“Well, you know of course what he is marrying Alice for. Money. Not that he’s hard up. But he’s ambitious—terrifically ambitious. He dreams of becoming the greatest man in the empire, next to the Czar. He——”
“It sounds to me like we’d picked out a good one!” broke in his uncle.
“He knows that in this poverty-stricken country nothing will help him forward like money—for he already has birth and brains. Well, he has learned from aunt about the arrangement you have been so good as to make for me—about your going to give me a part of your fortune, and your going to leave its management, even when it’s Alice’s, in my hands. He wants entire control of it all as soon as he can get it; the use of the lump sum will forward his plans much better than the use of the income alone. So he looks upon me as an obstacle between him and his ambition. That’s the other reason for his not loving me.”
“Anything else?”
“That’s enough, isn’t it?”
“Well, then—why don’t you like him? Not just because he’s marrying Alice?”
“I wouldn’t stop liking Jack Hammond if Alice were to marry Jack.”
“What is the reason then?”
Drexel hesitated. “I can’t explain. Nothing definite. He’s rather cold, and formal, and distant. But that isn’t it. It’s just a sort of uneasy feeling that I have when with him. I guess that’s really all. In fact— But there he comes now.”