Free The Headmaster's Dilemma by Louis Auchincloss

about it, I decided to make myself thoroughly comfortable." And she certainly had! There was something in her air, in her attitude, that implied that if men ruled the downtown world, they had done well to leave the truly important things, the arts and the art of living, to women. She had no loyally to the lares and penates of moneymakers. When Donald had once protested after she had invited and paid a famous radical novelist—some said a card-carrying communist—to address her book class, she had simply told him to "grow up."
    Caroline, advised by her mother-in-law, began to accept her husband, but it was a silent, moody acceptance. She spent most of her time with the twins now, and hardly seemed to notice whether Donald stayed home or went out. Sometimes, when they had a social engagement, she at the last moment would refuse to go with him on the obviously false excuse of a migraine, and nothing could convince her to change her mind. Still, their married life had the outward appearance of normality, and Donald supposed that this would have to be enough. And it might have been without the episode of the Connecticut house.
    Donald's mother had a curious apprehension that the family fortune was not destined to last, at least not in its present bulk, and she used serenely to make occasional purchases of things that would enable them to be comfortable in a reduced scale of living. One of these was a charming little eighteenth-century house in Connecticut, a colonial gem on the edge of a village green. There she would sometimes go for summer weekends, taking Caroline and the twins. Donald's father, who cheerfully paid for everything his wife desired, remarked to his oldest son with a chuckle, "Fortunately, I am still rich enough to afford your mother's economies."
    Caroline loved the house, and when her mother-in-law tired of playing Marie Antoinette at her
hameau
, as Donald sourly put it, she asked her husband, who always took title in his own name, to deed it to her daughter-in-law. Howard, of course, instantly complied, but in the Spencer tradition he gave the place to Donald rather than to his wife. To him it was the same thing.
    The house was not heated and was closed all winter, so that, the transfer having taken place in October, there was no idea of Caroline spending a weekend there before late spring. And it so happened that only weeks after Donald took title he received a magnificent offer for the property, which had become necessary to a developer who was taking over the entire little village for a huge retirement home. In accordance with every precept of his economic philosophy, Donald promptly sold it, delaying just long enough to sweeten the already succulent offer.
    He saw no reason to tell Caroline. He concluded that over the ensuing months she might even lose her interest in the house. But he was a bit nervous about it. She had spoken of it with real feeling, and he had even wondered if she might wish to heat it and live in it permanently, expecting him only for weekends and putting their marriage on that basis.
    He did not know it when, on an early spring day, she drove up to Connecticut to show a friend the house. She was faced with a vacant lot. The developer's bulldozer had preceded her.
    The scene to which she subjected her husband on her return ended all possibility of a happy union in the future. She screamed at him that he had taken the one thing she loved of the family properties and destroyed it for no other reason than to hurt and humiliate her. He had coldly insisted that he had treated the house like any other asset in his portfolio, disposing of it for a price that would almost surely never come again. He offered to hold the cash proceeds for any purchase that she might ask. She said that she wanted nothing and would take the twins and return to her own family.
    In the end she didn't do this. Her parents didn't want her, and she had no grounds for a divorce. Adelaide Spencer intervened, and