Lady Grace stuck to her word. “That’s what it seems to me!”
“It seems to you”—and his sarcasm here was easy—“more disloyal to sell a picture than to buy one? Because we didn’t paint ‘em all ourselves, you know!”
She threw up impatient hands. “I don’t ask you either to paint or to buy——!”
“Oh, that’s a mercy!” he interrupted, riding his irony hard; “and I’m glad to hear you at least let me off such efforts! However, if it strikes you as gracefully filial to apply to your father’s conduct so invidious a word,” he went on less scathingly, “you must take from him, in your turn, his quite other view of what makes disloyalty—understanding distinctly, by the same token, that he enjoins on you not to give an odious illustration of it, while he’s away, by discussing and deploring with any one of your extraordinary friends any aspect or feature whatever of his walk and conversation. That—pressed as I am for time,” he went on with a glance at his watch while she remained silent—“is the main sense of what I have to say to you; so that I count on your perfect conformity. When you have told me that I may so count”—and casting about for his hat he espied it and went to take it up—“I shall more cordially bid you good-bye.”
His daughter looked as if she had been for some time expecting the law thus imposed upon her—had been seeing where he must come out; but in spite of this preparation she made him wait for his reply in such tension as he had himself created. “To Kitty I’ve practically said nothing—and she herself can tell you why: I’ve in fact scarcely seen her this fortnight. Putting aside then Amy Sandgate, the only person to whom I’ve spoken—of your ‘sacrifice,’ as I suppose you’ll let me call it?—is Mr. Hugh Crimble, whom you talk of as my ‘confederate’ at Dedborough.”
Lord Theign recovered the name with relief. “Mr. Hugh Crimble—that’s it!—whom you so amazingly caused to be present, and apparently invited to be active, at a business that so little concerned him.”
“He certainly took upon himself to be interested, as I had hoped he would. But it was because I had taken upon my self—”
“To act, yes,” Lord Theign broke in, “with the grossest want of delicacy! Well, it’s from that exactly that you’ll now forbear; and ‘interested’ as he may be—for which I’m deucedly obliged to him!—you’ll not speak to Mr. Crimble again.”
“Never again?”—the girl put it as for full certitude.
“Never of the question that I thus exclude. You may chatter your fill,” said his lordship curtly, “about any others.”