“I am happy to hear so, since you let them in here.”
“But everybody is going to know them.”
“Then why should you care about my knowing them too?”
“That is just——” began his sister, and paused, scanning the little mouse embroidered on her handkerchief.
“Take your eyes off that bit of gossamer and look at me,” said Hurstmanceaux severely. “You do this kind of thing. Cocky does it. You make Gerald do it. But I’ll be damned, my dear, if you make me.”
She was mute, distressed, irritated, not seeing very well what to say or resent.
“Get up a firm with old Khris,” continued her brother; “Khris and Kenilworth; it will run very nicely and take the town like wildfire; I am convinced that it will; but Hurstmanceaux as ‘Co.’—no thank you.”
“You don’t even hear me,” said his sister rather piteously.
“I know all you’re going to say,” he replied. “You mean to float these people, and you’ll do it. You’ll get ’em to State concerts, and you’ll get ’em to Marlborough House garden-parties, and you’ll get ’em to political houses, and you’ll ram ’em down all our throats, and take the princes to dine with ’em; I know all that; it’s always the same programme; and the he-beast will get a baronetcy, and the she-beast will get to Hatfield, and you’ll run them just as Barnum used to run his giants and dwarfs, and you’ll make a pot by it as Barnum did. Only leave me out of the thing, if you please.”
“Why shouldn’t you be the sleeping partner?” said his sister jestingly, but with a side glance of her lovely eyes which had a timid and keen interrogation in it. “Nobody’d be the wiser, and your word has such weight.”