Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 20, 2025
He was plundering a railroad, and the original progenitor of the Wallings tried to buy the control away from him, and Havens issued ten or twenty millions of new stock overnight, in the face of a court injunction, and got away with most of his money.
"Among other things, I had to put the Wallings into Society. They were sneaking round on the outside when I came licking people's boots and expecting to be kicked. I said to myself, I'll put an end to that we'll have a show-down! So I gave a ball that made the whole country sit up and gasp it wouldn't be noticed particularly nowadays, but then people had never dreamed of anything so gorgeous.
Alice was young and guileless, and a pleasant person to patronize; but he was a man of the world, and it was his business to protect her. He had always paid his own way through life, and he was very loath to put himself under obligations to people like the Wallings, whom he did not like, and who, he felt instinctively, could not like him. But of course there was nothing he could do about it.
They took me off to the country to the Robert Wallings'." "Ah," said Mrs. Alden; and Montague, struggling to make conversation, inquired, "Do you know Mr. Walling?" "Quite well," said the other, placidly. "I used to be a Walling myself, you know." "Oh," said Montague, taken aback; and then added, "Before you were married?" "No," said Mrs. Alden, more placidly than ever, "before I was divorced."
But if the Robbie Wallings were to write cheques, it must be for value received. And what could the value be? "Ollie" was rather a little god among the ultra-swagger; his taste was a kind of inspiration.
And here was the Walling establishment, the "three-million-dollar palace on a desert," as Mrs. Billy Alden had described it. Montague had read of the famous mantel in its entrance hall, made from Pompeiian marble, and costing seventy-five thousand dollars. And the Wallings were the railroad kings who transported Mississippi Steel!
And then she came to the Wallings. Mrs. Billy had been in on the inside of that family, and there was nothing she didn't know about it; and she brought the members up, one by one, and dissected them, and exhibited them for Montague's benefit. They were typical bourgeois people, she said. They were burghers.
And Robbie himself was liable to panic fits of economy, in which he went to the most absurd excesses Montague once heard him haggling over fifty cents with a cabman. Lavish hosts though they both were, it was the literal truth that they never spent money upon anyone but themselves the end and aim of their every action was the power and prestige of the Robbie Wallings.
The town-house of the Robbies was a stately palace occupying a block upon Fifth Avenue one of the half-dozen mansions of the Walling family which were among the show places of the city. It would take a catalogue to list the establishments maintained by the Wallings there was an estate in North Carolina, and another in the Adirondacks, and others on Long Island and in New Jersey.
And of course Alice must have a new dress for the occasion, and it must be absolutely the most beautiful dress ever known. In an idle moment her cousin figured out that it was to cost her about five dollars a minute to be entertained by the Wallings! What it would cost the Wallings, one scarcely dared to think.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking