote|>“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,”</|quote|>the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his | The Outcry |
the girl returned, | No speaker | every one’s relief, I think,”<|quote|>the girl returned,</|quote|>“so that your precious time | which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,”<|quote|>the girl returned,</|quote|>“so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt | pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,”<|quote|>the girl returned,</|quote|>“so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that | who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,”<|quote|>the girl returned,</|quote|>“so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, | deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,”<|quote|>the girl returned,</|quote|>“so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this | she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,”<|quote|>the girl returned,</|quote|>“so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He | “I don’t know _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,”<|quote|>the girl returned,</|quote|>“so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for | be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,”<|quote|>the girl returned,</|quote|>“so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to | The Outcry |
“so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” | Grace | I think,” the girl returned,<|quote|>“so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”</|quote|>It was clearly for him, | over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned,<|quote|>“so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”</|quote|>It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as | once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned,<|quote|>“so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”</|quote|>It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange | in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned,<|quote|>“so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”</|quote|>It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain | possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned,<|quote|>“so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”</|quote|>It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic | this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned,<|quote|>“so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”</|quote|>It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough | _what_ she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned,<|quote|>“so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”</|quote|>It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have | he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned,<|quote|>“so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”</|quote|>It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident | The Outcry |
It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. | No speaker | taken to hunt for me.”<|quote|>It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity.</|quote|>“You came in from your | your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”<|quote|>It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity.</|quote|>“You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same | “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”<|quote|>It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity.</|quote|>“You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect | terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”<|quote|>It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity.</|quote|>“You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept | moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”<|quote|>It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity.</|quote|>“You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by | “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”<|quote|>It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity.</|quote|>“You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” | “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with--and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”<|quote|>It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity.</|quote|>“You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had | woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”<|quote|>It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity.</|quote|>“You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us | The Outcry |
“You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” | Crimble | the perfect flower of felicity.<|quote|>“You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?”</|quote|>They stood smiling at each | white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity.<|quote|>“You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?”</|quote|>They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange | the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity.<|quote|>“You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?”</|quote|>They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long | to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity.<|quote|>“You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?”</|quote|>They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that | the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity.<|quote|>“You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?”</|quote|>They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent | him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity.<|quote|>“You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?”</|quote|>They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to | so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity.<|quote|>“You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?”</|quote|>They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me | Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity.<|quote|>“You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?”</|quote|>They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated | The Outcry |
They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. | No speaker | me from that first moment?”<|quote|>They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness.</|quote|>“I haven’t forgotten one item | the same charity you showed me from that first moment?”<|quote|>They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness.</|quote|>“I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me | your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?”<|quote|>They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness.</|quote|>“I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for | her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?”<|quote|>They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness.</|quote|>“I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the | with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?”<|quote|>They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness.</|quote|>“I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of | among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?”<|quote|>They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness.</|quote|>“I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much | for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.” “Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father--in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s--I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him--if you _are_ to listen?” “I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace-- “it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!” “On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked. “I dare say the Duchess is!” “But do you see the Duchess _producing_ money--with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!” --Lady Sandgate piled them up. Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many--it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.” “You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?” “Kitty goes free.” “She has her creditor’s release?” “For every shilling.” “And if he only fails?” “Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.” “Poor father indeed!” --Lady Sandgate richly sighed it It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes--but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.” “To the point, you mean” --for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder-- “of really sacrificing you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?”<|quote|>They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness.</|quote|>“I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an | you?” The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?”<|quote|>They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness.</|quote|>“I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” | The Outcry |
“I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” | Crimble | almost long enough for awkwardness.<|quote|>“I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”</|quote|>“Bleak do you call it?” | stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness.<|quote|>“I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”</|quote|>“Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found | the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness.<|quote|>“I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”</|quote|>“Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like | protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness.<|quote|>“I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”</|quote|>“Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, | degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness.<|quote|>“I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”</|quote|>“Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d | clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness.<|quote|>“I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”</|quote|>“Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their | I _should_ be sacrificed if I married him?” Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness.<|quote|>“I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”</|quote|>“Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and | “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness.<|quote|>“I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”</|quote|>“Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious | The Outcry |
