“He does not think so.”
“No! Horrid selfish old man! Pretending to be young, too, with his flossy white hair and his absurd flirtations. Would you believe that he even made difficulties about our keeping our horses at his mews!”
“He probably knew that it meant his paying the forage bills. The duke is most generous and kind, and I think you ought to be more grateful to him than you are.”
“Oh, rubbish!” said Mouse, infinitely bored. “People who hate you to amuse yourself, who want you to live on a halfpenny a day, and who say something disagreeable whenever they open their lips, are always considered to be good to one. There is only one really good-natured thing that we ever wanted Poodle to do, and that was to let us live in Otterbourne House; and he has always refused. I am certain he will go on living for twenty years merely to keep us out of it!”
“Don’t wish him in his grave. As soon as your husband gets Otterbourne House he will sell it to make an hotel. A company has already spoken to him.”
“Isn’t it in the entail?”
“Perhaps. I cannot say. Ask your lawyer. But I know that an hotel company has made overtures to him for purchase or lease in event of the duke’s death—may it be many a day distant! He is an honest gentleman, and you and your husband and your cursed cad out of Dakota have made him look to English society as if he were capable of having sold the honor of entrance to his house for a mess of pottage for his son’s thirsty maw.”
“My dear Ronald, how you excite yourself! Really there is no reason.”
Hurstmanceaux looked at her very wistfully.
“Can’t you see the dishonor of what you’ve done?” he said impatiently. “You coax and persecute Otterbourne until he allows you to take those new people to his house, and then you let the cad you take there make your husband a director of a bank of which the man is chairman! Can’t you see to what comment you expose us all? Of what wretched manœuvring you make us all look guilty? Have you any perception, no conscience, no common decency? If Cocky were another kind of man than he is, such a thing would look a job. But being what he is, the transaction is something still more infamous.”