'Excuse me, but I can hardly believe the rumours I hear of you—people will talk, you know—are all inventions. They say you are for ever burrowing amongst the poor. Excuse the phrase.'
'I excuse or accept it, whichever you please. Whatever I do, I am my own steward.'
'Then you are just the person to help me! I have a fortune, not very limited, at my own disposal: a gentleman who is his own steward, would find his labours merely facilitated by administering for another as well—such labours, I mean.'
'I must beg to be excused, Lady Georgina. I am accountable only for my own, and of that I have quite as much as I can properly manage. It is far more difficult to use money for others than to spend it for yourself.'
'Ah!' said Lady Georgina, thoughtfully, and cast an involuntary glance round the untidy room, with its horse-hair furniture, its ragged array of books on the wall, its side-table littered with pamphlets he never read, with papers he never printed, with pipes he smoked by chance turns. He saw the glance and understood it.
'I am accustomed,' he said, 'to be in such sad places for human beings to live in, that I sometimes think even this dingy old room an absolute palace of comfort.—But,' he added, checking himself, as it were, 'I do not see in the least how your proposal would facilitate an answer to your question.'
'You seem hardly inclined to do me justice,' said Lady Georgina, with, for the first time, a perceptible, though slight shadow crossing the disc of her resolution. 'I only meant it,' she went on, 'as a step towards a further proposal, which I think you will allow looks at least in the direction you have been indicating.'
She paused.
'May I beg of you to state the proposal?' said Falconer.
But Lady Georgina was apparently in some little difficulty as to the proper form in which to express her object. At last it appeared in the cloak of a question.