Free The Scarlet Letters by Louis Auchincloss

decision?"
    "It was certainly mine in a way. Except you might say it had been made for me. Father was so much a part of me that it seemed almost inconceivable that I could choose any profession but his. And there was poor Mother, too. I lost her only last year. She had dedicated herself wholly to his memory. Too much so, I'm afraid. She was so bitter about his golden career cut short that she couldn't seem to reconcile herself to a fate that had done it."
    "I suppose she wanted you to make it up to her in some way. That would have been only natural."
    "But she was always fair. She knew I had to live my own life and that she couldn't share it as she had shared Father's."
    "No. For that you'd have to find another
her.
"
    "I should be so lucky," he said gravely and gave her a long look.
    She changed the subject then and told him some of the story of her own life.
    That summer she had three dates with him. She would have had more, had she not joined her family on a trip to Quebec. On none of those occasions was there a romantic interchange, but she certainly came to accept him as a beau. She was fairly confident that she could elicit almost any proposal from him the moment she wanted to, but she wasn't in the least sure that she was so minded. He was ... well, how could she put it? Not at all like the other men she knew. And she was not yet ready to introduce him or even mention him to her father. For the time being, anyway, she was keeping him to herself.
    "Of course, you're going to apply to Vollard Kaye for a job," she told him one night at their Automat.
    "You think they'd take me?" he inquired earnestly. "I'm not exactly a white shoe type. And I'm told that most of the partners are listed in the Social Register."
    "That's because most of them have worked their way up. Pa doesn't give a hoot about those distinctions. I thought you knew that."
    "Oh, I wasn't thinking of
him
. To work for him would be my dream of dreams!"
    "Please! You'll be making me think I'm only a rung in your ladder to fame."
    He became instantly solemn. "You couldn't think anything as awful as that, could you, Vinnie?"
    "Why not? A talented man without a fortune has to look about him to get started. In Europe it's taken quite for granted that one of the functions of a woman is to have something to give a push-up to a man, whether it be blood or connections or just hard cash."
    "Vinnie, I don't want you to talk that way. Those things have nothing to do with how I feel about you. Tell me that you believe that, Vinnie. Tell me, please."
    She was a bit taken aback by his gravity, but decided to pass it off. "Of course. I was only joking."
    She discovered that his stern morality was absolutely consistent. He had no use for ambiguities or double standards. A discussion they had after attending a Saturday matinee of
Hedda Gabler
brought this out rather too forcibly for her. It was a play that had excited Vinnie, an Ibsen enthusiast, but which had failed to arouse Rodman on this, his first experience with the great Norse playwright.
    "What does it all add up to?" he wanted to know. "A bored, idle woman in a fit of petty jealousy burns the manuscript of a presumably great book by a drunken genius and then goads him into suicide. After which she follows in the same godforsaken path. Is that a tragedy? Or even a comedy?"
    Vinnie tried to recall the lecture of a favorite Vassar professor. "It's neither. You might call it an ancient morality play. Of man and morals, and a world outside of man and morals."
    "What kind of a world is that?"
    "We don't know! That's what's so spooky. Ibsen seems to believe in something like the survival of the old pagan gods. They lurk in the dark air around us. Old wild demiurges. Wasn't there a medieval legend that Dionysus reappeared in a monastery in the form of an impish youth and presided over orgies? Hedda is subject to some terrible influence like that. She has great force and will, but she is completely unrestrained by any modern