“Your ladyship, that would give no handle to the law. Now, for instance, if I knew that the Canadian Pacific Railway, let us say, had discovered large coal bearing lands, and if I used that private knowledge to buy your Canadian Pacific stock at, say, one hundred, and if that stock rose to three hundred, could you make me give you your stock back? Certainly not. The gain would be a perfectly legitimate product of my own sharpness.”
“Sharpness,” said the bird woman, “that’s just it. If Arthur had had even sense, to say nothing of sharpness, things would have been very different all round—all round.”
She protruded her head from her boa and retracted it. Jones, furious, dumb, with his hands in his pockets and his back against the window, said nothing.
He never could have imagined that a baiting like this, over a matter with which he had nothing to do, could have made him feel such a fool, and such an ass.
He saw at once how Rochester had been done, and he felt, against all reason, the shame that Rochester might have felt—but probably wouldn’t. His uncle, the Duke of Melford, for that was the choleric one’s name, his mother, the dowager Countess of Rochester, and his sister, the Hon. Venetia Birdbrook, now all rose up and got together in a covey before making their exit, and leaving this bad business and the fool who had brought it about.
You can fancy their feelings. A man in Rochester’s position may be anything, almost, as long as he is wealthy, but should he add the crime of poverty to his other sins he is lost indeed. And Rochester had not only flung his money away, he had flung a coal mine after it.
No wonder that his uncle did not even glance at him again as he left the room, shepherding the two women before him.
“It’s unfortunate,” said Collins, when they found themselves alone. It was the mildest thing he could say, and he said it.