pompadour, and his silky moustache and beard were carefully
trimmed to points, and kept sharp by his active fingers.
His conversation was full of French phrases and French
opinions; he had been reared abroad, and had a whole-souled
contempt for all things American-even dictating his
business letters in French, and leaving it for his
stenographer to translate them. His shirts were
embroidered with violets and perfumed with violets—and
there were bunches of violets at his horses’
heads, so that he might get the odour as he drove!
There was a cruel saying about Freddie Vandam—that
if only he had had a little more brains, he would
have been half-witted. And Montague sat, and
watched his mannerisms and listened to his inanities,
with his mind in a state of bewilderment and dismay.
When at last he got up and walked away, it was with
a new sense of the complicated nature of the problem
that confronted him. Who was there that could
give him the key to this mystery—who could
interpret to him a world in which a man such as this
was in control of four or five hundred millions of
trust funds?
CHAPTER VII
It was quite futile to attempt to induce anyone to
talk about serious matters just now—for
the coming week all Society belonged to the horse.
The parties which went to church on Sunday morning
talked about horses on the way, and the crowds that
gathered in front of the church door to watch them
descend from their automobiles, and to get “points”
on their conspicuous costumes—these would
read about horses all afternoon in the Sunday papers,
and about the gowns which the women would wear at the
show.
Some of the party went up on Sunday evening; Montague
went with the rest on Monday morning, and had lunch
with Mrs. Robbie Walling and Oliver and Alice.
They had arrayed him in a frock coat and silk hat
and fancy “spats”; and they took him and
sat him in the front row of Robbie’s box.
There was a great tan-bark arena, in which the horses
performed; and then a railing, and a broad promenade
for the spectators; and then, raised a few feet above,
the boxes in which sat all Society. For the Horse
Show had now become a great social function. Last
year a visiting foreign prince had seen fit to attend
it, and this year “everybody” would come.
Montague was rapidly getting used to things; he observed
with a smile how easy it was to take for granted embroidered
bed and table linen, and mural paintings, and private
cars, and gold plate. At first it had seemed
to him strange to be waited upon by a white woman,
and by a white man quite unthinkable; but he was becoming
accustomed to having silent and expressionless lackeys
everywhere about him, attending to his slightest want.
So he presumed that if he waited long enough, he might
even get used to horses which had their tails cut
off to stumps, and their manes to rows of bristles,
and which had been taught to lift their feet in strange
and eccentric ways, and were driven with burred bits
in their mouths to torture them and make them step
lively.
