The Cream of the Jest by James Branch Cabell

Shortly afterward befell a queer incident. Kennaston, passing through a famed city, lunched with a personage who had been pleased to admire Men Who Loved Alison, and whose remunerative admiration had been skilfully trumpeted in the public press by Kennaston's publishers.

There were some ten others in the party, and Kennaston found it droll enough to be sitting at table with them. The lean pensive man -- with hair falling over his forehead in a neatly-clipped bang, such as custom restricts to children -- had probably written that morning, in his official capacity, to innumerable potentates. That handsome bluff old navy-officer was a national hero: he would rank in history with Perry and John Paul Jones; yet here he sat, within arms'-reach, prosaically complaining of unseasonable weather. That bearded man, rubicund and monstrous as to nose, was perhaps the most powerful, as he was certainly the most wealthy, person inhabiting flesh; and it was rumored, in those Arcadian days, that kingdoms did not presume to go to war without securing the consent of this financier.