“Bleak do you call it?” | Grace | on that rather bleak occasion.”<|quote|>“Bleak do you call it?”</|quote|>she laughed. “Why I found | of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”<|quote|>“Bleak do you call it?”</|quote|>she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour | somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”<|quote|>“Bleak do you call it?”</|quote|>she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a | to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”<|quote|>“Bleak do you call it?”</|quote|>she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into | of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”<|quote|>“Bleak do you call it?”</|quote|>she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous | the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”<|quote|>“Bleak do you call it?”</|quote|>she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had | emphasis, indirectly. “_Could_ you marry him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”<|quote|>“Bleak do you call it?”</|quote|>she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, | on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”<|quote|>“Bleak do you call it?”</|quote|>she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” | The Outcry |
she laughed. | No speaker | “Bleak do you call it?”<|quote|>she laughed.</|quote|>“Why I found it, rather, | on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?”<|quote|>she laughed.</|quote|>“Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the | short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?”<|quote|>she laughed.</|quote|>“Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on | of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?”<|quote|>she laughed.</|quote|>“Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great | a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?”<|quote|>she laughed.</|quote|>“Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” | “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?”<|quote|>she laughed.</|quote|>“Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” | him?” Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?”<|quote|>she laughed.</|quote|>“Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, | trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?”<|quote|>she laughed.</|quote|>“Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a | The Outcry |
“Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” | Grace | you call it?” she laughed.<|quote|>“Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”</|quote|>“Then you made it doubtless | rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed.<|quote|>“Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”</|quote|>“Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us | brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed.<|quote|>“Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”</|quote|>“Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be | more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed.<|quote|>“Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”</|quote|>“Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and | of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed.<|quote|>“Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”</|quote|>“Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people | in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed.<|quote|>“Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”</|quote|>“Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks | Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?” “For himself even--if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed.<|quote|>“Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”</|quote|>“Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The | out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed.<|quote|>“Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”</|quote|>“Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk | The Outcry |
“Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” | Crimble | me of the White City.”<|quote|>“Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.”</|quote|>“This” obviously meant for the | side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”<|quote|>“Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.”</|quote|>“This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded | to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”<|quote|>“Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.”</|quote|>“This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety | less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”<|quote|>“Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.”</|quote|>“This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the | of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”<|quote|>“Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.”</|quote|>“This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact | other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”<|quote|>“Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.”</|quote|>“This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk | for you.” Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.” “Yes--but you wouldn’t marry his mother.” “No--but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”<|quote|>“Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.”</|quote|>“This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a | and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”<|quote|>“Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.”</|quote|>“This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at | The Outcry |
“This” | No speaker | a sail on the horizon.”<|quote|>“This”</|quote|>obviously meant for the young | like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.”<|quote|>“This”</|quote|>obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; | found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.”<|quote|>“This”</|quote|>obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of | and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.”<|quote|>“This”</|quote|>obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, | sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.”<|quote|>“This”</|quote|>obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I | originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.”<|quote|>“This”</|quote|>obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. | her.” “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.”<|quote|>“This”</|quote|>obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud | girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.”<|quote|>“This”</|quote|>obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” | The Outcry |
obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. | No speaker | sail on the horizon.” “This”<|quote|>obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition.</|quote|>“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in | a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This”<|quote|>obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition.</|quote|>“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably | it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This”<|quote|>obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition.</|quote|>“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that | which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This”<|quote|>obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition.</|quote|>“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work | under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This”<|quote|>obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition.</|quote|>“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a | felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This”<|quote|>obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition.</|quote|>“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the | “Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?” This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only _wants_ me--which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This”<|quote|>obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition.</|quote|>“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of | in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This”<|quote|>obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition.</|quote|>“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” | The Outcry |
“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” | Grace | great free gaiety of recognition.<|quote|>“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,”</|quote|>Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, | would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition.<|quote|>“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,”</|quote|>Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and | meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition.<|quote|>“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,”</|quote|>Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before | rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition.<|quote|>“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,”</|quote|>Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging | it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition.<|quote|>“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,”</|quote|>Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense | black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition.<|quote|>“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,”</|quote|>Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand | everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition.<|quote|>“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,”</|quote|>Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of | girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition.<|quote|>“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,”</|quote|>Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of | The Outcry |
