Where is he then? Lord Theign demanded.
Off there among the pictureswhich he seems partly to have come for.
Oh!it made his lordship easier. Then hes all righton such a day.
His companion could none the less just wonder. Hadnt Lady Grace told you?
That he was coming? Not that I remember. But Lord Theign, perceptibly preoccupied, made nothing of this. Weve had other fish to fry, and you know the freedom I allow her.
His friend had a vivid gesture. My dear man, I only ask to profit by it! With which there might well have been in Lord Johns face a light of comment on the pretension in such a quarter to allow freedom.
Yet it was a pretension that Lord Theign sustainedas to show himself far from all bourgeois narrowness. She has her friends by the scoreat this time of day. There was clearly a claim here alsoto know the time of day. But in the matter of friends where, by the way, is your ownof whom Ive but just heard?
Oh, off there among the pictures too; so theyll have met and taken care of each other. Accounting for this inquirer would be clearly the least of Lord Johns difficulties. I mustnt appear to Bender to have failed him; but I must at once let you know, before I join him, that, seizing my opportunity, I have just very definitely, in fact very pressingly, spoken to Lady Grace. It hasnt been perhaps, he continued, quite the pick of a chance; but that seemed never to come, and if Im not too fondly mistaken, at any rate, she listened to me without abhorrence. Only Ive led her to expectfor our casethat youll be so good, without loss of time, as to say the clinching word to her yourself.
Without loss, you mean, ofamy daughters time? Lord Theign, confessedly and amiably interested, had accepted these intimationsyet with the very blandness that was not accessible to hustling and was never forgetful of its standing privilege of criticism. He had come in from his public duty, a few minutes before, somewhat flushed and blown; but that had presently droppedto the effect, we should have guessed, of his appearing to Lord John at least as cool as the occasion required. His appearance, we ourselves certainly should have felt, was in all respects charmingwith the great note of it the beautiful restless, almost suspicious, challenge to you, on the part of deep and mixed things in him, his pride and his shyness, his conscience, his taste and his temper, to deny that he was admirably simple. Obviously, at this rate, he had a passion for simplicitysimplicity, above all, of relation with you, and would show you, with the last subtlety of displeasure, his impatience of your attempting anything more with himself. With such an ideal of decent ease he would, confound you, sink a hundred other attributesor the recognition at least and the formulation of themthat you might abjectly have taken for granted in him: just to show you that in a beastly vulgar age you had, and small wonder, a beastly vulgar imagination. He sank thus, surely, in defiance of insistent vulgarity, half his consciousness of his advantages, flattering himself that mere facility and amiability, a true effective, a positively ideal suppression of reference in any one to anything that might complicate, alone floated above. This would be quite his religion, you might inferto cause his hands to ignore in whatever contact any opportunity, however convenient, for an unfair pull. Which habit it was that must have produced in him a sort of ripe and radiant fairness; if it be allowed us, that is, to figure in so shining an air a nobleman of fifty-three, of an undecided rather than a certified frame or outline, of a head thinly though neatly covered and not measureably massive, of an almost trivial freshness, of a face marked but by a fine inwrought line or two and lighted by a merely charming expression. You might somehow have traced back the whole character so presented to an ideal privately invokedthat of his establishing in the formal garden of his suffered greatness such easy seats and short perspectives, such winding paths and natural-looking waters, as would mercifully break up the scale. You would perhaps indeed have reflected at the same time that the thought of so much mercy was almost more than anything else the thought of a great option and a great marginin fine of fifty alternatives. Which remarks of ours, however, leave his lordship with his last immediate question on his hands.