The Outcry | Page 3

with that, the hope of arranging with our admirable host here that he shall lend a helpful hand to your commending yourself to dear Grace?"
Lord John might, in the light of these words, have felt any latent infirmity in such a pretension exposed; but as he stood there facing his chances he would have struck a spectator as resting firmly enough on some felt residuum of advantage: whether this were cleverness or luck, the strength of his backing or that of his sincerity. Even with the young woman to whom our friends' reference thus broadened still a vague quantity for us, you would have taken his sincerity as quite possible--and this despite an odd element in him that you might have described as a certain delicacy of brutality. This younger son of a noble matron recognised even by himself as terrible enjoyed in no immediate or aggressive manner any imputable private heritage or privilege of arrogance. He would on the contrary have irradiated fineness if his lustre hadn't been a little prematurely dimmed. Active yet insubstantial, he was slight and short and a trifle too punctually, though not yet quite lamentably, bald. Delicacy was in the arch of his eyebrow, the finish of his facial line, the economy of "treatment" by which his negative nose had been enabled to look important and his meagre mouth to smile its spareness away.
He had pleasant but hard little eyes--they glittered, handsomely, without promise--and a neatness, a coolness and an ease, a clear instinct for making point take, on his behalf, the place of weight and immunity that of capacity, which represented somehow the art of living at a high pitch and yet at a low cost. There was that in his satisfied air which still suggested sharp wants--and this was withal the ambiguity; for the temper of these appetites or views was certainly, you would have concluded, not such as always to sacrifice to form. If he really, for instance, wanted Lady Grace, the passion or the sense of his interest in it would scarce have been considerately irritable.
"May I ask what you mean," he inquired of Lady Sandgate, "by the question of my 'arranging'?"
"I mean that you're the very clever son of a very clever mother."
"Oh, I'm less clever than you think," he replied--"if you really think it of me at all; and mamma's a good sight cleverer!"
"Than I think?" Lady Sandgate echoed. "Why, she's the person in all our world I would gladly most resemble--for her general ability to put what she wants through." But she at once added: "That is if--!" pausing on it with a smile.
"If what then?"
"Well, if I could be absolutely certain to have all in her kinds of cleverness without exception--and to have them," said Lady Sandgate, "to the very end."
He definitely, he almost contemptuously declined to follow her. "The very end of what?"
She took her choice as amid all the wonderful directions there might be, and then seemed both to risk and to reserve something. "Say of her so wonderfully successful general career."
It doubtless, however, warranted him in appearing to cut insinuations short. "When you're as clever as she you'll be as good." To which he subjoined: "You don't begin to have the opportunity of knowing how good she is." This pronouncement, to whatever comparative obscurity it might appear to relegate her, his interlocutress had to take--he was so prompt with a more explicit challenge. "What is it exactly that you suppose yourself to know?"
Lady Sandgate had after a moment, in her supreme good humour, decided to take everything. "I always proceed on the assumption that I know everything, because that makes people tell me."
"It wouldn't make we," he quite rang out, "if I didn't want to! But as it happens," he allowed, "there's a question it would be convenient to me to put to you. You must be, with your charming unconventional relation with him, extremely in Theign's confidence."
She waited a little as for more. "Is that your question--whether I am?"
"No, but if you are you'll the better answer it"
She had no objection then to answering it beautifully. "We're the best friends in the world; he has been really my providence, as a lone woman with almost nobody and nothing of her own, and I feel my footing here, as so frequent and yet so discreet a visitor, simply perfect But I'm happy to say that--for my pleasure when I'm really curious--this doesn't close to me the sweet resource of occasionally guessing things."
"Then I hope you've ground for believing that if I go the right way about it he's likely to listen to me."
Lady Sandgate measured her ground--which scarce seemed extensive. "The person he most listens to just now--and in fact at any time, as you must have seen for yourself--is that arch-tormentor, or