MAKING A MONOCLE

Transcript:
Archibald: Dashed decent of you to have me out to the country pile for a spot of shooting, wot?
Rhodes: Pish and tosh - think nothing of it. It’s been, what? 5 years? Far too long. And besides, my motives aren’t entirely altruistic.
Rhodes: Truth is, there’s a small matter I want to discuss with you - but that can wait. After you.
Archibald: Ahah! Finally - into the inner sanct-
Archibald: I say. This is quite the private archive you have here.
Archibald: Is that... Is that a first edition of ‘Description de L’Égypt’?
Rhodes: Naturally. Naturally. Ah... If you don’t mind-
Archibald: -and these artifacts? All spoils from your expeditions?
Rhodes: In the main, yes - with a few personal curios thrown in for good meas-
Archibald: By jove! This Bordeaux is the cat’s meow! Don’t tell me it’s the 1870?
Rhodes: Archy. Be a good chap. Please be careful with that.
Archibald: This old thing? Didn’t Scarlett gad about wreaking havoc on the ants with it, when she was small?
Rhodes: Quite so. And having survived that, I’d hate to lose it now. It’s quite irreplaceable. One of a kind, you see.
Archibald: Oh? Good lord, how do you read with this?
Rhodes: It’s not for reading, Archy. The monocles lens is milled from some very particular quartz glass, that I went to quite extreme lengths to procure.
Archibald: Not for reading? I should hope not, it’s practically a magnifying glass.
Rhodes: Sir Archibald. You are at present juggling the objective lens through which Galileo first charted the transit of Jupiter’s moons across the face of that most majestic of spheres...
Rhodes: And I really must insist that you - most carefully - put it down.
Archibald: Let’s... juuuust put you back where you belong, no harm done, eh?
Archibald: Alistair - what, and why, and indeed - what is that doing in your possession?
Rhodes: Galileo wasn’t just a mathematician astronomer, he was an Alchemist. I got to thinking - what if that telescope of his was a product of more than just the physical sciences?
Rhodes: Had he perhaps ‘goosed it’ with all the skills he had at his disposal?
Rhodes: And what mysteries he unveiled with that wonderous instrument... I had to have it...
Rhodes: I was right, Archy... That lens reveals hidden things. It makes the occult... well... ‘non est absconditus’, I suppose.
Archibald: But, Alistair - How on this green Earth did you get hold of it?
Rhodes: That, Archibald - is a secret that shall ever remain between myself, a museum in Florence, and a certain Mister Stanton Shaw Esquire.