Free I Come as a Theif by Louis Auchincloss

of his pleasures, dragged visitors in to see his treasure and caused a mocking hilarity at family gatherings by loudly specifying the miniature ornaments that he needed as his Christmas or birthday due. Dorothy Lowder found, like many censors before her, that she had only exposed her shame to the spotlight. Tony decided that Philip should have one ally in the family.
    He had to break down the natural distrust of the maverick for the regular fellow, of Mummie's cross for Mummie's darling. An older brother, unlatching the side of the dolls' house for a peek, must have seemed the most Trojan of horses. But Tony was persistent, and Philip, for all his snarling independence, needed a friend. When Tony promised to get him a French divan for the dolls' house parlor, Philip was interested.
    "But how will you get it? They're very expensive."
    "I might ask Grandpa Daly. He promised me five dollars for swimming that mile last summer. He never paid up."
    "He never will!" Philip snorted in derision. Grandpa Daly, the family god, had clay feet to the younger generation. "Besides, he hates my dolls' house."
    "Well, what he doesn't know won't hurt him."
    But Tony got nowhere with Grandpa Daly, who gave him a lecture on the poverty of his own childhood in County Cork, and anyway he had discovered just the divan that he wanted for Philip, which was not to be had for money. It was a beautiful little green French sofa in the splendid dolls' house of Inez Feldman, only daughter of a rich Jewish banker who occupied a baroque mansion just north of the Lowders' apartment house. Inez was a fat, spoiled, opinionated brat with a snooty smile and pigtails, and she didn't give a hoot about any of her many things, but that didn't mean she would give them away. She liked Tony, but when he had asked her to make him a present of an old Howard Pyle book that she never looked at, she had turned him down flat, saying it had been a present from a favorite uncle. He knew her type. Things acquired a value in Inez's eyes simply by being coveted by others.
    Tony was certain, however, that she would never miss the sofa. In the first place, he could rearrange the little room so its absence would hardly show. In the second, the dolls' house was only one of four of Inez's, and she was already bored with it. The question was purely of the chances of detection, for there was no comparison between Inez's and Philip's need. In Tony's mind theft was associated exclusively with money. Taking things came under the lesser head of "swiping," a form of misdemeanor about which grown-ups could be expected to carry on but which enjoyed much less opprobrium among his contemporaries. There were gradations, of course, even in swiping. One did not take another boy's watch, or his camera or (assuming this were possible) his bicycle. But a useless bit of dolls' furniture owned by a spoiled girl who did not even care about it ... well, only a prude would carp about that. Besides, he would not be taking it for himself.
    The theft, or purloinment, or simple swiping, was accomplished as easily as Tony had foreseen, and Inez was quite unconscious of her loss. The epidsode filled him with elation. He might have been a prince of olden days who finds himself endowed with the power to heal by touch, or, more appropriately, a Robin Hood whose destiny is to redress, in his own particular fashion, the injustices of contemporary society. He had taken a trump from Inez's hand to provide a better balance in Philip's.
    When Susan, their older sister, who was always peering into Philip's dolls' house and making mean remarks about it, saw the divan, she recognized it at once as Inez's.
    "You swiped it from her!" she accused Philip.
    "I did not! Tony gave it to me."
    Susan turned in surprise to Tony. Inez might well have given a present to her handsome brother, but why a doll's divan? "Inez has a funny way of showing her partiality."
    "Not at all," Tony retorted. "I told her I wanted it for Philip."
    As an