“May I ask what you mean,” he inquired of Lady Sandgate, “by the question of my ‘arranging’?”
“I mean that you’re the very clever son of a very clever mother.”
“Oh, I’m less clever than you think,” he replied—“if you really think it of me at all; and mamma’s a good sight cleverer!”
“Than I think?” Lady Sandgate echoed. “Why, she’s the person in all our world I would gladly most resemble—for her general ability to put what she wants through.” But she at once added: “That is if—!” pausing on it with a smile.
“If what then?”
“Well, if I could be absolutely certain to have all in her kinds of cleverness without exception—and to have them,” said Lady Sandgate, “to the very end.”
He definitely, he almost contemptuously declined to follow her. “The very end of what?”
She took her choice as amid all the wonderful directions there might be, and then seemed both to risk and to reserve something. “Say of her so wonderfully successful general career.”
It doubtless, however, warranted him in appearing to cut insinuations short. “When you’re as clever as she you’ll be as good.” To which he subjoined: “You don’t begin to have the opportunity of knowing how good she is.” This pronouncement, to whatever comparative obscurity it might appear to relegate her, his interlocutress had to take—he was so prompt with a more explicit challenge. “What is it exactly that you suppose yourself to know?”
Lady Sandgate had after a moment, in her supreme good humour, decided to take everything. “I always proceed on the assumption that I know everything, because that makes people tell me.”