Free East Side Story by Louis Auchincloss

strong indeed, but he saw less and less reason to regret this. None of his offspring ever indicated that they were even aware of the fact that their wealth came from only one parent. The money seemed to cover them all with the same dye.
    He and Ada lived in four places; they had a Palladian villa in Newport, a French
hotel
in New York City, a rambling stone mansion in Fairfield, Connecticut, from which town the Bensons had sprung and in which each loyally maintained a residence, and a shingle villa in Jekyll Island, Georgia. The year was divided in four quarters between these, involving four stately annual moves and the displacement of some thirty in help, the walling up of garden statues against the cold, the packing and unpacking of countless trunks, and the shipping of large family portraits which could not be left in empty parlors. All this was efficiently supervised by Bruce, who sometimes wondered if it were not a life trade in itself, but he also had time to assemble a distinguished collection of Hudson River landscapes and to act as an oft-consulted trustee of the two Metropolitans, the museum and the opera.
    Oh, yes, it was a life and not a bad one. And he had made Ada happy; there was nothing phony about that. And he sometimes wondered if he had not, after all, become as "real" a man as he had sometimes imagined his brothers and brothers-in-law to be, in contrast to himself. His children were as much Bensons in looks and wealth as any of their cousins of the Benson name, and totally accepted as such in society, and had he not created them?

4. GORDON
    B Y THE YEAR 1900 the Carnochans had established themselves on a firm middle rung of the New York social ladder. Of the second generation from emigrator David only Douglas's widow, Eliza, survived, in quiet and sober respectability, in her brownstone on Fifty-seventh Street, which she shared with her maiden daughter, Annie, but her other children had made rather more of a splash. Brace's French
hotel
was a familiar sight to tourists who gaped at the long row of mansions on Fifth Avenue, and the annual visits of Sir James Muir, Clara's widower, were duly noted in the evening journals, though a city that could now claim two duchesses could hardly be much impressed by a mere baronet, even a rich one. Still, it was something.
    But the members of the third generation, now middle-aged, who were most visible, particularly in the world of business affairs, were the brothers Wallace and James. Wallace, who had largely redeemed himself from the collapse of his thread business in some half dozen other enterprises, was a stout, gruff gentleman whose rare and supposedly well-conceived pronouncements on stock market trends carried conviction to many, and James, a long, lean, also often silent lawyer with a large and loyal clientele, were close friends as well as brothers. They had built adjoining matching brownstones in the same street as their mother's and filled them with the academic art of the period: cavaliers boisterously drinking in taverns, cardinals playing chess in gilded interiors, and gladiators pleading for their lives to a stony Caesar. In the early fall and spring their numerous progeny played noisy games up and down the chocolate stoops.
    Both brothers had made appropriate matches: Wallace with Julie Denison, hearty member of a hearty, sports-loving, card-playing Brooklyn clan, and James with Louisa, the strong-minded and strong-willed daughter of a minor railroad tycoon. But the great difference between the two couples, at least in the eyes of one rueful observer, was that James and Louisa boasted six sturdy sons and Wallace and Julie only one.
    Gordon, that sole male, was the rueful observer. He had not always been the sole. He had had a twin, Michael, not identical, but bigger, stronger, and more loudly yelling. Yet for all his apparent physical superiority, Michael had succumbed to the diphtheria that had attacked the twins when they were six, leaving a violently