Free The Golden Calves by Louis Auchincloss

old girl, too, if it makes you feel any better. I mean fight for her
real
best interests—if she’ll only see what they are and stop being such a nanny goat." He paused, perhaps sensing he had gone too far. "Let’s put it this way, my friend. You convince Daisy Speddon to leave us her money and collection without crippling conditions, and I’ll convince the board to name you director. Claim it of me! There’s not a trustee, including old Peter Hewlett, who wouldn’t bow to a coup like that. Hell, man, you wouldn’t even need your B.A., let alone a master’s!"
    Mark didn’t need anything beyond these magic words to go to work. The very next day he embarked on a campaign of cultivating his friendship with Anita Vogel. It was obvious that she offered him the most available key to her patroness’s mind and heart. Nor did it take him long to convert this hitherto casual and rather bantering relationship into one considerably deeper. Indeed, the friendship soon threatened to get out of his control. Mark had not previously suspected how much this tense creature fancied him, and he was amused and intrigued by the interest that she obviously and unsuccessfully tried to conceal. It was not so much that he suspected himself of returning this interest as that the contrast between her virginal isolation from the world and his own perhaps undue involvement with it made him think of himself as a kind of savage Gaul and of her as a Roman Vestal. Her deep concern with beautiful things, and unconcern with every conceivable norm and standard of his own busy life, had their attraction for him at a time when Claverack's world had begun to seem too worldly, its rush too rushing. Might there not be a balm for him in the very commotion of Anita’s concentrated whirlpool, particularly if he were the cause of its swirling? She gave him the impression that if she ever should turn her attention from Miss Speddon’s pots and pans to a man, it would be a total transference. And that might be a sufficiently pleasant experience for the man, particularly if that man was a bit tired of being only a part of the life and career of Miss Chessie Norton.
    The latter, who had met Anita at the museum and again at Miss Speddon’s when she was assisting Mr. Claverack with the famous will, promptly flared the cause of her lover’s preoccupation.
    â€œI shouldn’t be at all surprised if you didn’t imagine yourself a kind of Colonel Higginson discovering Emily Dickinson," she suggested bleakly one evening when he had commented too keenly on Anita’s extreme devotion to her job. They had gone the previous Saturday night to a play about the Amherst poetess. “You think you may be the man who will bring her out. Big, brave, wonderful, condescending you! But there’s one little difference. Emily was a genius, and Miss Vogel is a drip. So that even if you’re as opaque as Higginson, it will make just as little matter. Emily remained a genius in spite of him. Miss Vogel will remain a drip in spite of you.”
    When Chessie was nasty, she reminded him again uncomfortably of that Modigliani model. At such moments he could actually dislike her.
    "I wonder if Anita
isn’t
a bit of a genius,” he parried. ‘If you had lived more with Titians and less with torts, you might have learned to appreciate people who don’t happen to believe that lawyers are the be-all and end-all of life. Or that the greatest goal of man isn't necessarily to slip off with the moneybags under a squid spray of small print.”
    â€œOink, oink! Do I hear the chauvinist pig grunting? We girls know that ploy. How to keep a woman out of the marketplace by turning her into a Vestal. And then tossing her the rag of aloofness to cover the bare ass of her servitude!"
    Nothing could have pushed him more towards Anita than Chessie’s meanness, particularly when she seemed to divine his own fantasies. If she