“Oh, my dear, you don’t know London,” said her host as he read. “They will be the idols of London, the very Buddha of solid gold that its smart people most delight to adore. Look at the whole thing as a comedy, my child, and you will enjoy it.”
“I once spoke to a clown’s wife at a circus,” said Katherine Massarene. “While the clown was making the audience scream with laughter, she was crying. ‘I can’t help crying,’ she said, ‘to see my man make a butt and a guy of himself. He’s nabbut a tomfool to them, but he’s my man to me.’ I am as foolish as the clown’s wife.”
“I can’t admit the analogy,” said her host. “I think you take the thing too seriously. Your people’s position is a common one enough in our days. When anybody has made a heap of money they are never happy till they get a mob of smart beggars to crowd round ’em and pick their pockets. How would smart society go on unless there were these feeders for it to fatten on? If I were your father I should keep my money in my pocket and snap my fingers at smart society. But then, you see, I know what smart society is and he doesn’t.”
“But why should he want to know? He is not made for it. It only laughs at him.”
“Oh, pardon me, I am sure it does more than laugh; I am sure it plunders him as well. I only hope that he will know when to cry ‘stop, thief!’ for if he doesn’t all his millions will go into the maw of his fine friends.”
Katherine Massarene sighed.
“My father will never lose except when he chooses to do so. If they use him, he uses them. It is a quid pro quo. It is a question of barter. But that is what is so disgraceful about it.”
“I have said,” replied her host, “I think if I were an intelligent man who had made a pot of money by my own exertions, as Mr. Massarene has done, that I should not care a damn (excuse the word) for all the fine folks in creation. Certainly I should not care to waste my money upon them. But the fact is that all these new men do care for that and that alone. They appear wholly to underrate themselves and their own accomplishment, and care only to be rooked by a set of idle loungers with handles to their names. It is not they who will ever destroy the Upper House.”
“No,” said his guest bitterly. “An earl can see and say that the days of the Upper House are numbered, but my father regards it as the holy of holies because he means to seat himself in its gilded chamber.”
“It’s Joe Chamberlain’s reason too,” said Framlingham with a chuckle. “When we make peers of the tradesmen, my dear, we know what we are about; we are soldering our own leaking pot.”