Free The Embezzler by Louis Auchincloss Page A

was only away from Rex that I could abuse him as an astigmatic who saw order in the jungle and Christian discipline in the wolf pack. In his presence, his relentless logic and inexhaustible figures reduced me to sullen acquiescence.
    I see now that he should have had more sympathy for the role played in Wall Street by men like myself. I was a salesman and he was a moneylender: that was the basic difference. What he should have encouraged me to do was to develop myself into a salesman of de Grasse. My view of Wall Street may have been naive compared to his—I admit that I took a childish pleasure in the crisp heavy paper on which securities were engraved and in the promises of fairy tale wealth that they seemed to contain—but a naive view can still be a contagious one. Reading and study, at least of business facts, were not my
forte.
My mind simply turned off after too many pages, and I would be torn between angry resentment and drowsiness. When I came home I was glad to go out again to dinner, any dinner, to sit next to a pretty woman and drink a good deal of champagne and talk gaily. Was that not youth? What else was youth for?
    Our best times together were on weekends. Rex loved of a Sunday to take a train down to the South Shore of Long Island and hike through the marshes and along the beaches of Cedarhurst and Lawrence. On these occasions he would throw off the monastic earnestness of his banking hours and behave with a gay and infectious enthusiasm. He would even sing, loudly and off tune. Like many men of large intellect and moral seriousness, he could be very boyish when he relaxed. One had to have seen him in such moods to understand the attraction that he was capable of exercising.
    All of this brief gaiety, however, blew away with his first love affair. Of what use is the wisdom of the ages? Young men will still go to war and still fall in love with the wrong women. They will believe, till doomsday, that dolls like Alix Prime will catch fire from their fire and learn love from their ardor. It is really hardly fair to the dolls, who are not to be blamed for their doll-like natures. Rex, like many impoverished, ambitious young men of his day, had kept sex too long at bay. To cause an explosion within him, Alix did not have to be either beautiful or charming. She had only to be female.
    She was an heiress, the daughter of Uncle Chauncey, the stiffest of my uncles and the one who had made the greatest match. She was pale, blonde and well shaped, with a high chirping voice that expressed enthusiasm for all the things over which a debutante was supposed to wax enthusiastic. You couldn't fault her; she liked the best books and the best plays and the best scenic views and the best people. It might have been forgivable, even in a first cousin, had she only been dumb. But Alix wasn't dumb. None of the Primes were dumb.
    I knew, of course, that she and Rex had met. He had been with me to Aunt Amy's and Uncle Chauncey's on two or three occasions. What I did not know was that he had gone back alone. One Sunday afternoon, in early spring, as he and I were exploring a marsh near the sea in Lawrence, our conversation fell, accidentally as I then thought, on my cousin. I described her casually as a stuck-up mannequin. Before I knew it, he had jumped on my back and thrown me to the ground. I wrestled desperately for some minutes before he was on top of me, his knees pressing my shoulders down. Of course, he had surprise on his side. I could not at first believe he was in earnest.
    "Take it back," he demanded hoarsely.
    "Oh, Rex, for Pete's sake!"
    "Take it back or I'll stuff your mouth with mud."
    "All right, all right, she's anything you want, an angel, a goddess, what the hell!"
    I got up sullenly while he excoriated me. "The trouble with you, Guy, is that you're a cynic. You can't see that girl's a million miles above the usual debutante type. Oh, she lives in your silly social world, yes. Where else can the poor creature