Lady Grace amiably objected. | No speaker | nothing particular in the hall,”<|quote|>Lady Grace amiably objected.</|quote|>“Nothing, I see, but Claudes | gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,”<|quote|>Lady Grace amiably objected.</|quote|>“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” | surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,”<|quote|>Lady Grace amiably objected.</|quote|>“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some | side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,”<|quote|>Lady Grace amiably objected.</|quote|>“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving | a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,”<|quote|>Lady Grace amiably objected.</|quote|>“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes | the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,”<|quote|>Lady Grace amiably objected.</|quote|>“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought | and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,”<|quote|>Lady Grace amiably objected.</|quote|>“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier | out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,”<|quote|>Lady Grace amiably objected.</|quote|>“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots | The Outcry |
“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” | Crimble | hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected.<|quote|>“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,”</|quote|>he said-- “before a new | we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected.<|quote|>“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,”</|quote|>he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily | begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected.<|quote|>“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,”</|quote|>he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when | to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected.<|quote|>“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,”</|quote|>he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” | followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected.<|quote|>“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,”</|quote|>he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can | that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected.<|quote|>“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,”</|quote|>he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he | still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.” To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected.<|quote|>“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,”</|quote|>he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far | me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected.<|quote|>“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,”</|quote|>he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. | The Outcry |
he said-- | No speaker | and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,”<|quote|>he said--</|quote|>“before a new and rare | “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,”<|quote|>he said--</|quote|>“before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up | solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,”<|quote|>he said--</|quote|>“before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk | doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,”<|quote|>he said--</|quote|>“before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace | question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,”<|quote|>he said--</|quote|>“before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though | unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,”<|quote|>he said--</|quote|>“before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could | luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,”<|quote|>he said--</|quote|>“before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear | as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,”<|quote|>he said--</|quote|>“before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she | The Outcry |
“before a new and rare feast!” | Crimble | I’m an ogre,” he said--<|quote|>“before a new and rare feast!”</|quote|>She happily took up his | see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said--<|quote|>“before a new and rare feast!”</|quote|>She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as | the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said--<|quote|>“before a new and rare feast!”</|quote|>She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have | for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said--<|quote|>“before a new and rare feast!”</|quote|>She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, | whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said--<|quote|>“before a new and rare feast!”</|quote|>She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which | unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said--<|quote|>“before a new and rare feast!”</|quote|>She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady | of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said--<|quote|>“before a new and rare feast!”</|quote|>She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. | in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said--<|quote|>“before a new and rare feast!”</|quote|>She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” | The Outcry |
She happily took up his figure. | No speaker | a new and rare feast!”<|quote|>She happily took up his figure.</|quote|>“Then won’t you begin--as a | an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!”<|quote|>She happily took up his figure.</|quote|>“Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your | doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!”<|quote|>She happily took up his figure.</|quote|>“Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day | couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!”<|quote|>She happily took up his figure.</|quote|>“Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing | good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!”<|quote|>She happily took up his figure.</|quote|>“Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words | rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!”<|quote|>She happily took up his figure.</|quote|>“Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use | as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!”<|quote|>She happily took up his figure.</|quote|>“Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich | With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!”<|quote|>She happily took up his figure.</|quote|>“Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had | The Outcry |
“Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” | Grace | happily took up his figure.<|quote|>“Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.”</|quote|>“Some tea, with pleasure” --he | new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure.<|quote|>“Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.”</|quote|>“Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though | imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure.<|quote|>“Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.”</|quote|>“Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and | about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure.<|quote|>“Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.”</|quote|>“Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more | his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure.<|quote|>“Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.”</|quote|>“Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for | bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure.<|quote|>“Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.”</|quote|>“Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips | see indeed--for the general immaculate connection.” The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure.<|quote|>“Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.”</|quote|>“Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young | of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure.<|quote|>“Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.”</|quote|>“Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate | The Outcry |
“Some tea, with pleasure” | Crimble | ogre before you--has left any.”<|quote|>“Some tea, with pleasure”</|quote|>--he looked all his longing; | is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.”<|quote|>“Some tea, with pleasure”</|quote|>--he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of | objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.”<|quote|>“Some tea, with pleasure”</|quote|>--he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are | had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.”<|quote|>“Some tea, with pleasure”</|quote|>--he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet | spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.”<|quote|>“Some tea, with pleasure”</|quote|>--he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. | contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.”<|quote|>“Some tea, with pleasure”</|quote|>--he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation | possibility. “Well, we _haven’t_ had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.”<|quote|>“Some tea, with pleasure”</|quote|>--he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- | this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.”<|quote|>“Some tea, with pleasure”</|quote|>--he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played | The Outcry |
--he looked all his longing; | No speaker | any.” “Some tea, with pleasure”<|quote|>--he looked all his longing;</|quote|>“though when you talk of | an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure”<|quote|>--he looked all his longing;</|quote|>“though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have | but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure”<|quote|>--he looked all his longing;</|quote|>“though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; | Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure”<|quote|>--he looked all his longing;</|quote|>“though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest | stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure”<|quote|>--he looked all his longing;</|quote|>“though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one | or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure”<|quote|>--he looked all his longing;</|quote|>“though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently | had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure”<|quote|>--he looked all his longing;</|quote|>“though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous | oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure”<|quote|>--he looked all his longing;</|quote|>“though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. | The Outcry |
