CHAPTER XVIII
LORD VYVYAN SPEAKS
A week later—and it was a week crowded with dinners and suppers and theater parties and dances, with the tawdry, hectic frivolities of Berlin At Night where Tom was usually the guest of Baron von Götz-Wrede, who was trying, he said, to repay a fraction of the splendid hospitality with which he had been treated in Spokane—old Mrs. Wedekind’s warning was repeated.
Tom Graves had not seen very much of Lord Vyvyan during the last days. Nor was it his fault. He would have liked to introduce him into the gay set in which he was moving, had even suggested it to the Baron, who shrugged his expressive shoulders and said with a drawl, not a very cordial one, that of course any friend of Tom's was welcome. Tom noticed the tack of cordiality, but decided to overlook it, for, as he put it in a letter to Martin Wedekind: "Most of these young Prussian fellows seem to have been born with a sneer on their faces. I guess they can't help it. Must be merry hell to live in a country where every man you meet is either your superior or your inferior—never your equal!"
It was Lord Vyvyan's own fault that he had not seen more of Tom since coming to Berlin, and he explained that he was being kept frightfully busy at the Embassy; said he fancied "Old Titmouse"—that’s how
111
