To go to the right people with money in both hands." He sat back and looked at the Sarrions with his little, cunning eyes twinkling beneath his gold laced cap.

The expansiveness would not last much longer.

Sarrion's dark glance was diagnosing the man with a deadly skill.
"The thing," he said slowly, "is to strike while the iron is hot." He spoke in the symbolic way of a people much given to proverbial wisdom and the dark uses of allegory.

He might have meant much or nothing.

As it happened, the Count de Sarrion meant nothing; for he knew nothing.
"That is what I say.