“Come, come,” he remonstrated, “you must know that they’re trying to milk you for a bit. Hasn’t Mason suggested your financing his night club?”
“Some sort of a proposition was made,” Jacob acknowledged. “I declined.”
“And Hartwell? Has he mentioned some oil wells in Trinidad?”
“He has,” Jacob admitted. “I happen to be doing rather well in oils in another direction.”
“You haven’t turned up early one day and found Grace in tears with a dressmaker’s bill on her knee, have you?”
“That, I presume, is to arrive. Lady Powers is dining with me next Sunday.”
“Mind your P’s and Q’s, then,” the young philosopher advised. “She’s a fly little hussy. You see, Pratt, I know the world a bit. Seems to me I might be rather useful to you—in fact that’s why I came here this morning.”
“It is very kind of you,” Jacob said. “In what way, may I ask?”
“You see,” Lord Felixstowe proceeded, hitching up his trousers and drawing his chair a little nearer, “I know the ropes, Pratt, and you don’t. You’re a very decent fellow who’s made a pot of money, and naturally, just at first, you don’t know where you are. You want to get on, eh, to know the right sort of people, go to the right sort of places, be seen about with the right sort? Between ourselves, old thing, Hartwell and Mason aren’t the right sort. Suits me to pick their brains a bit, now and then, when the oof’s coming along slowly, but then I can do what I like—you can’t.”
“Let me have your concrete proposition, Lord Felixstowe,” Jacob suggested, with a faint smile at the corner of his lips.