The Embezzler by Louis Auchincloss

you are referring."
    "You can't imagine that, sharing an apartment with my best friend, I might have a suspicion when he's smitten?"
    Alix's oval, pale face became almost stern. What did he
see
in her? She twitched her shoulders, and her satin crackled. More than ever she was like a doll in an expensive dress. "I fear that Rex has been indiscreet."
    "If you call infatuation indiscretion. The poor fellow's in such a bad way that he almost beat the life out of me for abusing you."
    "I wish he had!" she cried indignantly. "How were you abusing me?"
    "I was only telling him that old story about your trouble with the boy who took away the wet bathing suits at Bailey's Beach."
    "Guy Prime, you made that up!"
    "And then about the footman with the big calves whom Uncle Chauncey had to get rid of."
    "Really, you're too disgusting to be borne. I'm glad Rex beat you up."
    "Look at the glint in those eyes! What a pity poor Rex didn't pick a simple girl from his own home town. But seeing he's stuck on a 'sassiety' type, I suppose I must plead his cause."
    "Some pleader," Alix retorted with a sniff. She was beginning to realize that she would not get anything out of me without betraying some interest, but she still tried. "Tell me about this unhappy swain," she continued airily. "One knows so little about him. His father, I gather, is a minister?"
    "His putative father."
    "His
what?
"
    "It's all part o£ the mask. Rex is in reality the son of a very great man."
    "He
is!
" Alix's eyes were now really popping.
    "Yes, his real father is the Stuart pretender to the British crown. But don't tell anyone. His life wouldn't be worth a plugged nickel if fat old King Edward were to catch him."
    Alix's little red puff of a mouth formed poutily into an oblong like her face. "Oh, Guy, you can never be serious."
    "But I am serious. I was just trying to find out something, and I succeeded."
    "What?"
    "That the only thing you have against Rex is his humble birth. If he were an eligible millionaire, you'd fly into his arms soon enough."
    "I'm not flying into anyone's arms, thank you very much," Alix responded tartly. When I had no comment to make on this, she continued with a shrug of impatience: "Well, of course, one cares who people are. I have Pa to face. You have your pa. Be fair, Guy."
    "Oh, my pa." I dismissed him with my own shrug. "He married for love."
    "You're perfectly odious today! I won't talk to you."
    "Then I'll talk to
you,
" I said, catching her by the arm. "Where do you think your branch of the family would be today if a young man called Thompson, born in much humbler circumstances than Rex, a tailor's son, had not robbed his way to the top of the textile industry?"
    "How can you talk so vulgarly? Grandpa Thompson was a most distinguished man!"
    "He was when he died." But people of recent fortune in that day lived so utterly in the present that the past did not exist for them, even as a thing to be ashamed of. "Tell me, Alix, do you ever stop to consider that when you marry, you'll be marrying a way of life as well as a man?"
    "I hate to consider what sort of a way of life
your
wife will be marrying!"
    "No, be serious, please. Who do you think had more fun: your grandparents in their clamber to the top of the pile, or your parents in their dull existence at the summit? Which would you want for a husband: a man who would take you with him to the places where the exciting things of our century are happening, or a pink-faced boob out of a Turkish bath at the Racquet Club?"
    "A pink-faced boob out of a Turkish bath at the Racquet Club!" Here she stretched her arms mockingly towards me. "Marry me, Guy!"
    It was this gesture that gave her away, that made me suspect that she might, after all, care a little bit for Rex. Love him?
Could
she? I was not sure. But I knew that this bolder humor, this stretching out of her arms, was not characteristic of the old Alix. Someone had given her a confidence that she had quite lacked before, and I began to