"In order to ask me to do that which you have already done," said Mrs. Treharne, with quite unusual affability, coming up at that moment and catching his final words. "Louise, dear, permit me—Mr. Langdon Jesse. Don't expect her to know, Mr. Jesse, that you are a cotton king. I doubt if her routine at school permitted her to read the newspapers, even if they interested her; which I sincerely hope they did not and will not."
Louise had not often seen her mother in so gracious a humor toward any man; but this fact did not in any sense serve to quell the instinctive dislike which she immediately felt for Jesse, the "cotton king" of her mother's somewhat too purposely-significant introduction. She noticed that his hands were small and obtrusively white; that there was a wave in his burnished blonde hair; that his large clear-cut features were of a chiselled regularity; and her natural aversion to the merely handsome man promptly asserted itself. The sneer of his mouth, and his fixed way of gazing squarely into her eyes as if his own eyes were forming a question, disquieted her. She replied in purposed monosyllables to his rather trivial yet studied questions about her school life. She knew perfectly well that he was in no wise interested in her school life, but that he merely was seeking what he considered might be the most engaging method of capturing her attention. Five minutes after his meeting with her she devised an excuse and went to her apartments. She threw her windows wide and let the wintry air bulge the curtains when she reached her sleeping room; perhaps it was her subconsciousness that told her that she needed some such a bath of purifying air to obliterate what intangible traces there might remain of her brief contact with Langdon Jesse. That night she dreamt persistently of a leopard with large, blazing eyes of topaz; and an hour after she awoke a large basket of superb orchids, with Langdon Jesse's card attached, was brought to her. Laura was with her at the time.
"From Langdon Jesse?" said Laura, knitting her brow. "Did you meet him last night, Louise?"
"Yes. I disliked him intensely."
"If I were you, dear," suggested Laura, "I should send these orchids to a hospital. They can of course have no sinister effect upon those who have not met their donor. But I should be afraid to have you keep any flowers sent you by Langdon Jesse. They might poison the air. The bald impudence of him in sending you flowers at all!"
A footman was carrying the orchids to a nearby hospital five minutes later.
CHAPTER V
Langdon Jesse and his one-time associate and co-partner in lamb-shearing "deals," Frederick Judd, met at luncheon in a restaurant in the financial district a few days later.
Judd, one of the powers of "the Street," was past fifty-five, and he had no great toleration for the vacuities of young men. This fact, however, placed no inhibition on the admiration—it could scarcely be called a liking—which he felt for Langdon Jesse; for Jesse, whatever else he may have been, certainly was not vacuous in the matter of business; and it was from the angle of their success in business that Judd exclusively judged men. Jesse, well under forty, already was a veteran of the stock market; and on at least one occasion he had deftly "trimmed" no less a person than his former associate, Mr. Judd; wherefore Judd, with the breadth of vision of the financial general in considering the strategy of the general who has beaten him, admired Jesse, who had been virtually his pupil, all the more; resolving, at the same time, not to permit his quondam pupil to "trim" him again.