"you can't have our Duchess!"

"You can't have our Duchess!"--and Lord John, as before the altar of
patriotism, wrapped it in sacrificial sighs.

"You can't have our Duchess!" Lady Sandgate repeated, but with a grace
that took the sting from her triumph. And she seemed still all sweet
sociability as she added: "I wish he'd tell you too, you dreadful rich
thing, that you can't have anything at all!"

Lord Theign, however, in the interest of harmony, deprecated that
rigour. "Ah, what then would become of my happy retort?"

"And what--as it _is_," Mr. Bender asked--"becomes of my unhappy
grievance?"

"Wouldn't a really great capture make up to you for that?"

"Well, I take more interest in what I want than in what I have--and it
depends, don't you see, on how you measure the size."

Lord John had at once in this connection a bright idea. "Shouldn't you
like to go back there and take the measure yourself?"

Mr. Bender considered him as through narrowed eyelids. "Look again at
that tottering Moretto?"

"Well, its size--as you say--isn't in _any_ light a negligible
quantity."

"You mean that--big as it is--it hasn't yet stopped growing?"

The question, however, as he immediately showed, resided in what Lord
Theign himself meant "It's more to the purpose," he said to Mr. Bender,
"that I should mention to you the leading feature, or in other words
the very essence, of my plan of campaign--which is to put the picture at
once on view." He marked his idea with a broad but elegant gesture. "On
view as a thing definitely disposed of."

"I say, I say, I say!" cried Lord John, moved by this bold stroke to
high admiration.

Lady Sandgate's approval was more qualified. "But on view, dear Theign,
how?"

"With one of those pushing people in Bond Street." And then as for the
crushing climax of his policy: "As a Mantovano pure and simple."

"But my dear man," she quavered, "if it _isn't_ one?"

Mr. Bender at once anticipated; the wind had suddenly risen for him
and he let out sail. "Lady Sand-gate, it's going, by all that's--well,
interesting, to _be_ one!"

Lord Theign took him up with pleasure. "You seize me? We _treat_ it as
one!"

Lord John eagerly borrowed the emphasis. "We _treat_ it as one!"

Mr. Bender meanwhile fed with an opened appetite on the thought--he even
gave it back larger. "As the long-lost Number Eight!"

Lord Theign happily seized _him_. "That will be it--to a charm!"

"It will make them," Mr