“though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” | Crimble | --he looked all his longing;<|quote|>“though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.”</|quote|>“Ah, we can’t work sports | any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing;<|quote|>“though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.”</|quote|>“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the | an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing;<|quote|>“though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.”</|quote|>“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: | a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing;<|quote|>“though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.”</|quote|>“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” | almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing;<|quote|>“though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.”</|quote|>“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” | his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing;<|quote|>“though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.”</|quote|>“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly | even had bad moments.” “Yes, you’ve been beatific!” --Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing;<|quote|>“though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.”</|quote|>“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to | appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing;<|quote|>“though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.”</|quote|>“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but | The Outcry |
“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” | Grace | running a continuous _table d’hôte_.”<|quote|>“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,”</|quote|>Lady Grace went on, “your | this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.”<|quote|>“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,”</|quote|>Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I | If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.”<|quote|>“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,”</|quote|>Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he | free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.”<|quote|>“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,”</|quote|>Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can | “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.”<|quote|>“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,”</|quote|>Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of | of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.”<|quote|>“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,”</|quote|>Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, | of the footman--a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.”<|quote|>“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,”</|quote|>Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you | was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.”<|quote|>“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,”</|quote|>Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; | The Outcry |
Lady Grace went on, | No speaker | people care for; unless, perhaps,”<|quote|>Lady Grace went on,</|quote|>“your own peculiar one, as | amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,”<|quote|>Lady Grace went on,</|quote|>“your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing | you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,”<|quote|>Lady Grace went on,</|quote|>“your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it | he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,”<|quote|>Lady Grace went on,</|quote|>“your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady | doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,”<|quote|>Lady Grace went on,</|quote|>“your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic | appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,”<|quote|>Lady Grace went on,</|quote|>“your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me | for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,”<|quote|>Lady Grace went on,</|quote|>“your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke | rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,”<|quote|>Lady Grace went on,</|quote|>“your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which | The Outcry |
“your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” | Grace | perhaps,” Lady Grace went on,<|quote|>“your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble went more than | most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on,<|quote|>“your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description | fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on,<|quote|>“your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the | new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on,<|quote|>“your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of | let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on,<|quote|>“your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” | for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on,<|quote|>“your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of | be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on,<|quote|>“your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” | “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on,<|quote|>“your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, | The Outcry |
Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. | No speaker | said the old idiotic superstitions.”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on.</|quote|>“The names and stories and | in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on.</|quote|>“The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, | banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on.</|quote|>“The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace | before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on.</|quote|>“The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred | what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on.</|quote|>“The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper | to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on.</|quote|>“The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. | visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on.</|quote|>“The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether | than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on.</|quote|>“The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a | The Outcry |
“The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” | Crimble | indeed even beckoned it on.<|quote|>“The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?”</|quote|>But he had a drop, | of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on.<|quote|>“The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?”</|quote|>But he had a drop, no less, as from the | own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on.<|quote|>“The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?”</|quote|>But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the | I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on.<|quote|>“The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?”</|quote|>But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” | more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on.<|quote|>“The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?”</|quote|>But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked | lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on.<|quote|>“The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?”</|quote|>But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more | Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears--to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern. IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on.<|quote|>“The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?”</|quote|>But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath | all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on.<|quote|>“The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?”</|quote|>But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their | The Outcry |
But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. | No speaker | author or subject or school?”<|quote|>But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost.</|quote|>“Ah, that’s a game at | not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?”<|quote|>But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost.</|quote|>“Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” | in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?”<|quote|>But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost.</|quote|>“Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of | “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?”<|quote|>But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost.</|quote|>“Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me | free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?”<|quote|>But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost.</|quote|>“Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you | more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?”<|quote|>But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost.</|quote|>“Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in | IV Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?”<|quote|>But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost.</|quote|>“Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if | flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?”<|quote|>But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost.</|quote|>“Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, | The Outcry |
“Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” | Crimble | of a cause sometimes lost.<|quote|>“Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!”</|quote|>“Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, | less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost.<|quote|>“Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!”</|quote|>“Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can | to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost.<|quote|>“Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!”</|quote|>“Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have | that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost.<|quote|>“Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!”</|quote|>“Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time | I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost.<|quote|>“Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!”</|quote|>“Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he | her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost.<|quote|>“Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!”</|quote|>“Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I | her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost.<|quote|>“Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!”</|quote|>“Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us | shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost.<|quote|>“Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!”</|quote|>“Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight | The Outcry |
“Though scarcely,” | Grace | which we _all_ can play!”<|quote|>“Though scarcely,”</|quote|>Lady Grace suggested, “at which | “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!”<|quote|>“Though scarcely,”</|quote|>Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The | even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!”<|quote|>“Though scarcely,”</|quote|>Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much | Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!”<|quote|>“Though scarcely,”</|quote|>Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the | said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!”<|quote|>“Though scarcely,”</|quote|>Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then | of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!”<|quote|>“Though scarcely,”</|quote|>Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our | “So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!”<|quote|>“Though scarcely,”</|quote|>Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light | a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!”<|quote|>“Though scarcely,”</|quote|>Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious | The Outcry |
Lady Grace suggested, | No speaker | _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,”<|quote|>Lady Grace suggested,</|quote|>“at which we all can | a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,”<|quote|>Lady Grace suggested,</|quote|>“at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed | it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,”<|quote|>Lady Grace suggested,</|quote|>“at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots | on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,”<|quote|>Lady Grace suggested,</|quote|>“at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise | a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,”<|quote|>Lady Grace suggested,</|quote|>“at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” | the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,”<|quote|>Lady Grace suggested,</|quote|>“at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save | kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,”<|quote|>Lady Grace suggested,</|quote|>“at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that | interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,”<|quote|>Lady Grace suggested,</|quote|>“at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she | The Outcry |
“at which we all can score.” | Grace | “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested,<|quote|>“at which we all can score.”</|quote|>The words appeared indeed to | which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested,<|quote|>“at which we all can score.”</|quote|>The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing | names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested,<|quote|>“at which we all can score.”</|quote|>The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the | peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested,<|quote|>“at which we all can score.”</|quote|>The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us | rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested,<|quote|>“at which we all can score.”</|quote|>The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s | of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested,<|quote|>“at which we all can score.”</|quote|>The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by | the midst of the great doings I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested,<|quote|>“at which we all can score.”</|quote|>The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good | _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested,<|quote|>“at which we all can score.”</|quote|>The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t | The Outcry |
The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. | No speaker | which we all can score.”<|quote|>The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance.</|quote|>“Certainly,” he said, “no one | scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.”<|quote|>The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance.</|quote|>“Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much | often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.”<|quote|>The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance.</|quote|>“Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about | of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.”<|quote|>The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance.</|quote|>“Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. | his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.”<|quote|>The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance.</|quote|>“Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation | all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.”<|quote|>The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance.</|quote|>“Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the | I noticed--to have found a beautiful minute for me.” “I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.”<|quote|>The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance.</|quote|>“Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem | would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.”<|quote|>The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance.</|quote|>“Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself | The Outcry |
“Certainly,” | Crimble | for appreciation of their importance.<|quote|>“Certainly,”</|quote|>he said, “no one can | treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance.<|quote|>“Certainly,”</|quote|>he said, “no one can ever have scored much on | a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance.<|quote|>“Certainly,”</|quote|>he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the | this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance.<|quote|>“Certainly,”</|quote|>he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” | --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance.<|quote|>“Certainly,”</|quote|>he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no | stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance.<|quote|>“Certainly,”</|quote|>he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most | time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance.<|quote|>“Certainly,”</|quote|>he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to | made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance.<|quote|>“Certainly,”</|quote|>he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, | The Outcry |
he said, | No speaker | appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,”<|quote|>he said,</|quote|>“no one can ever have | of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,”<|quote|>he said,</|quote|>“no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots | game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,”<|quote|>he said,</|quote|>“no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks | description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,”<|quote|>he said,</|quote|>“no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich | looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,”<|quote|>he said,</|quote|>“no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would | just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,”<|quote|>he said,</|quote|>“no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He | shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,”<|quote|>he said,</|quote|>“no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he | the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,”<|quote|>he said,</|quote|>“no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and | The Outcry |
“no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” | Crimble | their importance. “Certainly,” he said,<|quote|>“no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”</|quote|>“We’ve had great luck,” she | that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said,<|quote|>“no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”</|quote|>“We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been | which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said,<|quote|>“no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”</|quote|>“We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. | his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said,<|quote|>“no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”</|quote|>“We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” | his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said,<|quote|>“no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”</|quote|>“We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been | to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said,<|quote|>“no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”</|quote|>“We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and | taken to hunt for me.” It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said,<|quote|>“no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”</|quote|>“We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that | by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said,<|quote|>“no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”</|quote|>“We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his | The Outcry |
