"Don't you call me your dear! I won't have it."
"Very well, although it is possible that few men have a better right----"
"Right! Don't you dare to talk to me about right!--you!--don't you talk to me like that, Mr. Luker! You just simply listen to me. I want ten thousand pounds before this day week, and you've got to get it. No one in London knows better than you from whom and how to get it."
"Mrs. Lamb--by the way, how is your worthy husband?"
"Never mind my worthy husband--you keep to the point."
"Even supposing we are able to saddle McTavish & Brown with the responsibility for the Hardwood shares--which is problematical--it'll take a good deal more than three months to do it. It is not to be supposed that they'll accept an adverse decision without taking the case through every court available. That may take years. If in the end it is decided that they will have to pay, it is not by any means certain that they will be able to. Costs will have swollen the original total enormously; it all will have to come from them. There is nothing to show that they are in a position to pay such a huge sum as that will be."
"Oh yes, there is; they're rolling in money; I've seen enough of them to know so much."
"You think you have. I doubt if that is a matter on which your judgment can be trusted. If the case ultimately goes against them, the possibilities--I should say the probabilities--are that they will declare themselves bankrupt. Then where will you be? You will have to pay your own costs, and, instead of getting the amount adjudged, after another interval of dreary waiting, you may receive, as a final quittance, perhaps sixpence, or a shilling, in the pound. And in the meantime, you must remember, you will have to live."
"You old croaker!"
"Let me make a suggestion."