“Mixed up with anybody who isn’t all he ought to be?”
“Not that I know of, except that I’ve seen him with Mahmoud and Einarson. They are certainly scoundrels, though they may not be.”
“Who are they?”
“Nubar Mahmoud is private secretary to Doctor Semich, the President. Colonel Einarson is an Icelander, just now virtually the head of the army. I know nothing about either of them.”
“Except that they are scoundrels?”
The chargé d’affaires wrinkled his round white forehead in pain and gave me a reproachful glance.
“Not at all,” he said. “Now, may I ask, of what is Grantham suspected?”
“Nothing.”
“Then?”
“Seven months ago, on his twenty-first birthday, this Lionel Grantham got hold of the money his father had left him—a nice wad. Till then the boy had had a tough time of it. His mother had, and has, highly developed middle-class notions of refinement. His father had been a genuine aristocrat in the old manner—a hard-souled, soft-spoken individual who got what he wanted by simply taking it; with a liking for old wine and young women, and plenty of both, and for cards and dice and running horses—and fights, whether he was in them or watching them.
“While he lived the boy had a he-raising. Mrs. Grantham thought her husband’s tastes low, but he was a man who had things his own way. Besides, the Grantham blood was the best in America. She was a woman