“We’ve had great luck,” | Grace | pride, their claims, their assurance!”<|quote|>“We’ve had great luck,”</|quote|>she granted-- “as I’ve just | the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”<|quote|>“We’ve had great luck,”</|quote|>she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since | growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”<|quote|>“We’ve had great luck,”</|quote|>she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while | or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”<|quote|>“We’ve had great luck,”</|quote|>she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked | a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”<|quote|>“We’ve had great luck,”</|quote|>she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly | call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”<|quote|>“We’ve had great luck,”</|quote|>she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, | of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”<|quote|>“We’ve had great luck,”</|quote|>she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to | somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”<|quote|>“We’ve had great luck,”</|quote|>she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the | The Outcry |
she granted-- | No speaker | assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,”<|quote|>she granted--</|quote|>“as I’ve just been reminded; | their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,”<|quote|>she granted--</|quote|>“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible | place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,”<|quote|>she granted--</|quote|>“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk | But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,”<|quote|>she granted--</|quote|>“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be | “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,”<|quote|>she granted--</|quote|>“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she | “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,”<|quote|>she granted--</|quote|>“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast | in from your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,”<|quote|>she granted--</|quote|>“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it | I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,”<|quote|>she granted--</|quote|>“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three | The Outcry |
“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” | Grace | had great luck,” she granted--<|quote|>“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble had a shudder | their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted--<|quote|>“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The | its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted--<|quote|>“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight | had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted--<|quote|>“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost | can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted--<|quote|>“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of | found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted--<|quote|>“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be | your revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted--<|quote|>“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.” “Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.” “That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!” Well, clearly, she might put it | that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted--<|quote|>“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably | The Outcry |
Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. | No speaker | be pulling us to pieces?”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance.</|quote|>“Mr. Bender?” “The rich American | I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance.</|quote|>“Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave | those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance.</|quote|>“Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant | art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance.</|quote|>“Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an | Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance.</|quote|>“Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in | what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance.</|quote|>“Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, | it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance.</|quote|>“Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.” “Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.” “That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!” Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked--it all came back to | left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance.</|quote|>“Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We | The Outcry |
“Mr. Bender?” | Crimble | had a shudder of remembrance.<|quote|>“Mr. Bender?”</|quote|>“The rich American who’s going | us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance.<|quote|>“Mr. Bender?”</|quote|>“The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a | town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance.<|quote|>“Mr. Bender?”</|quote|>“The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had | importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance.<|quote|>“Mr. Bender?”</|quote|>“The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no | meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance.<|quote|>“Mr. Bender?”</|quote|>“The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, | Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance.<|quote|>“Mr. Bender?”</|quote|>“The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of | of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance.<|quote|>“Mr. Bender?”</|quote|>“The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.” “Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.” “That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!” Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked--it all came back to his being | of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance.<|quote|>“Mr. Bender?”</|quote|>“The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll | The Outcry |
“The rich American who’s going round.” | Grace | shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?”<|quote|>“The rich American who’s going round.”</|quote|>It gave him a sharper | pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?”<|quote|>“The rich American who’s going round.”</|quote|>It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged | tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?”<|quote|>“The rich American who’s going round.”</|quote|>It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he | he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?”<|quote|>“The rich American who’s going round.”</|quote|>It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious | description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?”<|quote|>“The rich American who’s going round.”</|quote|>It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost | to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?”<|quote|>“The rich American who’s going round.”</|quote|>It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you | essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?”<|quote|>“The rich American who’s going round.”</|quote|>It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.” “Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.” “That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!” Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked--it all came back to his being more charmed. “Heaven knows I’ve wanted | his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?”<|quote|>“The rich American who’s going round.”</|quote|>It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen | The Outcry |
It gave him a sharper shock. | No speaker | rich American who’s going round.”<|quote|>It gave him a sharper shock.</|quote|>“The wretch who bagged Lady | of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.”<|quote|>It gave him a sharper shock.</|quote|>“The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed | time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.”<|quote|>It gave him a sharper shock.</|quote|>“The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” | have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.”<|quote|>It gave him a sharper shock.</|quote|>“The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man | indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.”<|quote|>It gave him a sharper shock.</|quote|>“The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious | solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.”<|quote|>It gave him a sharper shock.</|quote|>“The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, | certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.”<|quote|>It gave him a sharper shock.</|quote|>“The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.” “Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.” “That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!” Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked--it all came back to his being more charmed. “Heaven knows I’ve wanted a chance at you, but what | for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.”<|quote|>It gave him a sharper shock.</|quote|>“The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her | The Outcry |
“The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” | Crimble | gave him a sharper shock.<|quote|>“The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”</|quote|>Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is | American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock.<|quote|>“The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”</|quote|>Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor | in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock.<|quote|>“The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”</|quote|>Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no | of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock.<|quote|>“The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”</|quote|>Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, | names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock.<|quote|>“The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”</|quote|>Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted | than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock.<|quote|>“The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”</|quote|>Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I | forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock.<|quote|>“The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”</|quote|>Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.” “Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.” “That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!” Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked--it all came back to his being more charmed. “Heaven knows I’ve wanted a chance at you, but what should you say if, having then at | the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock.<|quote|>“The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”</|quote|>Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. | The Outcry |
