"It is not for sale," replied Ned, "and it's quite enough to hire it, I assure you, Hirsch."
Mr. Hirsch laughed in his loud unfettered fashion.
"Ah! my dear Blackborough, you always pay too much for everything. You are the sellers' natural prey."
Aura who had helped herself out of another silver dish to something which the butler called _fraises a la creme en caisses_, because it looked to her like strawberries and cream, gave a quick glance at Ned.
Paid for; yes, of course, everything must have been paid for. In an instant all her pleasure became transmuted to gold. The very strawberries--strawberries at Christmas! What must they not have cost? And they had been got for her. She felt, hotly, as if she were being bribed.
"If you will finish your lunch," came Ned's voice in an undertone, "we can start back as soon afterwards as you choose. Yes! Hirsch," he added out loud, "I know I'm done all round. But it amuses people, and it doesn't hurt me. The only use of money is to get rid of it."
"I never, Mrs. Tressilian," protested Lady Smith-Biggs plaintively, "quite understand what your cousin means."
"I don't wonder," replied Helen soothingly, then smiled to herself, for, in truth, the lady in question seldom understood anything, but, being the wife of a conservative manufacturer who stood for his native town, thought it her duty to take an interest in social and political questions. "Ned loves paradoxes, but he really hates being cheated as much as any one."
"I only meant, Lady Smith-Biggs," put in Lord Blackborough, gravely, "that I am quite willing to subscribe--as I am sure Sir Joseph does--to all the great truths which underlie our commercial prosperity. That is to say, first, that everything is worth what it will fetch, and a trifle more for underhand percentages. Secondly, that nothing can be called cheating in an open market. Thirdly, that truth is the affair of the purchaser, or his creator."
"Bah! my dear Lord Blackborough," laughed Mr. Hirsch, "you would have a world without money; it would be a pretty paradise."
"But," protested Lady Smith-Biggs again, her diamond ear-rings twinkling--they were so magnificent that they made one forget the redness and the fatness of the face against which they shone, "I really do not understand. If you have no money, how can you pay your bills?"