False Gods by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online Page A

Horace
was
handsome until you compared him with someone else. His figure was lithe and well knit, but there was just a suggestion of slightness to it. His auburn hair was thick and long with a mild wave, and in profile his pallor and Greek nose gave him something of the air of a poet, but his determined stride across the campus in the company of his peers suggested a half-defiant need to proclaim himself "one of the boys." In the same way his wide brown eyes, after fixing you with a luminous and faintly distrustful stare, would suddenly flash in mockery, and you would hear his cheerful but rather coarse laugh. But he willed the coarseness; that was the point. He could be very funny indeed, but he could also be very serious, and the latter mood, I soon learned, was the truer one. Horace was never sure of himself, but he had from childhood, I suspected, been very sure that he had to be a good boy.
    Young men, as I have implied, become intimate easily, and Horace and I were no exceptions. He never showed the slightest awareness of the difference in our backgrounds; he had been born, so far as I could make out, without a snobbish bone in his body. It was true that his friends, except for me, were all drawn from the same milieu, but that was because this milieu had been his natural habitat. That he had not had the imagination or even the curiosity to change it might have been simply the result of his failure to see that other habitats were any different.
    Gurdon was much more sophisticated, a natural snob born with the wit to conceal it. He was very social, an accomplished manipulator of men, smart and shrewd, with eyes that sparkled with the intent to convey an air of friendly mischief and a braying, humorless laugh. He treated Horace more like a kid brother than a cousin of equal age, and I had little doubt that he regarded me with a distinct suspicion, as if he could not believe that a man as intelligent as I obviously was would be cultivating Horace from motives of simple friendship. But he was cordial enough. Gurdon would never discard a card until he was sure it had no value. Not unlike myself.
    It was probably because of Gurdon's superiority in worldly wisdom that Horace found me a more comfortable confidant to hear of his love for Dorothy Stonor. She was the only child of the second marriage of the twice-widowered Frank Stonor, with whose famous career I was sufficiently familiar, the streetcar magnate and statesman who had served briefly in Cleveland's cabinet and was known as the patrician liberal who had reared a sober brownstone cube on a prominent corner of Fifth Avenue to mock the garish derivative palaces of his
nouveaux riches
neighbors. The snapshot of his beloved that Horace carried in his wallet showed me a handsome rather than pretty girl with straight dark hair tied at the back of her neck, a firm nose and chin and candid, inquiring eyes. You could see that she was honest and would be frank. Perhaps even too much so.
    "Why do you think it's all so hopeless?" I asked. "Aren't you considered rather a catch? By mothers in Gotham, anyway?"
    "But Dorothy doesn't have a mother. Hers died when she was a baby."
    "Well, by fathers, then."
    "Oh, Mr. Stonor has no use for the likes of me. How could he? A poor college student with law school still ahead of him."
    "But surely your family has money."
    "Not what he calls money. Dorothy will have
millions,
Maury."
    "I don't see that as a drawback. Besides, I thought these tycoons liked to marry their daughters into old families."
    "But Mr. Stonor comes of an old family himself! The only thing self-made about him is his fortune. No, he has very different plans for his princess."
    "Such as a foreign title?"
    "They're out of fashion now." Horace pondered for a minute and then admitted, "I guess I don't really know what he wants except that it's sure as hell something a lot better than Horace Aspinwall."
    "But can't Dorothy decide for herself? Or are we still in the day of