Free False Gods by Louis Auchincloss Page B

watching you at lunch, because of what Dorothy told me about you. You obviously didn't know any of her silly friends, but you held your own well enough. You strike me as a man who wants to run things rather than be run. In my day we old capitalists pretty much took the law into our own hands. But that day is over. In the future it's the lawyer who will tell us how to do what we want to do."
    "How to get around the law, you mean, sir?"
    Mr. Stonor shrugged. "If you want to put it that way. I look to acts, not definitions. Anyway, it's going to be a world that a clever lawyer should be able to dominate. Tell me, young man: Who in your opinion has been the most powerful American of the past decade?"
    "Wouldn't that be President Roosevelt?"
    "Well, he'd certainly like to think so. He told me once, as if it were something to the last degree presumptuous, that Pierpont Morgan, conferring with him in the White House, appeared to treat him as an equal. But I have no doubt that Morgan considered him an inferior. If you had seen as I did, last year in the panic, our financial leaders waiting respectfully outside the door of Morgan's great art-studded library to be admitted, one by one, each to submit his plan of how to save the nation to the silent figure bent over his game of solitaire, you would have witnessed a demonstration of real power. The great Theodore, for all his trumpeting, couldn't have done it. But it was nonetheless the end of an era."
    "Horace's mother told me that her father had spotted you as a man who would make his mark in life when you were only my age. Is that what you are doing to me, sir? If so, I certainly appreciate it."
    "Mrs. Aspinwall's father didn't have much else to choose from in the Newport of that day. Still, it was nice of her to say so. Little Lydia Beekman—I remember her well. Pretty as a picture. She was a friend of my younger sister's. But she threw herself away on John Aspinwall."
    "They seemed compatible enough to me."
    "Then he must have brought her down to his level. Men like that do."
    And then we returned to our fishing. That evening before dinner Horace came to my room, where I was reading. There were actual tears in his eyes. "It's all over. The engagement will be announced on Thursday night."
    "Can't you get her at least to put it off? A day's ride is hardly giving you a fair chance."
    "Why should she give me any sort of chance?"
    "Why has she been writing to you? Why has she been stringing you along? Why did her father have to take her abroad to get her away from you? Hell's bells, man, you don't know your own power."
    "But, Maury, it's just what I do know. And I suspect you do, too. It isn't decent for a man to hang on after he's been definitely rejected. I'm leaving the camp tonight. The little train is taking me out at six. Are you coming with me?"
    I eyed him defiantly. "No!"
    "What do you expect to accomplish here?"
    "I don't know!"
    He sighed. "There are times, Maury, when I can't help wondering if it was a good idea we ever met."
    He left by the train as planned, and Dorothy seemed surprised, but not wholly displeased, that I did not accompany him.
    Gurdon, I had later to admit, had been right about his cousin's nervous state of mind. Horace underwent a severe depression and had to leave Yale for six months while he retreated to a sanatorium, postponing his graduation by a year. His family always believed that I had been the cause of his breakdown and that I had sacrificed him to my own social advantage in cultivating the Stonors. They, of course, never blamed the pressures they had put on him, however unconsciously, to remain a charming boy, protected from the menacing world of adulthood. Dorothy's rejection had left him feeling less a boy than a failed man.
    But at the time, left by myself in the Stonor camp, I gave little thought to the emotional consequences to my friend of the amorous course I had induced him to pursue. I was concentrating my attentions on Guy Thorp.
    He