Lady Grace showed surprise. | No speaker | who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”<|quote|>Lady Grace showed surprise.</|quote|>“Is he a wretch?” Her | a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”<|quote|>Lady Grace showed surprise.</|quote|>“Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be | gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”<|quote|>Lady Grace showed surprise.</|quote|>“Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ | impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”<|quote|>Lady Grace showed surprise.</|quote|>“Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled | vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”<|quote|>Lady Grace showed surprise.</|quote|>“Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker | the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”<|quote|>Lady Grace showed surprise.</|quote|>“Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw | involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”<|quote|>Lady Grace showed surprise.</|quote|>“Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.” “Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.” “That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!” Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked--it all came back to his being more charmed. “Heaven knows I’ve wanted a chance at you, but what should you say if, having then at last just taken you | face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”<|quote|>Lady Grace showed surprise.</|quote|>“Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh | The Outcry |
“Is he a wretch?” | Grace | Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise.<|quote|>“Is he a wretch?”</|quote|>Her visitor but asked to | wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise.<|quote|>“Is he a wretch?”</|quote|>Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He | heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise.<|quote|>“Is he a wretch?”</|quote|>Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or | their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise.<|quote|>“Is he a wretch?”</|quote|>Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been | be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise.<|quote|>“Is he a wretch?”</|quote|>Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very | broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise.<|quote|>“Is he a wretch?”</|quote|>Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall | also rather spent in the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise.<|quote|>“Is he a wretch?”</|quote|>Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.” “Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.” “That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!” Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked--it all came back to his being more charmed. “Heaven knows I’ve wanted a chance at you, but what should you say if, having then at last just taken you in in your so | in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise.<|quote|>“Is he a wretch?”</|quote|>Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three | The Outcry |
Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. | No speaker | surprise. “Is he a wretch?”<|quote|>Her visitor but asked to be extravagant.</|quote|>“Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his | Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?”<|quote|>Her visitor but asked to be extravagant.</|quote|>“Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, | Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?”<|quote|>Her visitor but asked to be extravagant.</|quote|>“Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at | “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?”<|quote|>Her visitor but asked to be extravagant.</|quote|>“Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. | or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?”<|quote|>Her visitor but asked to be extravagant.</|quote|>“Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever | been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?”<|quote|>Her visitor but asked to be extravagant.</|quote|>“Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid | the process--kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?”<|quote|>Her visitor but asked to be extravagant.</|quote|>“Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.” “Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.” “That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!” Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked--it all came back to his being more charmed. “Heaven knows I’ve wanted a chance at you, but what should you say if, having then at last just taken you in in your so apparent perfection, I should feel it the | a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?”<|quote|>Her visitor but asked to be extravagant.</|quote|>“Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any | The Outcry |
“Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” | Crimble | but asked to be extravagant.<|quote|>“Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.”</|quote|>“Oh, I thought you meant | he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant.<|quote|>“Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.”</|quote|>“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” | Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant.<|quote|>“Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.”</|quote|>“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on | I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant.<|quote|>“Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.”</|quote|>“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people | a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant.<|quote|>“Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.”</|quote|>“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also | recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant.<|quote|>“Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.”</|quote|>“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its | redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant.<|quote|>“Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.”</|quote|>“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.” “Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.” “That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!” Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked--it all came back to his being more charmed. “Heaven knows I’ve wanted a chance at you, but what should you say if, having then at last just taken you in in your so apparent perfection, I should feel it the better part of valour simply to mount my ‘bike’ | or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant.<|quote|>“Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.”</|quote|>“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the | The Outcry |
“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” | Grace | his infernal eight thousand down.”<|quote|>“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”</|quote|>“I wish he had--he could | extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.”<|quote|>“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”</|quote|>“I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” | had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.”<|quote|>“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”</|quote|>“I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have | things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.”<|quote|>“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”</|quote|>“I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” | a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.”<|quote|>“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”</|quote|>“I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections | Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.”<|quote|>“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”</|quote|>“I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, | directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.”<|quote|>“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”</|quote|>“I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.” “Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.” “That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!” Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked--it all came back to his being more charmed. “Heaven knows I’ve wanted a chance at you, but what should you say if, having then at last just taken you in in your so apparent perfection, I should feel it the better part of valour simply to mount my ‘bike’ again and spin away?” “I should be sure that at | and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.”<|quote|>“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”</|quote|>“I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared | The Outcry |
“I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” | Crimble | he had played some trick!”<|quote|>“I wish he had--he could then have been collared.”</|quote|>“Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, | “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”<|quote|>“I wish he had--he could then have been collared.”</|quote|>“Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering | who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”<|quote|>“I wish he had--he could then have been collared.”</|quote|>“Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man | the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”<|quote|>“I wish he had--he could then have been collared.”</|quote|>“Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my | we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”<|quote|>“I wish he had--he could then have been collared.”</|quote|>“Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save | I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”<|quote|>“I wish he had--he could then have been collared.”</|quote|>“Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even | the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”<|quote|>“I wish he had--he could then have been collared.”</|quote|>“Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.” “Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.” “That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!” Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked--it all came back to his being more charmed. “Heaven knows I’ve wanted a chance at you, but what should you say if, having then at last just taken you in in your so apparent perfection, I should feel it the better part of valour simply to mount my ‘bike’ again and spin away?” “I should be sure that at the end of the avenue you’d turn right round | ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”<|quote|>“I wish he had--he could then have been collared.”</|quote|>“Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” | The Outcry |
