Free The Embezzler by Louis Auchincloss

to be quite infatuated with that young man. If I am to set you up on Wall Street, it will be with men of your own class. I haven't worked all my life for the future of Reginald Geer."
    "Worked!" I could not help exclaiming. "Excuse me, sir, but when did you work?"
    Father's face turned a faint pink, a most unusual phenomenon with him, and those long agile fingers twined and re-twined themselves around the silver handle of his walking stick. "Never mind how I've worked," he reproved me sharply. "One day you'll find out and beg my pardon for your impertinence. One day you'll learn which is your truer friend: your father or that young man."
    "Do you imply that he's using me?"
    "Certainly, he's using you, and I don't blame him in the least. These things aren't done in cold blood, mind you. The circumstances create them. You will understand that when you've watched the human ant heap as long as I have. Young Geer is by nature a self-aggrandizing animal. He moves upwards wherever you put him. Of course, he'll crawl over you, if you let him. He can't help himself. He wants the moon. He wants to be first in de Grasse, first in Wall Street, first in society."
    "Rex cares nothing for society!" I cried indignantly.
    "Rex cares for anything he hasn't got," Father said emphatically. "You think, because he doesn't enjoy things, that he doesn't want them. You're dead wrong. He may want them just because someone else has them, but he still wants them."
    None of Father's suspicions, however, could cloud my relationship with Rex. In that first year of our apprenticeship our friendship was at its apex. He came with me to my family's for Sunday lunch and was asked to my uncles' on holidays and special occasions, as if he had been a Prime. Sometimes I took him to parties, but more often he preferred to stay home and work and hear about them later from me, sitting up over a cigar and a glass of brandy. Our only disagreements were over my failure to work as hard as he. One night, after a particularly grand dinner at Uncle Lewis', I must have described the guests with some of Father's fulsomeness, for I provoked him into retorting:
    "Those men didn't get where they are by going out to dinner parties when
they
were young."
    "Didn't they? Where would Chauncey DePew have been without the Vanderbilts? Where would the Pratts and Paynes have been without Mr. Rockefeller?"
    "You think too much of money-making, Guy."
    "But we're in the money-making game! You may not judge a doctor or even a lawyer by his income, but how can you rate a money-maker except by the size of his pile?"
    "Banking isn't just money-making. Banking is starting new businesses and saving old ones. Banking is helping the right man over a bad time. Banking is keeping the heart of the economy pumping. If you don't feel that way about it, you ought to quit and become a stockbroker."
    "You and Father!"
    But I had no idea of becoming a stockbroker, and seeing that I had really irked him, I held my peace. I was determined to make good at de Grasse, and Rex, in his own way, was trying to help. He was constantly checking on my work, reading over my market reports, suggesting areas of additional research, filling up our brief lunch periods with talk of stocks and bonds. His attitude was rather irritatingly tutorial, but I knew that it did me no harm.
    What
did
do harm was the contrast that he unconsciously obtruded between himself and me, not so much to other eyes as to my own. There was something about Rex that made all non-Rex activities seem foolish. And so I was constantly pretending to be something I wasn't, nodding my head and clearing my throat and starting sentences, statistic-laden, that I could never seem to finish. I read much of what Rex read, but I could never retain it as he so uncannily did. His mind was a whole glittering philosophy of finance, and every customer of de Grasse, like one of Browning's broken arcs in the poem he loved to quote, seemed part of a perfect round above. It