Henry James

“ She spared him the invidious answer to this as, a moment before, his eagerness had spared her reserve; she flung over the “ground” that his question laid bare the light veil of an evasion, “‘Great people,’ I’ve learned to see, mustn’t—to remain great—do what my father’s doing.”
“It’s indeed on the theory of their not so behaving,” Hugh returned, “that we see them—all the inferior rest of us—in the grand glamour of their greatness!”
If he had spoken to meet her admirable frankness half-way, that beauty in her almost brushed him aside to make at a single step the rest of the journey. ”

“ Hugh meanwhile, visibly, had not only followed his train of thought, he had let it lead him to certainty. “It will have moved Mr. Bender to absolute rapture.”
“Rather,” Lady Grace wondered, “than have put him off?”
“It will have put him prodigiously on! Mr. Bender—as he said to me at Dedborough of his noble host there,” Hugh pursued—“is ‘a very nice man’; but he’s a product of the world of advertisment, and advertisement is all he sees and aims at. He lives in it as a saint in glory or a fish in water.” ”

“ Do you call it the moment for me to have liked to see myself all but cajoled into planking down even such a matter as the very much lower figure of Kitty’s horrid incubus?”
“Ah, but the inducement and the quid pro quo,” Lord John brightly indicated, “are here much greater! In the case you speak of you will only have removed the incubus—which, I grant you, she must and you must feel as horrid. In this other you pacify Lady Imber and marry Lady Grace: marry her to a man who has set his heart on her and of whom she has just expressed—to himself—a very kind and very high opinion.” ”

“ She smiled more intensely, her eyes attached, as from fascination, to the morsel of paper still handled by her friend. “But of course on his next visit he’ll add his great signature.”
“The devil he will!”—and Lord Theign, with the highest spirit, tore the crisp token into several pieces, which fluttered, as worthless now as pure snowflakes, to the floor.
“Ay, ay, ay!”—it drew from her a wail of which the character, for its sharp inconsequence, was yet comic.
This renewed his stare at her. “Do you want to back out? I mean from your noble stand.” ”

“ The young man appeared to regard this imputation for a moment almost as a liberty taken. “How do you know so well, Lady Sandgate, what I represent?”
She bethought herself—but briefly and bravely. “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 Theign looked for a moment as if these were rather large presumptions; then he put them in their place a little curtly. “It’s one thing to keep our possessions for ourselves—it’s another to keep them for other people.”
“Well,” Hugh good-humouredly returned, “I’m perhaps not so absolutely sure of myself, if you press me, as that I sha’n’t be glad of a higher and wiser opinion—I mean than my own. It would be awfully interesting, if you’ll allow me to say so, to have the judgment of one or two of the great men.” ”

“ Hugh had for an instant a show of hesitation—of the arrested impulse, while he kept her father within range, to launch at that personage before going some final remonstrance. It was the girl’s raised hand and gesture of warning that waved away for him such a mistake; he decided, under her pressure, and after a last searching and answering look at her reached the door and let himself out. The stillness was then prolonged a minute by the further wait of the two others, Lord Theign where he had been standing and his daughter on the spot from which she had not moved. ”

“ Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering us eight thousand—or eighteen or even eighty!”
Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t suppose you’d traffic.”
She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people have trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.” ”

“ But it’s another affair over there where the eagle screams like a thousand steam-whistles and the newspapers flap like the leaves of the forest: there he’ll be, if you’ll only let him, the biggest thing going; since sound, in that air, seems to mean size, and size to be all that counts. If he said of the thing, as you recognise,” Lord John went on, “‘It’s going to be a Mantovano,’ why you can bet your life that it is—that it has got to be some kind of a one.” ”

“ Bender asked, “is Lord John?”
Lady Sandgate, as he spoke, found her eyes meeting those of a young woman who, presenting herself from without, stood framed in the doorway to the terrace; a slight fair grave young woman, of middle, stature and simply dressed, whose brow showed clear even under the heavy shade of a large hat surmounted with big black bows and feathers. Her eyes had vaguely questioned those of her elder, who at once replied to the gentleman forming the subject of their inquiry: “Lady Grace must know.” ”

“ But the butler had come in, interrupting, straight from the lobby; of whom she made her request. “Let her ladyship know—Mr. Crimble.”
Gotch looked hard at Hugh and the crumpled hat—almost as if having an option. But he resigned himself to repeating, with a distinctness that scarce fell short of the invidious, “Mr. Crimble,” and departed on his errand.
Lady Sandgate’s fair flush of diplomacy had meanwhile not faded. “Couldn’t you, with your immense cleverness and power, get the Government to do something?”
“About your picture?” Hugh betrayed on this head a graceless detachment. ”

“ Lord Theign looked again hard at Hugh, and then harder than he had done yet at his other invader. “I don’t know what Mr. Bender means!” With which he turned off.
“Well, I guess I mean that it would come higher to me than to any one! But how much higher?” the American continued to Hugh.
“How much higher to you?”
“Oh, I can size that. How much higher as a Mantovano?”
Unmistakably—for us at least—our young man was gaining time; he had the instinct of circumspection and delay. “To any one?”
“To any one.”
“Than as a Moretto?” Hugh continued.
It even acted on Lord John’s nerves. ”

