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.’”