“Isn’t it, though?” replied Wallingford. “And for her father. I always blame the fathers.”
“But I thought it was the mothers who hankered after European marriages,” said Frothingham.
“That’s what is usually said,” Wallingford answered, “because only the mothers appear in the public part of the business. But who gives up the money for the settlements? The women ain’t a nose ahead of the men in the race of snobbishness. Poor little Elsie Pope! This ought to be a lesson to our girls against——”
He paused abruptly and reddened, though Frothingham could not see him. “I almost forgot that Frothingham’s one of ’em,” he said to himself.
Frothingham was grinning in the seclusion of his bedroom. “I should say so!” he exclaimed in his drawling, satirical voice. “Wonder what the Milan yarn is?”
He learned in a few hours, for the Washington afternoon papers had a long Associated Press despatch from Milan. Rontivogli, heavily in debt and ruined, had been backed by a syndicate of his creditors for an American tour in search of an heiress. They had risked in the venture forty thousand lire and, within a month, an additional twenty thousand. They regarded it as a by no means desperate investment for the recovery of the very large sum which Rontivogli had got out of them before they discovered his financial plight—certainly with such a title and so much personal beauty and charm he could win the daughter of one of the multitude of rich men among those title-crazy American vulgarians. The Milan despatch set forth that the correspondent had had no difficulty in getting the facts, as “everyone here knows the story. The formation of such syndicates is said to be common in England, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, and many of them have been successful.”
“Poor Frothingham!” Wallingford thought as he read. “This is bad for his business. I fancy it’ll be many a day before I see my thousand again.” And then he delicately gave Frothingham a hint that if he needed another thousand he could have it. But Frothingham didn’t need it just then—and, it should be set down to his credit, he would have hesitated long before taking it, had he needed it. Wallingford was not wrong in thinking there had been since he met Frothingham a marked decline in his “honour as a gentleman,” and a marked rise in his “honour as a man.”
Rontivogli went to the Popes’ at eleven o’clock that morning. The look of the flunky who opened the door foreshadowed to him his fate. He was shown not into the drawing room, but into a reception room—a small alcove to the left of the door, intended for wraps rather than for callers. The servant returned with a package on his tray. “Miss Pope is not at ’ome,” he said haughtily, omitting the customary “Your ’Ighness,” and not even substituting so much as a “Sir” for it, “and she left this to be given to you.”
Rontivogli ignored the impudences of omitting his title and of addressing him as “you,” and took the package. The servant held aside the portière with the broadest possible hint in his face and manner.
“Tell Senator Pope that the Prince di Rontivogli wishes to see him,” said Rontivogli in a tone which at once reduced the servant, in spite of himself, from a human being to a mechanical device for the transmission of messages.