Manhattan Monologues by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online Page A

cousin Beatrice and the Earl of Chester. Aren't lords and ladies equal stars in the ceremony of an ancient peerage?"
    "They could be. Perhaps they
should
be. But American brides don't always do their part; they don't believe in it."
    "Beatrice will. She loves coronets and tiaras!"
    "As bangles, yes. But wait till she sees great gobs of her fortune going to pay the earl's pile of old debts and to set up his younger brothers. And wait till he wants to use the money she's designed for a splendid new mansion in London on some moldy old castle in a remote part of Wales."
    I must admit that things turned out for Beatrice much as he predicted. She ultimately found happiness in a second union, with her oldest son's tutor.
    Miles, of course, was forbidden our house, as well as the homes of Mama's sisters, but Uncle Sam Thorn would listen neither to hints nor bold requests from his siblings: Miles Constable was a friend of his son Sammy, and no friend of Sammy's was to be denied access to the big reproduction of Blois in which Grandpa's principal heir resided. Lily Hammersly would alert me to when Miles was going there, and he and I had many a forbidden tête-à-tête under the palms of the dank conservatory.
    Miles was taking his banishment from the distaff Thorn establishments more bitterly than I had expected; he obviously resented what he called my passivity under the paternal interdict, and he was most sarcastic about Walter.
    "Though I have to admit that your old man has chosen cleverly," he conceded. "Even rather devilishly. Wheelock doesn't fit into any of the categories of fortune hunters about which I warned you. Not, of course, that he isn't a fortune hunter. But he does offer something besides his greed."
    "I suppose that's big of you. What is it that he offers?"
    "Well, I imagine he'd be a faithful spouse. He's too cold for anything else. And I don't think he'd waste your money. He's too careful for that. He might even be a good father. There's only one thing he'd never be able to give you."
    He paused, until I asked him: "What?"
    "Oh, a little thing that some people think makes the world go 'round."
    But it irritated me that he should so blandly take for granted not only that love was what I needed but that Walter was any less capable of providing it than he was.
    "So there
is
one little thing that the ever scornful Miles Constable doesn't scorn!"
    "There is," he replied, with uncharacteristic complacency. "And that little thing is love. Wheelock can't give it because he hasn't got it to give. He's like Alberich in
The Ring.
He's given up love in exchange for power."
    "And how do you know that I don't agree with him that it's a good bargain?" I was exasperated with Miles, perhaps with his whole sex. "How do you know that I'm not a Thorn through and through? How do you know that the only thing that will make me happy isn't to be in a position like Grandpa's, where he can say to one man 'go' and he goeth and to another 'come' and he cometh?"
    "Oh, Aggie, don't joke about this. You'd be a lost thing without love! Why don't we run off together and get married and live in Florence for a year? I could just afford it, and then your family would be bound to come around. They always do, after the first baby!"
    And do you know, if he hadn't laughed that high screeching laugh of his, I might have done it? For laugh or no laugh, he still loved me. I was always, oddly enough, sure of that. And my feeling for him was always bubbling up, never quite high enough, because of my constant sense that he wasn't quite real, wasn't a man a Seward or a Thorn
could
marry, but there might not have needed too great a change of circumstances to push me over the dam. Anyway, that laugh annoyed me sufficiently to make me rise and go home.
    There, I was confronted with an irate father who had discovered my trysts with Miles and decreed that I should leave at once for a Caribbean cruise on our yacht,
The Osprey,
with Mama and my sisters. He would