Free The Embezzler by Louis Auchincloss Page B

live? She has to do what her parents say. But that doesn't mean she wasn't born for better things."
    "Like Rex Geer," I suggested sulkily, brushing off my pants.
    "Don't even think it!" he exclaimed wrathfully. "How would I dare aspire to the likes of her?"
    "That's right, she's a Prime, isn't she?" I retorted. "Forget her, peasant."
    Well, obviously he wasn't going to do that, and how could he court Alix without my help? We were in 1908, and Uncle Chauncey was not about to hand over his finest flower to adorn the buttonhole of the son of a penniless rural parson. In a few more minutes he had to beg my pardon, and when I grudgingly accorded it, he threw an arm over my shoulder and gave me a squeeze and then hurried off to lose his embarrassment in a rapid walk. We did not speak again until the station, and then, as we sat waiting for our train, he asked me a dozen questions about Alix. In the crowd of hot excursionists returning to the city, amid soft drinks and crumpled newspapers and howling babies, we talked of Alix at dancing class, Alix at Miss Chapin's, Alix reciting "Evelyn Hope" at Aunt Amy's Christmas party, Alix in pink and white sitting with her mother for a portrait by Porter. I did not tell him of the time Alix did wee-wee on the rug and let me be punished for it, or of how we used to make fun of her for her crushes on older girls, or of her temper tantrums or of how Aunt Amy was supposed to have wept before Miss Chapin to keep her from being suspended for cheating. No doubt Alix no longer remembered these things herself. When the violence of the teens congeals into the kind of sandy surface that she presented to the world, it is possible that the memory itself may be affected.
    What I found difficult to make out from Rex's version of his romance was to what extent his emotion was reciprocated. I suspected that Alix was probably both flattered and surprised by the passion that she had aroused, but that she did not know what
to
do with it. What does one do, after all, with a real stove in furnishing a doll's kitchen? Yet I was sure of one thing. I was sure she was Prime enough to appreciate that it had some value.
    "You'd better let me work on it," I told him later that night. "We'll see what ideas I come up with. After all, it's more my field than yours."
    The following Wednesday was Aunt Amy's "at home," and I left the office early to call at the great red and white brick Louis XIII
hotel
that Uncle Chauncey had reared with her money on upper Fifth Avenue. Aunt Amy was the biggest, simplest, nicest, plainest old shoe in New York society. She looked like a cook dressed up as a duchess; she had pink hair and a round brown face that was inclined to be sad when it was not very merry, and she kissed half the people who came into the room. Unfortunately, she was also a secret drinker and had little of the will power that one usually associated with hostesses of her type. My uncle, small and dour and generally absent from her receptions, controlled her absolutely.
    "Guy, honey," she exclaimed when she saw me, "you're cute to come! Tell me about that handsome roommate of yours. He's become quite a caller here. How do you make him talk? I declare I can't get two words out of him."
    "Rex is not a ladies' man. I suppose he chats with Uncle Chauncey?"
    "With Chauncey? I don't think Chauncey's even met him."
    This was good. Certainly, the less Rex saw of Uncle Chauncey, the better. "Maybe you scare him, Aunt Amy."
    "Me? As if I could scare a fly!"
    "Perhaps it's your pearls, then. They are ominously large."
    I found Alix in the library and took her to a window embrasure. As the oldest of my generation I was rather a hero with my female cousins. I used to quiz them and advise them on all their little love affairs.
    "You've been holding out on me," I said severely. "Did you think I wouldn't find out?"
    Alix cast down her eyes with a demureness that I was supposed to be stupid enough to take seriously. "I can't imagine to what