Free I Come as a Theif by Louis Auchincloss Page A

answer it seemed to fit, but Tony knew that Susan would make a point of checking his story with Inez. For there was a grown-up quality in Susan. She could always be counted on to do the obvious thing and hence to catch people. Yet he had no sense of alarm, or even of apprehension. The game was becoming exciting.
    "Well, I'll ask her next time to give you something for me," Susan said.
    And she did this, the very next Sunday, when Inez and her father came to lunch. Inez looked blank.
    "You remember, Inez," Tony said coolly. "The little divan from your dolls' house you gave me for Philip's? I asked you for it as a Valentine's Day present."
    Inez looked so bewildered that Tony felt embarrassed for her obtuseness. Then her features seemed suddenly to jump in recognition.
    "Oh, the little sofa, of course!" she cried. "Naturally, I gave it to you! It was for Philip, that's right. Do you like it, Philip? Does it fit your room? You must show it to me after lunch."
    But after lunch Tony had to walk home with Inez, and when her father had gone upstairs for his nap, he had to kiss her many times in the conservatory. For years afterward ferns would be associated in his mind with wet, thick lips, with the scent of gum drops, with perspiration. He had learned about crime. Now he learned about punishment.
    It was not necessary, however, to be caught. Only fools were caught. It was going to take more than Inez's giggles and squirms to make him give up this brave new weapon. A week later he took a miniature piano from the apartment of a friend whom neither Susan nor Philip knew and warned Philip not to show it off to guests. Then he took a book from the library of a friend's father for Susan (he told her it had been a present) and a china ashtray for his mother (he told her he had bought it with his saved allowance). At last he decided that it was time to do something for himself, and he took a yellow fountain pen from a department store counter. This last somehow struck him as a final commitment.
    He now found himself in the habit of accumulating small objects at the rate of one a week: figurines, vases, beads, tiny toys, spoons—the world seemed replete with useless, decorative, unmissed chattels. He kept them in the back of his closet and in the bottom of the grandfather clock in the front hall that had never worked. Just why he was turning himself into such a magpie remained a mystery. At times he thought that he must like the feeling that he was doing things, rather than having things done to him. At others he felt that there might be an element of daring in these acts, a kind of challenge to the capricious deity that had made his family's life seem such a dreary one. But all he could be sure of was that he felt a bigger, braver being when his fingers surreptitiously closed around a coveted object.
    There might have been a lesson taught by the fact that when detection came, it came after a gross risk quite unnecessarily and uncharacteristically taken. It was on the Lowders' annual summer visit to Grandpa Daly in the big white house in Larchmont. Tony hated this visit. He hated the airs of superiority of the Daly cousins and the bray of the big Irish gathering. He hated his mother's enthusiasm and his father's discomfort. But above all he hated Grandpa Daly.
    Grandpa Daly was a small, wiry widower with thick long hair, still brown at eighty, that fell over his forehead in the manner of Will Rogers. But there was little benignity in the sharp-nosed, thin-lipped brown face under that tumbling lock or in the discourse that flowed so relentlessly from that gnarled throat. Tony had never known a human being to talk as much as Grandpa Daly. He seemed to be engaged in a kind of permanent, oral autobiography, a monument of words to the glory of Patrick Daly, varied only by individual paragraphs directed at particular members of his listening family to show them how best to derive profit from his example. Ordinarily, at least at Larchmont, the