Читать книгу The Temptress (La tierra de todos) онлайн

33 страница из 108

The most important guests were several deputies and journalists, friends of the banker Fontenoy. The latter was a man of middle age, clean-shaven, entirely bald, who affected the dress and manners of an American business man.

Robledo, as he looked at him, was reminded of an occasion long ago in Buenos Aires when a note was to fall due the following day, and he had not yet been able to raise the money to meet it. Fontenoy looked exactly like the popular idea of the successful man of affairs who is directing business enterprises in every quarter of the globe. Everything about him seemed calculated to inspire confidence, above all his obvious faith in his own resourcefulness. Yet, at times, he would frown, and plunged in silence, give the impression of being completely detached from all that surrounded him.

“He is thinking of some new combination,” Torre Bianca would say to his guest. “The way that man’s mind works is extraordinary!”

Yet Robledo, without quite knowing why, was again reminded of his own anxieties and those of so many others way off there in Buenos Aires when they had borrowed money at ninety days, and were facing the necessity of meeting this debt on the morrow.