She herself, with her head on one side, studied her sketch and seemed to twirl her pencil. "No--not quite. But I'll settle the rest with Captain Yule."
Her companion looked, over his white waistcoat, at his large tense shoes, the patent-leather shine of which so flashed propriety back at him that he became, the next moment, doubly erect on it. "Captain Yule has nothing to sell."
She received the remark with surprise. "Then what have you been trying to buy?"
She had touched in himself even a sharper spring. "Do you mean to say," he cried, "you want to buy _that_?" She stared at his queer emphasis, which was intensified by a queer grimace; then she turned from him with a change of colour and an ejaculation that led to nothing more, after a few seconds, than a somewhat conscious silence--a silence of which Mr. Prodmore made use to follow up his unanswered question with another. "Is your proposal that I should transfer my investment to you for the mere net amount of it your conception of a fair bargain?"
This second inquiry, however, she could, as she slowly came round, substantially meet. "Pray, then, what is yours?"
"Mine would be, not that I should simply get my money back, but that I should get the effective value of the house."
Mrs. Gracedew considered it. "But isn't the effective value of the house just what your money expresses?"
The lid of his hard left eye, the harder of the two, just dipped with the effect of a wink. "No, madam. It's just what _yours_ does. It's moreover just what your lips have already expressed so distinctly!"
She clearly did her best to follow him. "To those people--when I showed the place off?"
Mr. Prodmore laughed. "You seemed to be _taking_ bids then!"
She was candid, but earnest. "Taking them?"
"Oh, like an auctioneer! You ran it up high!" And Mr. Prodmore laughed again.
She turned a little pale, but it added to her brightness. "I certainly did, if saying it was charming----"
"Charming?" Mr. Prodmore broke in. "You said it was magnificent. You said it was unique. That was your very word. You said it was the _perfect_ specimen of its class in England." He was more than accusatory, he was really crushing. "Oh, you got in deep!"
It was indeed an indictment, and her smile was perhaps now rather set. "Possibly. But taunting me with my absurd high spirits and the dreadful liberties I took doesn't in the least tell me how deep _you're_ in!"