“Ah!” he sighed. “I shall very soon leave London again—thank goodness! Next week I return to Fiesole for the winter. I am no great lover of London—are you, Mr.—Mr. Garfield?”
“My business as an electrical engineer keeps me in London,” was my reply. “Besides, I have recently sustained a very heavy financial loss. If, however, I were independent I should certainly live in the country. London has, to me, become unbearable since the war.”
“Ah! I quite agree,” replied my host. “All our fine British traditions seem to have gone by the board. That, at least, is my own view. But there—perhaps I am getting an old fogey.”
“I don’t think so,” I replied. “Everyone who knows you, Mr. De Gex, is well aware of your up-to-dateness, and your great generosity.”
“Are they?” he asked, smiling wearily. “Personally I care very little. Popularity and prosperity can be manufactured by any shrewd press-agent employed at so much a year. Without publicity, the professional man or woman would never obtain a hearing. These are the days when incompetency properly boomed raises the incompetent to greatness—and even to Cabinet rank. Neither would the society woman ever obtain a friend without her boom,” he went on. “Bah! I’m sick of it all!” he added with a sweep of his thin white hand. “But it is refreshing to talk with you, a stranger.”
He was certainly frank in his criticisms, and I was not at all surprised when he commenced to question me as to my profession, where I lived, and what were my future plans.
I told him quite openly of my position, and that I lived in Rivermead Mansions with my friend Hambledon; and I also mentioned again the financial blow I had just received.
“Well,” he said lazily, “I’m greatly indebted to you, Mr. Garfield, for deigning to come in and see a much-worried man. Ah! you do not know how I suffer from my wife’s hatred of me. My poor little Oswald. Fancy abandoning him in order that the police might find him. But happily he is back. Think of the publicity—for the papers would have been full of my son being lost.” Then, after a pause, he added: “I hope we shall see each other again before I go back to Italy.”
At that moment, the butler, Horton, entered with a card upon a silver salver, whereupon I rose to leave.
“Oh! don’t go yet!” my host urged quickly, as he glanced at the card.