The Embezzler by Louis Auchincloss Page B

to linger behind with me on a tour of Jordan's Pond while Alix and Rex sauntered ahead. She was as bored with my company as I with hers and had none of my motives for concealing it. On the contrary, she had developed a violent crush on Rex and was always trying to edge her way between him and Alix. And to make matters worse, whether it was from maidenly timidity, lack of imagination or simply innate good manners, Alix appeared to tolerate her intrusions.
    Alix was indeed an enigma. She accepted our house and household, not with the disarming enthusiasm of her mother, but more daintily, as if she were being very gracious on some annual organization outing, some special anniversary picnic, where the servants, once a year, sat down with the princess. I wondered if she did not enjoy her visit to the Percy Primes in some of the same way that she seemed to enjoy her flirtation with Rex, as things that were pleasant, titillating, perhaps even exciting, but not, in the last analysis, quite real, things that belonged to summer and to a sea resort and to brightly colored umbrellas on a beach, things that one had, by implication, to put away in the crisp days of early autumn when one took up city things, social things,
real
things. Where did reality go in summer? Ah, that was just it, reality was off cruising up the Maine coast aboard "The Wandering Albatross." Rex would not have had even the little that he did have if Uncle Chauncey had been there.
    He did not think, certainly, that he was getting much, and he became progressively gloomier as the visit wore on.
    "I sometimes think Alix cares more for her clothes than she does for me," he grumbled one night after we had gone to bed. "Do you realize we've been here nine days, and she hasn't worn the same dress twice?"
    "You must really be in love," I muttered. "I never knew you to notice a dress before."
    "Is it possible, do you think," he persisted, "to break through the barrier girls like her put up? It's like a wall of pink and yellow ice cream, with spun sugar for barbed wire, on top. But don't let that fool you! It's as impenetrable as steel."
    "Love seems to have given the banker's language a colorful turn."
    "But you know what I mean, Guy," the anxious voice came to me through the darkness. "After all, you're a Prime. You know the society attitude that identifies the unfamiliar with the comic. All I have to do to make Alix smile is to mention East Putnam or the public school that I went to there or the fact that my father's a Congregationalist minister. She doesn't mean in the least to be unkind. But middle-class things are supposed to be funny, like hay fever or hives."
    "And lower-class things?"
    "Oh, they're different. They're sad—when they're not dangerous. We shake our heads over the poor." He snorted in derision. "Of course, it's simply childishness at bottom. I remember the first time I discovered that every boy's father wasn't a minister. It struck me as very funny. But I've grown up since. Alix still feels that to mention any denomination but Episcopalianism is to say something, well if not exactly crude, certainly embarrassing."
    "Ah, my poor fellow, I can see you've learned the ways of society! And to think what a simple unspoiled creature you were a year ago! Maybe you should give her up."
    "Give her up? How can I give her up? Or give up the part of me that's bound to her? He sprang out of bed and paced angrily about the room. "It's easy enough for you to say that. You're not in love with Alix, and, besides, it's incredible to you that I should be. Oh yes, I know how that is. I never really believe in my sisters' beaux. And then you don't appreciate Alix. You don't recognize her enormous potentialities..."
    "But, Rex, you know I've changed my mind about all that!"
    "You say you have, perhaps you think you have, but have you really? I'll never forget what you said about her before you knew how I felt!"
    The unfairness of this got me, too, out of bed. "You might at