Little by little he met all the friends of the house who usually appeared at the formal dinners given by the Torre Biancas. Elena invariably presented him, not as an engineer whose enterprises were in their first and most precarious stages, but as one whose work was already a success, and who had returned from America well provided with millions. She took care however to impart this misinformation behind his back, and Robledo was somewhat at a loss to understand the profound respect with which he was treated, and the sympathetic attention with which his friends’ guests turned to listen to him whenever he offered a remark.
The most important guests were several deputies and journalists, friends of the banker Fontenoy. The latter was a man of middle age, clean-shaven, entirely bald, who affected the dress and manners of an American business man.
Robledo, as he looked at him, was reminded of an occasion long ago in Buenos Aires when a note was to fall due the following day, and he had not yet been able to raise the money to meet it. Fontenoy looked exactly like the popular idea of the successful man of affairs who is directing business enterprises in every quarter of the globe. Everything about him seemed calculated to inspire confidence, above all his obvious faith in his own resourcefulness. Yet, at times, he would frown, and plunged in silence, give the impression of being completely detached from all that surrounded him.
“He is thinking of some new combination,” Torre Bianca would say to his guest. “The way that man’s mind works is extraordinary!”
Yet Robledo, without quite knowing why, was again reminded of his own anxieties and those of so many others way off there in Buenos Aires when they had borrowed money at ninety days, and were facing the necessity of meeting this debt on the morrow.
As he left the Torre Bianca’s one evening, Robledo started off down the Avenue Henri Martin towards the Trocadero, where he expected to take the subway. One of the guests accompanied him, a dubious looking person, who sat at the last seat at table, and now seemed quite happy to be walking along with a South American millionaire. He was a protégé of Fontenoy’s and edited a business weekly, one of the banker’s innumerable enterprises. A close and acid person, he seemed to expand only in those moments when he was criticising his benefactors, which was always the moment their backs were turned. At the end of a few yards he began to pay off his debt toward his host and hostess by gossiping about them. He knew of course that Robledo was a school friend of the Marquis.
“And have you known his wife a long time too?” he inquired, and smiled meaningly when Robledo admitted that he had first made her acquaintance a few weeks ago.
“Russian! Do you really think that she is Russian?... Of course that’s what she says she is, just as she says her first husband was a Marshall of the Czar’s court.... Yet a good many people can’t help wondering whether there ever was such a husband. I don’t care to say anything about the truth of all this. But I do know that I never have met any Russians at the noble lady’s house.”
He paused to take breath, and added,
“Moreover, some of her supposed countrymen, people in a position to know what they were talking about, told me that she wasn’t Russian. I’ve been told that she’s Rumanian, by some people who claim to have seen her when she was a girl, in Bucharest—and I have heard that she was born in Italy, and that her parents were Poles.... Well, there you are! And it’s lucky we don’t have to know the history of all the people who invite us to dinner....”