“You can’t have our Duchess!” Lady Sandgate repeated, but with a grace that took the sting from her triumph. And she seemed still all sweet sociability as she added: “I wish he’d tell you too, you dreadful rich thing, that you can’t have anything at all!”
Lord Theign, however, in the interest of harmony, deprecated that rigour. “Ah, what then would become of my happy retort?”
“And what—as it is,” Mr. Bender asked—“becomes of my unhappy grievance?”
“Wouldn’t a really great capture make up to you for that?”
“Well, I take more interest in what I want than in what I have—and it depends, don’t you see, on how you measure the size.”
Lord John had at once in this connection a bright idea. “Shouldn’t you like to go back there and take the measure yourself?”
Mr. Bender considered him as through narrowed eyelids. “Look again at that tottering Moretto?”
“Well, its size—as you say—isn’t in any light a negligible quantity.”
“You mean that—big as it is—it hasn’t yet stopped growing?”
The question, however, as he immediately showed, resided in what Lord Theign himself meant “It’s more to the purpose,” he said to Mr. Bender, “that I should mention to you the leading feature, or in other words the very essence, of my plan of campaign—which is to put the picture at once on view.” He marked his idea with a broad but elegant gesture. “On view as a thing definitely disposed of.”