The Outcry | Page 3

"Well, don't you
represent, by your own admission, certain fond aspirations? Don't you
represent the belief--very natural, I grant--that more than one perverse
and extravagant flower will be unlikely on such a fine healthy old stem;
and, consistently 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