CHAPTER VI
Showing, amongst other rather drab things, how the spell of the blade begins to work, and introducing a shrewd-eyed, gentle old man out of the East.
It was known from Wall Street to Bartholomew Lane, from the Rue Lafitte to the Nevsky Pospekt, from the cotton exchange of New Orleans to the wool exchange of Melbourne, that there was no love lost between the two Land Development Kings, Mr. Ezra W. Warburton of New York City and Mr. Preserved Higgins of the British Empire in general. Not that their mutual antipathy was in any way national, international rather, since a good half of the former's backers were British, while the latter's financial co-defendants were as often as not from the more exuberant sections of the United States, Chicago and San Francisco and Seattle and Kansas City.
Their enmity, though it affected their business relations, had not even been caused by a business quarrel, but by a fundamental difference in character—and that codified outgrowth of character called breeding. Destined ultimately to become as notorious, and quite as destructive, as the Harriman-Hill feud, it had started at the occasion of a dinner given by the great Paris banker, M. Adolphe Bischoffsheim, with the intention of bringing the two together, during which, in a hilarious mood which was both alcoholic and atavistic,
