n 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 wealth