CHAPTER X
MISS ETHEL ROWRER OF CHICAGO
The breeze blew from the West.
Miss Ethel Rowrer, daughter of the great Redmount Rowrer, had just arrived in Paris. She was preceded by the fame of her father, the famous Chicagoan, a business Napoleon. From his office, the center of a network of telegraph and telephone lines, he communicated with the financial universe; and his tremendous toil was building up a world-wide fortune. He thought himself poor, for he had not yet reached the billion mark; but his fame grew. Ethel adored this father. She was proud that men spoke of him. She felt herself a part in his glory; but, really, she could have wished people should pay less attention to herself. Every day the society papers devoted space to her.
“Yesterday evening, Miss Ethel Rowrer, daughter of the famous milliardaire, was present at the opera”—and so forth; and there followed a description of her dress.
“To-morrow, Miss Ethel Rowrer, daughter of the famous milliardaire, accompanied by her grandmother, will be present at the horse show.”
They told how she passed her day; people learned that she had tried on gowns at Paquin’s, chosen a hat at Stagg’s, eaten chocolates at Marquis’s—while in reality she had stayed at home with “grandma.”
All this gossip annoyed her. One day, however, she laughed heartily. She learned from a paper her intention of buying the tomb of Richard the Lion-hearted to make a bench of it in her hall at Chicago. This earned for Ethel a newspaper article, grave and patriotic.
“Foreigners, touch not our illustrious dead!” was the journalist’s conclusion in the evening “Tocsin.”
Richard the Lion-hearted went the rounds of the head-lines of the Paris yellow press. Then, one fine day, the papers spoke of an interview of the ex-Empress Eugénie with Miss Ethel Rowrer, daughter of the famous milliardaire, R. K. Rowrer. Vieillecloche, in his “Tocsin,” had seen and heard everything. He accused America of mixing itself up with French politics. Miss Ethel did not read the article, otherwise she might have gathered that the “Tocsin” was very ill-informed. That she had seen the empress was true, but there had been no word of politics.
The empress was making a short stay in Paris, as she did every year. Her sorrows had given the former sovereign the love of retirement. She passed her days by her window at the hotel, sometimes looking sadly toward the empty place where the Tuileries had been.