“I can’t fancy Mr Steinherz standing that sort of thing. He’s not—not——”
“Don’t quite look the part of the ordinary heavy father from the States?” said Mr Hicks quickly, as Usk hesitated. “That is so, sir. He doesn’t incline to play it, either.” He stopped abruptly.
“That’s it. He is so awfully dignified and polite that I feel as if I should sink into the ground when I think of going to him with an offer that must strike him as such arrant cheek. Do you know, Hicks, that he and Miss Steinherz came to the Duchess of Old Sarum’s reception after all? I got them a card, but Mr Steinherz was so high and mighty about accepting that I felt horribly small.”
“J. B. Steinherz was always real high-toned in his notions. At home he lays himself out to snub his fellow-citizens, and the smart set are ready to kiss his boots because he is ‘so charmingly exclusive.’ Here in England he doesn’t hold with thrusting himself into intimacy with the British nobility, so he puts in his time at a down-town hotel, and scorns ducal invitations.”
“Well, I got him to Sarum House, at any rate, and every one was asking who he was. There was one very old lady there, Mrs Sadleir, a great friend of my people’s—knew my grandfather—who was quite smitten with him, and wanted me to tell her who was the elderly man with the grand air. When I said he was an American, she was really snappish, and said he reminded her of some one she had known long ago. I brought him up and introduced him, and they flirted solemnly for nearly an hour. Afterwards Mrs Sadleir said she couldn’t place him exactly, but she was pretty sure he must be a Southerner, for he had just the fine manners of the men who used to come over here before the war.”
“J. B. S. is a real white man,” said Mr Hicks emphatically. “And you don’t need to be afraid of sailing right in, sir, so far as he is concerned. You’ll scarcely tell me he hasn’t known why you were loafing around all the time at his hotel. No, you may bet your boots that it’s Miss Maimie that’s your rock ahead—honest Injun.”
“Miss Logan? But why in the world should she have anything to do with it?”
“Women with a real consuming ambition on behalf of another woman are not plenty anywhere,” said Mr Hicks slowly, “and maybe least of all in America, but that’s how it is with Miss Maimie. She would sell her very soul to see Félicia Steinherz make a great marriage. Why, a year or so back she all but engineered her into marrying Prince Timoleon Malasorte.”
“The Neustrian Pretender?”
“The same, sir. He was an attaché in the Scythian Embassy at Washington those days, but you bet he meant to be emperor, same’s he does now, and with Félicia’s dollars and her smartness back of him I calculate he’d have got there. But J. B. S. put his foot down, and the Embassy found itself bereaved of its brightest ornament. That’s why I say, Watch out for Miss Maimie. Félicia won’t marry any one below a duke if she can help it.”