Mrs. cyril had received her guests.
It was a vast room in a house on the south side of Grosvenor Square. There was a kind old Cabinet Minister, who was rather deaf and kept on putting his hand to his left ear with a beatified look; a rich young woman who had just married a still richer lord in the North of England, and who wrote small, carefully-sculptured pieces of bad verse; two ex-Lord Chancellors; a banker, and his wife too; Lady Batton (Henry Batton’s wife, not the old lady); and Marjorie Kayle, who had only one leg and was very witty. But great as these people were, they were nothing like as great as the room. It was perfectly enormous, and Mrs. Leonard Cyril, relict of the late Leonard Cyril, who had no particular business but had certainly thriven wonderfully by it, and who was herself the daughter of Pallins, the old artist, gloried in the dimensions thereof. She murmured that Mr. Petre was late; she lied, for she had deliberately given him an hour twenty minutes later than the others. They fell to talking of him, of his vast wealth, of his eccentricities, of his mania for avoiding the world and his refusal of his name and movements.
“Oh, I can understand that,” sighed Marjorie Kayle, who was perpetually in the papers; and the two ex-Lord Chancellors agreed. But the kind old Cabinet Minister, putting up his left hand to his ear, only said “What?” and beamed. “Petre,” bellowed Mrs. Cyril into his better ear. “Petre. The American man. John K. Petre.”
“... And the two ex-Lord-Chancellors agreed.”
“Oh, the American man,” said the kind old Cabinet Minister, his face suddenly changing, and assuming the expression proper to a revelation. “Not J. K. Petre, the rotor man?”
“Yes,” roared Mrs. Cyril again. “The rotor man. J. K. Petre.”
“I can’t conceive,” said the noble poetess, “what possible good it can do a man to have so much money.”
“I don’t see what possible harm it can do him,” said Marjorie Kayle with asperity, for she herself, poor darling, felt strongly on that point; she resented the great wealth of the woman who had just spoken. “He does plenty of good with it. He gave £200,000 to Peggy’s show last year, and it just got them round the corner.”