“It will have put him prodigiously on! Mr. Bender—as he said to me at Dedborough of his noble host there,” Hugh pursued—“is ‘a very nice man’; but he’s a product of the world of advertisment, and advertisement is all he sees and aims at. He lives in it as a saint in glory or a fish in water.”
She took it from him as half doubting. “But mayn’t advertisement, in so special a case, turn, on the whole, against him?”
Hugh shook a negative forefinger with an expression he might have caught from foreign comrades. “He rides the biggest whirlwind—he has got it saddled and bitted.”
She faced the image, but cast about “Then where does our success come in?”
“In our making the beast, all the same, bolt with him and throw him.” And Hugh further pointed the moral. “If in such proceedings all he knows is publicity the thing is to give him publicity, and it’s only a question of giving him enough. By the time he has enough for himself, you see, he’ll have too much for every one else—so that we shall ‘up’ in a body and slay him.”
The girl’s eyebrows, in her wondering face, rose to a question. “But if he has meanwhile got the picture?”
“We’ll slay him before he gets it!” He revelled in the breadth of his view. “Our own policy must be to organise to that end the inevitable outcry. Organise Bender himself—organise him to scandal.” Hugh had already even pity to spare for their victim. “He won’t know it from a boom.”
Though carried along, however, Lady Grace could still measure. “But that will be only if he wants and decides for the picture.”
“We must make him then want and decide for it—decide, that is, for ‘ours.’ To save it we must work him up—he’ll in that case want it so indecently much. Then we shall have to want it more!”
“Well,” she anxiously felt it her duty to remind him, “you can take a horse to water——!”