Of all places, the Club gathered that night at the Pertonwaithe house.  Extra chairs had been brought into the great drawing-room, and in all there must have been two hundred Philomaths that sat down to hear Ernest.  They were truly lords of society.  I amused myself with running over in my mind the sum of the fortunes represented, and it ran well into the hundreds of millions.  And the possessors were not of the idle rich.  They were men of affairs who took most active parts in industrial and political life.

We were all seated when Miss Brentwood brought Ernest in.  They moved at once to the head of the room, from where he was to speak.  He was in evening dress, and, what of his broad shoulders and kingly head, he looked magnificent.  And then there was that faint and unmistakable touch of awkwardness in his movements.  I almost think I could have loved him for that alone.  And as I looked at him I was aware of a great joy.  I felt again the pulse of his palm on mine, the touch of his lips; and such pride was mine that I felt I must rise up and cry out to the assembled company:  “He is mine!  He has held me in his arms, and I, mere I, have filled that mind of his to the exclusion of all his multitudinous and kingly thoughts!”

At the head of the room, Miss Brentwood introduced him to Colonel Van Gilbert, and I knew that the latter was to preside.  Colonel Van Gilbert was a great corporation lawyer.  In addition, he was immensely wealthy.  The smallest fee he would deign to notice was a hundred thousand dollars.  He was a master of law.  The law was a puppet with which he played.  He moulded it like clay, twisted and distorted it like a Chinese puzzle into any design he chose.  In appearance and rhetoric he was old-fashioned, but in imagination and knowledge and resource he was as young as the latest statute.  His first prominence had come when he broke the Shardwell will.* His fee for this one act was five hundred thousand dollars.  From then on he had risen like a rocket.  He was often called the greatest lawyer in the country—­corporation lawyer, of course; and no classification of the three greatest lawyers in the United States could have excluded him.

* This breaking of wills was a peculiar feature of the period.  With the accumulation of vast fortunes, the problem of disposing of these fortunes after death was a vexing one to the accumulators.  Will-making and will-breaking became complementary trades, like armor-making and gun-making.  The shrewdest will-making lawyers were called in to make wills that could not be broken.  But these wills were always broken, and very often by the very lawyers that had drawn them up.  Nevertheless the delusion persisted in the wealthy class that an absolutely unbreakable will could be cast; and so, through the generations, clients and lawyers pursued the illusion.  It was a pursuit like unto that of the Universal Solvent of the mediaeval alchemists.