That she
unexpectedly made a good match with a very wealthy manufacturer who had
raised himself; and that she was puffed up accordingly with a sense of
self-importance."
"Exactly. He is a millionaire, or something very like it; and, being an
ambitious girl, as she understands ambition, she got him to stand for
the mayoralty, I don't doubt, in the year when the Prince of Wales was
going to open the Royal Incurables, on purpose to secure him the chance
of a knighthood. Then she said, very reasonably, 'I WON'T be Lady
Gubbins--Sir Peter Gubbins!' There's an aristocratic name for you!--and,
by a stroke of his pen, he straightway dis-Gubbinised himself, and
emerged as Sir Ivor de Courcy Meadowcroft."
"Really, Hilda, you know everything about everybody! And what do you
suppose they're going to India for?"
"Now, you've asked me a hard one. I haven't the faintest notion....
And yet... let me think. How is this for a conjecture? Sir Ivor is
interested in steel rails, I believe, and in railway plant generally.
I'm almost sure I've seen his name in connection with steel rails in
reports of public meetings. There's a new Government railway now being
built on the Nepaul frontier--one of these strategic railways, I think
they call them--it's mentioned in the papers we got at Aden.
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