“What he is, we know—a man of leisure and of fortune. Who he is, whence he comes...?”
He made an expressive gesture.
“And, after all, what does it matter? Who knows who half the people are whom one meets everywhere to-day? They can afford to do you well, they do do you well, and that is all that most people care about. Though ‘La Planta’ is not precisely a British name, the man looks, and evidently is an Englishman. He has a great friend, indeed, two great friends, who are almost always with him. Profane people have nicknamed the three ‘The Trinity.’ One is a man called Aloysius Stapleton, the other is a young widow—Mrs. Mervyn-Robertson, a perfectly lovely creature; heaven knows what her dressmaking bills must come to.”
“Or who pays them?”
“Charlie, that is unkind of you, what the women call ‘catty.’ Why should we conclude that she doesn’t pay her own bills?”
“And why should we conclude that she does? Well, I shall be interested to meet Mrs. Hartsilver at lunch presently. I don’t think I have ever before met the wife of a profiteer.”
In spite of the Food Comptroller’s regulations, the luncheon supplied at the Ritz lacked little. It was the second day of our great offensive, August 9th, 1918, but a stranger looking about him in the famous dining-room, where everybody seemed to be in the best of spirits and spending money lavishly, might have found it difficult to believe that men were being shot down, mangled, tortured, and blown to pieces in their thousands less than two hundred miles away. Captain Preston thought of it, and of the striking contrast, for that morning he had, while at the War Office, listened on the telephone to the great bombardment in progress. And that perhaps was the reason he looked glum, and why he was, as Mrs. Mervyn-Robertson afterwards remarked to La Planta as they drove away together, “a regular wet blanket right through the whole of lunch.”
Aloysius Stapleton, though not distinguished-looking, was one of those men who, directly they begin to talk, rivet the attention of their hearers. Forty-two years of age, he did not look a day over thirty-five, and in addition to being an excellent conversationalist, his knowledge of men and women was exceptional. He had traveled several times round the world, or rather, as he put it, zig-zagged over it more than once. He appeared to possess friends, or at least acquaintances, in every capital in Europe, also in many American cities and in far-off China and Japan. The only country he had not visited, he observed that day at lunch, was New Guinea, but he meant to go there some day to complete his education.
“Were you ever in Shanghai?” Preston inquired carelessly, looking him straight in the eyes across the table. As this was only the second time Preston had spoken since they had sat down to lunch, everybody looked towards him.
“Yes,” Stapleton answered, meeting his gaze. “I was there twice, some years before the war.”