Mr. Hooper looked embarrassed and rubbed his jawbone vigorously with his thumb and forefinger. “Yes--yes--certainly--any time you say. I’ll talk to him, myself. Can he come to-morrow? I don’t think it’ll take him long to satisfy me you’re all right.”
Frothingham stared, thinking “D----n his impudence!” He said only, “To-morrow, at eleven, then,” shook hands as warmly as he thought wise, and went back to the parlour where Jeanne was waiting for him.
Frothingham’s “representative” was Lawrence, attorney to the British Consulate at Chicago, a brother of Gerald Boughton’s mother. He had come to America thirty years before because he could make a living here and could not make a living at home. He had renounced allegiance to the British throne because by doing so his income was doubled. But at heart he regarded himself as a British subject and, while he pretended to be an American, was so savagely critical of things American that everyone disliked him. He wore the long, slim side-whiskers which were the fashion when he left home; he talked with the lisp then affected as the “hall mark” of a gentleman. He disliked Americans; he despised Anglo-Americans of the Hooper type; Hooper himself he loathed as an intolerable upstart, successful where he, of the “upper class,” was barely able to keep chin above water.
When he came into Hooper’s study at the hour fixed by Frothingham he was an accurate representation of the supercilious, frozen-faced “swell” of the Piccadilly district a quarter of a century before. Hooper knew that he was of the “upper class,” but had not the faintest deference for him. Hooper had been Americanised to the extent of caring nothing for mere family. It took a title to stir his dormant instincts of servility; the untitled Lawrence was a man to be judged by American standards, as he understood them. Lawrence was not a millionaire and not on the way toward that goal of every rational ambition; Hooper, therefore, had no more respect for him than he had for any other “failure.”
“You’ve come to explain about the Earl of Frothingham,” began Hooper in the arrogant voice he used at business. “But it’s not necessary. I’m well informed as to Lord Frothingham’s family and am satisfied he’s what he represents himself to be.”