Thus excited, she gave with sudden sombre clearness another try. “Well—the value’s a fancy value!”
Mr. Prodmore, receiving it as more than he could have hoped, turned triumphant to his young friend. “Exactly what I told you!”
Mrs. Gracedew explained indeed as if Mr. Prodmore’s triumph was not perhaps exactly what she had argued for. Still, the truth was too great. “When a thing’s unique, it’s unique!”
That was every bit Mr. Prodmore required. “It’s unique!”
This met, moreover, the perception of the gentleman in the green necktie. “It’s unique!” They all, in fact, demonstratively—almost vociferously now—caught the point.
Mrs. Gracedew, finding herself so sustained, and still with her eyes on the lawful heirs, put it yet more strongly. “It’s worth anything you like.”
What was this but precisely what Mr. Prodmore had always striven to prove? “Anything you like!” he richly reverberated.
The pleasant discussion and the general interest seemed to bring them all together. “Twenty thousand now?” one of the gentlemen from Gossage archly inquired—a very young gentleman with an almost coaxing voice, who blushed immensely as soon as he had spoken.
He blushed still more at the way Mrs. Gracedew faced him. “I wouldn’t look at twenty thousand!”
Mr. Prodmore, on the other hand, was proportionately uplifted. “She wouldn’t look at twenty thousand!” he announced with intensity to the Captain.