“I guess I can learn,” he said.
Palliser felt the foothold become firmer. The bounder was interested, but, after a bounder’s fashion, was either nervous or imagined that a show of hesitation looked shrewd. The slight hit made at his inexperience in investment had irritated him and made him feel less cock-sure of himself. A slightly offended manner might be the best weapon to rely upon.
“I thought you might care to have the thing made clear to you,” he continued indifferently. “I meant to explain. You may take the chance or leave it, as you like, of course. That is nothing to me at this stage of the game. But, after all, we are, as I said, relatives of a sort, and it is a gigantic opportunity. Suppose we change the subject.”
Palliser paused in an unconcerned opening of a copy of the Sunday “Earth.”
“Oh, I don’t mind trying to catch on to what’s doing in any big scheme,” said Tembarom.
Palliser’s manner at the outset was perfect. He produced his papers without too obvious eagerness. He spread them upon the table, and coolly examined them himself before beginning his explanation. There was more to explain to a foreigner and one unused to investment than there would be to a man who was an Englishman and familiar with the methods of large companies, he said. He went into technicalities, so to speak, and used rapidly and lightly some imposing words and phrases, to which T. Tembarom listened attentively, but without any special air of illumination. He dealt with statistics and the resulting probabilities. He made apparent the existing condition of England’s inability to supply an enormous and unceasing demand for timber. He had acquired divers excellent methods of stating his case to the party of the second part.
“He made me feel as if a fellow had better hold on to a box of matches like grim death, and that the time wasn’t out of sight when you’d have to give fifty-seven dollars and a half for a toothpick,” Tembarom later said to the duke.
What Tembarom was thinking as he listened to him was that he was not getting over the ground with much rapidity.
“If he thought I wanted to know what he thinks I’d a heap rather not know, he’d never tell me,” he speculated. “If he gets a bit hot in the collar, he may let it out. Thing is to stir him up. He’s lost his nerve a bit, and he’ll get mad pretty easy.”
“Of course money is wanted,” Palliser said at length. “Money is always wanted, and as much when a scheme is a success as when it isn’t. Good names, with a certain character, are wanted. The fact of your inheritance is known everywhere; and the fact that you are an American is a sort of guaranty of shrewdness.”