“Ah, but the inducement and the quid pro quo,” Lord John brightly indicated, “are here much greater! In the case you speak of you will only have removed the incubus—which, I grant you, she must and you must feel as horrid. In this other you pacify Lady Imber and marry Lady Grace: marry her to a man who has set his heart on her and of whom she has just expressed—to himself—a very kind and very high opinion.”
“She has expressed a very high opinion of you?”—Lord Theign scarce glowed with credulity.
But the younger man held his ground. “She has told me she thoroughly likes me and that—though a fellow feels an ass repeating such things—she thinks me perfectly charming.”
“A tremendous creature, eh, all round? Then,” said Lord Theign, “what does she want more?”
“She very possibly wants nothing—but I’m to that beastly degree, you see,” his visitor patiently explained, “in the cleft stick of my fearfully positive mother’s wants. Those are her ‘terms,’ and I don’t mind saying that they’re most disagreeable to me—I quite hate ‘em: there! Only I think it makes a jolly difference that I wouldn’t touch ‘em with a long pole if my personal feeling—in respect to Lady Grace—wasn’t so immensely enlisted.”
“I assure you I’d chuck ‘em out of window, my boy, if I didn’t believe you’d be really good to her,” Lord Theign returned with the properest spirit.
It only encouraged his companion. “You will just tell her then, now and here, how good you honestly believe I shall be?”
This appeal required a moment—a longer look at him. “You truly hold that that friendly guarantee, backed by my parental weight, will do your job?”
“That’s the conviction I entertain.”
Lord Theign thought again. “Well, even if your conviction’s just, that still doesn’t tell me into which of my very empty pockets it will be of the least use for me to fumble.”