"My dear! What HAVE you been promising him?" she cried.
The Millionaire swore softly, as the truth sank into his brain.
"Have another place laid for dinner," he ordered; "book two seats for a music-hall and take him out to supper afterwards. I can't afford to be disturbed to-night. To-morrow I must get in touch with the Iron King…. I don't see what more there is to be said."
Four weeks later the Poet drove in a six-cylinder car from Park Lane to Eaton Square on an indeterminate visit to the Iron King. He was looking better for the month's good wine and food, in which the Millionaire's house abounded; but now the Millionaire, who based his fortune on knowing the right people in every walk of life, was arranging to have his house taken over by the Red Cross authorities. In a week's time the house was to be found unsuitable and restored to him, but henceforth the Iron King was to have the honor of entertaining the Poet.
"How you ever came to make such a promise!" wailed the Millionaire's wife for the twentieth time, as they drove to Claridge's. "London's so full that you might have known it's impossible to get ANYthing."
"I feel that we have exhausted this subject," answered the Millionaire with the bruskness of a man whose nerves have worn thin; with the menace, too, of one who, having divorced his first wife, would divorce the second on small provocation.
The Iron King was not at home when the Poet arrived in Eaton Squire, but a pretty, young secretary, cultured to the point of transforming all her final "g's" into "k's" received him with every mark of welcome. She admired the Iron King romantically and was in the habit of writing his surname after her own Christian name to see how the combination looked; and, when he had departed each morning to contest his latest assessment for excess profits, she would wander through the house, planning little changes in the arrangement of the furniture and generally deploring the sober, colorless taste of the first Iron Queen. So far her employer returned none of her admiration. He addressed her loosely as "Miss—er" and forgot her name; he never noticed what clothes she was wearing or the pretty dimples that she made by holding down the inside flesh of her cheeks between her eye-teeth; further, he criticized her spelling spitefully and, on the occasion of the Millionaire's second marriage, had dictated a savage half sheet beginning, "A young man may marry once, as he may get drunk once, without the world thinking much the worse of him; habitual intemperance is, on first principles, to be deplored…."
The pretty young secretary knew from fiction and the drama that the Iron King would never appreciate her until he stood in danger of losing her. She welcomed the Poet as a foil and misquoted his poetry twice before tea was over; then she invited him to accompany her to a picture palace, but the Poet, once inside the citadel, was reluctant to leave it until his position was more firmly established.
Scarcely entrenched at Claridge's, the Millionaire telephoned derisively to the city, so that the Iron King returned home half an hour before his usual time, prepared to deal with the Poet as he dealt with querulous or inquisitive shareholders at General Meetings. The Poet, however, was long and painfully accustomed to combat with enraged editors and lost no time in assuming the offensive, demanding indignantly in a high head-voice, before the Iron King had crossed his own threshold, why no quarters had been found for him and how much longer any one imagined that he would put up with the indignity of being bandied from one wretched house to another.
The flushed cheeks and hysterical manner put the Iron King temporarily out of countenance.