Holker Morris and Lagarge now strolled in and drawing up to a
small table adjoining Peter's touched a tiny bell. This answered,
and the order given, the two renewed a conversation which had
evidently been begun outside, and which was of so absorbing a
character that for a moment Peter's face, half hidden by his book,
was unnoticed.
"Oh!--that's you, Methusaleh, is it!" cried Morris at last. "Move
over--have something?"
Peter looked up smiling: "Not now, Holker. I will later."
Morris kept on talking. Lagarge, his companion--a thin,
cadaverous-looking man with a big head and the general air of
having been carved out of an old root--a great expert in
ceramics--listening intently, bobbing his head in toy-mandarin
fashion whenever one of Holker's iconoelasms cleared the air.
"Suppose they did pay thirty thousand dollars for it," Holker
insisted, slapping his knee with his outspread palm. "That makes
the picture no better and no worse. If it was mine, and I could
afford it, I would sell it to anybody who loved it for thirty
cents rather than sell it to a man who didn't, for thirty
millions.
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