“Not in writing,” she said, looking up at him with a twinkle in her eyes.
“Bah! Well, do you want that?”
“No, certainly not,” she returned, giving him a glance of admiration. “But, to return, Mrs. Hawley-Crowles is going to be received into your wife’s set, and you are going to give her a good financial whipping?”
“Certainly, if you wish it. I’m yours to command. Mrs. Hawley-Crowles shall go to the poor-house, if you say the word. But now, my dear, have William order my car. And, let me see, Mrs. Ames is to meet Mrs. Hawley-Crowles at Fitch’s? Just a chance call, I take it.”
“Yes, dear,” murmured the Beaubien, reaching up and kissing him; “next Thursday at three. Good night. Call me on the ’phone to-morrow.”
CHAPTER 12
The Ames building, a block from the Stock Exchange, was originally only five stories in height. But as the Ames interests grew, floor after floor was added, until, on the day that Mrs. Hawley-Crowles pointed it out to Carmen from the window of her limousine, it had reached, tower and all, a height of twenty-five stories, and was increasing at an average rate of two additional a year. It was not its size that aroused interest, overtopped as it was by many others, but its uniqueness; for, though a hive of humming industry, it did not house a single business that was not either owned outright or controlled by J. Wilton Ames, from the lowly cigar stands in the marble corridors to the great banking house of Ames and Company on the second floor. The haberdashers, the shoe-shining booths, the soda fountains, and the great commercial enterprises that dwelt about them, each and all acknowledged fealty and paid homage to the man who brooded over them in his magnificent offices on the twenty-fifth floor in the tower above.
It was not by any consensus of opinion among the financiers of New York that Ames had assumed leadership, but by sheer force of what was doubtless the most dominant character developed in recent years by those peculiar forces which have produced the American multimillionaire. “Mental dynamite!” was Weston’s characterization of the man. “And,” he once 101 added, when, despite his anger, he could not but admire Ames’s tactical blocking of his piratical move, which the former’s keen foresight had perceived threatened danger at Washington, “it is not by any tacit agreement that we accept him, but because he knows ten tricks to our one, that’s all.”