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his parents and walk the streets of Newcastle, Max Aitken really had no home. Hotels were one way to show this, to intimate to others that he was a traveller. A traveller and a loner. That is why he ended up so far away.
    Soon everyone had heard of him, and, as he was introduced about, by himself or by others, he met General Charles Drury, who had taken charge of the Halifax Garrison from the British—a very notable thing. One other notable thing about General Drury was his daughter Gladys.

CHAPTER SIX
Marriage
in the New World
    From all accounts, Max married a wonderful woman in Gladys Drury. She brought with her an aura of charm and elegance, and her family brought connections in a higher society. The love between them was mutual—at least to the extent that Max could manage. (Of course he would be unfaithful most of his life, and liked to promote the idea that he had married her for her name.)
    He married someone who knew society as he never had, and she married a man—“the small fellow with the big head” as one Montreal banker described him about this time—who knew modern enterprise like few men in the world, and had a limitless faith in his own ability.
    To say that he benefited from the marriage by marrying money (as some do) is in the end as pointless as saying that her father approved of the match only when he discovered Max to be a financial genius. (Her parents did not attend thewedding.) When he married Gladys, he was already earning more in a year than most of her other suitors could ever hope to in ten. That, of course, is not suggesting that money was the wand that changed him from Frog to Prince. Many close to Gladys disapproved violently of Max on a more personal level. The man lived in a hotel, and was a wheeler-dealer, for God’s sake! What is more, I am sure Max was aware of this. He knew his faults and often embellished them himself. And perhaps he would never have considered taking a wife who could not be a ready benefit.
    Still, was it uncommon for a man to benefit from a marriage in that closed society? Herbert Asquith, who would become Liberal prime minister in Great Britain at the start of the First World War and a strong political rival of Max Aitken, had done just that when he married his wife, Violet. In fact, in the genteel society to which many people, and many Canadians, felt that Max shouldn’t belong, it was done all the time.
    They went to Cuba on their honeymoon, where he worked out a deal to buy a tram line.
    IN 1904 , John Stairs died at the King Edward Hotel in Toronto, creating another vacuum in Aitken’s life, and Max was not made a director of the finance and bond company,Royal Securities, as he had been promised. Again, he says, he felt betrayed, but there are indications that he did not expect to be made a member of the board. However it went, he inspired more fear and distrust than other men. Perhaps he could not help this.
    Still, he was also inconsolable at the death of the man he called “my hero.” In private he sought sympathy, ironically enough (or maybe not), from Charles Porter, a music director at the Presbyterian college in Halifax, who, far from giving sympathy, attacked him for thinking he was something more than “an ordinary insurance salesman.” It seems to me that Max often relied on stuffy moralizers to assure him he was being good or bright or clever. But once they told him he wasn’t being good, he would turn with wrath against them. This, in fact, was something of a constant pattern in his life.
    Most in Halifax believed that John F. Stairs had protected his young charge, and now that Stairs was gone, they hoped that Max would flounder badly. In fact, of all the men who had helped him, Stairs had provided the greatest leg up. Yet Max was in many respects the most forward-thinking and aggressive business partner in Stairs’s group, and had brought it a good deal of financial success. At the time of Stairs’s death, he was in a struggle to save