It was his son whom he addressed. The room, large, oblong, furnished in red, tropically hot on this mid-May noon, had the tawdriness of a Paris hotel written all over it. Through an open window the sun lurched. Beyond were the Tuileries. From below came the cries of the hawkers that are never still, “Le Matin! Demandez Le Matin!”
“Now disobey me if you dare—”
The boy made a face. He was rather good looking, and quite athletic.
“Disobey you! Disobey a father who is a phenomenon, a father with thirty million and three chins! What do you take me for? But how do you know she won’t object?”
“Because she does what her mamma wishes.”
“But I don’t see why her mamma should wish anything of the kind, or, for that matter, you either.”
“You don’t, eh? I am decently fixed, am I not? I did the fixing myself, didn’t I? What did I do it for? Why do you suppose that after mining in Montana I monkeyed with Morgan, roiled Rockefeller, and got ahead of Gates? For the fun of it? There is no fun in a job like that. To donate libraries? That is Carnegie’s patent. I want to splurge. In that new house of mine on Fifth Avenue I want to give cotillons and dinner dances—cotillons with automobiles and Russian sables for favors, dinner dances with government bonds for boutonnières. I want to be top of the heap.”
“Noble ambition.”
“And why not? Supposing I am self-made. I am as rich as Croesus, whoever he may be, and just as good as the rest of them. The trouble is that in New York I don’t know anybody—except from 10 to 3. Out of Wall Street I am seven-eighths offered and nothing bid. But here it is different. On this side people who have position don’t seem to be as much afraid of losing it as they are at home. You have noticed that yourself, haven’t you?”
The young man yawned and nodded.
“Anyway,” Mr. Beamish resumed, “that’s been the case with the Finsburys. They are bankrupt, it is true, but they are not bounders, and provided I produce enough they are willing that you should marry their daughter and take her back to New York. There all you will have to do is to fill my house with the smart set. And they’ll come, too; they’ll come on a run when they find a duke’s daughter is there to receive them.”
“But what if I don’t like the girl?”
Mr. Beamish stood up and reached for a hat. “You have got to like her,” he answered shortly. “Come. It’s time for business. Ring the bell, and see if the auto is ready.”
The auto was. And presently, after a series of touf-toufs, a whizz up the Champs Élysées, a bolt into the Avenue Marceau, father and son were let into the drawing room of an appartement meublé, a miniature salon, cream and gold, and tenderly pink, where loomed a dowager, robust and rancid, flanking a tall, large-mouthed, small-eyed girl.
“Duchess, this is my son Harry,” Mr. Beamish began, and, plucking at his collar, and finding it moist, mopped himself abundantly.
The duchess assumed an expression of great amiability. “My daughter, the Lady Angelica,” she announced, with a wave of her fan, and with another, she added: “I am so sorry Finsbury is not in. But he has a perfect mania for going to the dentist’s, and that, I think, shows so much conscientiousness. Do sit down.”
The girl had moved to a sofa. Harry took a seat at her side. Mr. Beamish and the duchess ranged themselves opposite.
“Warm day,” said the fat man. At once he and his hostess lost themselves in cognate reflections.
“Do you like Paris?” Harry asked of the girl, who just raised her eyes to his. “I prefer London. But New York is good enough for me. You have never been there, have you?”
The Lady Angelica flushed, her eyes flickered, her lips half parted, then, as though by a sheer effort of will, her mouth shut tight. What she meant by the mummery Harry could not tell. But he took it for British reserve.
“Yes,” Harry continued, indifferently, “New York is a mighty nice place. We make a specialty of tall houses, high winds, beautiful manners, ready-made clothes, and pretty girls. It is all due to the climate, I believe. Did I understand you to say that you had been there?”
“My daughter,” the duchess overloudly interrupted “has not traveled much; she—”
Harry turned. His father was contemplating a Cupid on the ceiling. The duchess seemed to have one eye on him, the other on Angelica.
“She is only recently out of the schoolroom, you know, and—Come here, Posey!”
Suddenly from somewhere, presumably from under the sofa, there filtered the cry of a cat.
“Come here, Posey, Posey, Posey.” And the duchess, leaning forward, snapped her fingers enticingly.
Mr. Beamish stood up. Harry also was rising; the girl, too. Previously flushed; now she was pale.
“They seem to have forgotten to give poor little Posey his breakfast,” the duchess added, in smiling explanation. “But you are not going, are you? Finsbury will be so sorry. Yet, why not dine with us tomorrow, just a plain family dinner at 8, and afterward my little girl can show you her watercolors. She fairly dotes on watercolors, and that, I think, shows such a pure mind.”
“Tomorrow, I am afraid,” Harry interjected, but his father managed to kick him.
“He will be proud to come. But how about today? Couldn’t you both lunch with us at Paillard’s? My auto can take you there and back in a jiffy.”
“That is my brother’s stepdaughter,” the duchess remarked to Harry, who was examining a photograph on the mantel. “Do you think she resembles Lady Essex? So many do.”
Harry moved closer to the picture. The duchess seized the opportunity to whisper to Mr. Beamish behind her fan. In a moment Harry turned.
“We shall love to,” the duchess resumed. “Lunching at Paillard’s will be quite an escapade. But we shan’t
