IV

Summary

“THEN Theign's not yet here!” Lord John had to resign himself as he greeted his American ally. “But he told me I should find you.”

“He has kept me waiting,” that gentleman returned—“but what's the matter with him anyway?”

“The matter with him”—Lord John treated such ignorance as irritating—“must of course be this beastly thing in the ‘Journal.’”

Mr. Bender proclaimed, on the other hand, his incapacity to seize such connections. “What's the matter with the beastly thing?”

“Why, aren't you aware that the stiffest bit of it is a regular dig at you?”

“If you call that a regular dig you can't have had much experience of the Papers. I’ve known them to dig much deeper.”

“I’ve had no experience of such horrid attacks, thank goodness; but do you mean to say,” asked Lord John with the surprise of his own delicacy, “that you don't unpleasantly feel it?”

“Feel it where, my dear sir?”

“Why, God bless me, such impertinence, everywhere!”

“All over me at once?”—Mr. Bender took refuge in easy humour. “Well, I’m a large man—so when I want to feel so much I look out for something good. But what, if he suffers from the blot on his ermine—ain't that what you wear?—does our friend propose to do about it?”

Lord John had a demur, which was immediately followed by the apprehension of support in his uncertainty. Lady Sandgate was before them, having reached them through the other room, and to her he at once referred the question. “What will Theign propose, do you think, Lady Sandgate, to do about it?”

She breathed both her hospitality and her vagueness. “To ‘do’——?”

“Don't you know about the thing in the ‘Journal’—awfully offensive all round?”

“There’d be even a little pinch for you in it,” Mr. Bender said to her—“if you were bent on fitting the shoe!”

Well, she met it all as gaily as was compatible with a firm look at her elder guest while she took her place with them. “Oh, the shoes of such monsters as that are much too big for poor me!” But she was more specific for Lord John.