“ It was more than Lord John could bear as he fairly flung himself off in his derisive impotence and addressed his wail to Lady Sandgate.
“Yes, at my expense is exactly what I mean,” Lord Theign asseverated—“at the expense of my modest claim to regulate my behaviour by my own standards. There you perfectly are about the man, and it’s precisely what I say—that he’s to hustle and harry me because he’s a money-monster: which I never for a moment dreamed of, please understand, when I let you, John, thrust him at me as a pecuniary resource at Dedborough. ”

“ Such was the setting confirmed by generous time, but the handsome woman of considerably more than forty whose entrance had all but coincided with that of Lord John either belonged, for the eye, to no such complacent company or enjoyed a relation to it in which the odd twists and turns of history must have been more frequent than any dull avenue or easy sequence. Lady Sandgate was shiningly modern, and perhaps at no point more so than by the effect of her express repudiation of a mundane future certain to be more and more offensive to women of real quality and of formed taste. ”

“ Lord Theign sighed. With which he moved away from her.
Her eyes followed him an instant—then she smiled at their guest. “Is he bored at having the higher prize—if you’re sure it is the higher?”
“Mr. Crimble is sure—because if he isn’t,” Lord John added, “he’s a wretch.”
“Well,” she returned, “as he’s certainly not a wretch it must be true. And fancy,” she exclaimed further, though as more particularly for herself, “our having suddenly incurred this immense debt to him!” ”

“ Ah,” he cried so cheerily that there was still a freedom in it toward any it might concern, “the worst sha’n’t come to the worst, but the best to the best: my conviction of which it is that supports me in the deep regret I have to express”—and he faced Lord Theign again—“for any inconvenience I may have caused you by my abortive undertaking. That, I vow here before Lady Grace, I will yet more than make up!” ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Bender impartially inquired, “a very wonderful thing?”
“Well, as a Lawrence, it has quite bowled me over”—Hugh spoke as for the strictly aesthetic awkwardness of that. “But you know I take my pictures hard.” He gave a punch to his hat, pressed for time in this connection as he was glad truly to appear to his friend. “I must make my little rapport.” Yet before it he did seek briefly to explain. “We’re a band of young men who care—and we watch the great things. Also—for I must give you the real truth about myself—we watch the great people.” ”

“ Lady Sandgate forestalled his knowledge. “Because poor Kitty Imber—who should either never touch a card or else learn to suffer in silence, as I’ve had to, goodness knows!—has thrown herself, with her impossible big debt, upon her father? whom she thinks herself entitled to ‘look to’ even more as a lovely young widow with a good jointure than she formerly did as the mere most beautiful daughter at home.”
She had put the picture a shade interrogatively, but this was as nothing to the note of free inquiry in Lord John’s reply. ”

“ If nothing could have been, on this, richer response, nothing could at the same time have bee more pleasing than her modesty. “Ah, my affectionate Theign, is, as I think you know, a fountain always in flood; but in any more worldly element than that—as you’ve ever seen for yourself—a poor strand with my own sad affairs, a broken reed; not ‘great’ as they used so finely to call it! You are—with the natural sense of greatness and, for supreme support, the instinctive grand man doing and taking things.” ”

“ Lord Theign took, on this, with a frank show of reaction from some of his friend’s terms, a sharp turn off; he even ironically indicated the babbler or at least the blunderer in question to Lady Sandgate. “He too has known me so long, and he comes here to talk to me of ‘the drift of public opinion’!” After which he quite charged at his vain informant. “Am I to tell you again that I snap my fingers at the drift of public opinion?—which is but another name for the chatter of all the fools one doesn’t know, in addition to all those (and plenty of ‘em!) one damnably does.” ”

“ With which he impatiently started, through the long and stately perspective, for the saloon.
She sank into a chair when he had gone; she sat there some moments in a visible tension of thought, her hands clasped in her lap and her dropped eyes fixed and unperceiving; but she sprang up as Hugh Crimble, in search of her, again stood before her. He presented himself as with winged sandals.
“What luck to find you! I must take my spin back.” ”

“ Lord Theign broke in, “tried to befool us, for his beggarly reasons, into claiming for it?”
Lady Sandgate renewed her mild influence. “Ah, the knowing people haven’t had their last word—the possible Mantovano isn’t exploded yet!” Her noble friend, however, declined the offered spell. “I’ve had enough of the knowing people—the knowing people are serpents! My picture’s to take or to leave—and it’s what I’ve come back, if you please, John, to say to your man to his face.” ”

“ Lord Theign coldly laughed,—“of course I trace the connection!”
Mr. Benders acceptance of responsibility clearly cost him no shade of a pang. “Why, I haven’t for quite a while talked of a blessed other thing—and I’m capable of growing more profane over my not getting her than I guess any one would dare to be if I did.”
“Well, you’ll certainly not ‘get’ her, Mr. Bender,” Lady Sandgate, as for reasons of her own, bravely trumpeted; “and even if there were a chance of it don’t you see that your way wouldn’t be publicly to abuse our noble friend?” ”

“ Lord John lived it amusedly over. “Well, she took care of that.”
“How incredibly vulgar!” It all had, however, for Lady Sandgate, still other connections—which might have attenuated Lady Lappington’s case, though she didn’t glance at this. “He makes the most scandalous eyes—the ruffian!—at my great-grandmother.” And then as richly to enlighten any blankness: “My tremendous Lawrence, don’t you know?—in her wedding-dress, down to her knees; with such extraordinarily speaking eyes, such lovely arms and hands, such wonderful flesh-tints: universally considered the masterpiece of the artist.” ”