“Well,” | Grace | could then have been collared.”<|quote|>“Well,”</|quote|>Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s | trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.”<|quote|>“Well,”</|quote|>Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ | “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.”<|quote|>“Well,”</|quote|>Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely | in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.”<|quote|>“Well,”</|quote|>Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest | “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.”<|quote|>“Well,”</|quote|>Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for | rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.”<|quote|>“Well,”</|quote|>Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford | mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.”<|quote|>“Well,”</|quote|>Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.” “Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.” “That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!” Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked--it all came back to his being more charmed. “Heaven knows I’ve wanted a chance at you, but what should you say if, having then at last just taken you in in your so apparent perfection, I should feel it the better part of valour simply to mount my ‘bike’ again and spin away?” “I should be sure that at the end of the avenue you’d turn right round and | not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.”<|quote|>“Well,”</|quote|>Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case | The Outcry |
Lady Grace peacefully smiled, | No speaker | then have been collared.” “Well,”<|quote|>Lady Grace peacefully smiled,</|quote|>“it’s no use his offering | “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,”<|quote|>Lady Grace peacefully smiled,</|quote|>“it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or | wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,”<|quote|>Lady Grace peacefully smiled,</|quote|>“it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” | which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,”<|quote|>Lady Grace peacefully smiled,</|quote|>“it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover | which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,”<|quote|>Lady Grace peacefully smiled,</|quote|>“it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly | feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,”<|quote|>Lady Grace peacefully smiled,</|quote|>“it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. | ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,”<|quote|>Lady Grace peacefully smiled,</|quote|>“it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.” “Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.” “That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!” Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked--it all came back to his being more charmed. “Heaven knows I’ve wanted a chance at you, but what should you say if, having then at last just taken you in in your so apparent perfection, I should feel it the better part of valour simply to mount my ‘bike’ again and spin away?” “I should be sure that at the end of the avenue you’d turn right round and come back. You’d think | or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,”<|quote|>Lady Grace peacefully smiled,</|quote|>“it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford | The Outcry |
“it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!” | Grace | “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled,<|quote|>“it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble stared as at | could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled,<|quote|>“it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this | Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled,<|quote|>“it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying | us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled,<|quote|>“it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth | score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled,<|quote|>“it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from | up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled,<|quote|>“it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his | remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled,<|quote|>“it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.” “Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.” “That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!” Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked--it all came back to his being more charmed. “Heaven knows I’ve wanted a chance at you, but what should you say if, having then at last just taken you in in your so apparent perfection, I should feel it the better part of valour simply to mount my ‘bike’ again and spin away?” “I should be sure that at the end of the avenue you’d turn right round and come back. You’d think again of Mr. Bender.” “Whom I don’t, however, you see--if he’s prowling | it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled,<|quote|>“it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!”</|quote|>Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at | The Outcry |
Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. | No speaker | thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made.</|quote|>“Gracious goodness, I hope not! | use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made.</|quote|>“Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ | but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made.</|quote|>“Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble | that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made.</|quote|>“Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might | of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made.</|quote|>“Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled | your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made.</|quote|>“Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” | at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.” “Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.” “Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free gaiety of recognition. “Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected. “Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said-- “before a new and rare feast!” She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made.</|quote|>“Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for us.” “Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?” His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.” “Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.” “That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!” Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked--it all came back to his being more charmed. “Heaven knows I’ve wanted a chance at you, but what should you say if, having then at last just taken you in in your so apparent perfection, I should feel it the better part of valour simply to mount my ‘bike’ again and spin away?” “I should be sure that at the end of the avenue you’d turn right round and come back. You’d think again of Mr. Bender.” “Whom I don’t, however, you see--if he’s prowling off there--in the least want to meet.” Crimble made the point with gaiety. “I don’t know what I mightn’t do to him--and yet it’s not of | your ride? If the other, that is--for there has been an ogre before you--has left any.” “Some tea, with pleasure” --he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table d’hôte_.” “Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.” Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!” “Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.” The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!” “We’ve had great luck,” she granted-- “as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?” Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?” “The rich American who’s going round.” It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?” Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?” Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.” “Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!” “I wish he had--he could then have been collared.” “Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_ eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!”<|quote|>Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made.</|quote|>“Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.” She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” “Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.” She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.” “We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?” The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’” It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.” “Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.” “I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.” Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!” “Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub! I dare say” --the young man saw it all-- “he has brought his poisonous cheque.” She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.” “And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?” “No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.” He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?” “As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.” He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.” The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the | The Outcry |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.