Powers of Attorney by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online Page B

Barry Schlide. “Barry’s all very well, of course—a first class tax mind—but Barry’s not for us. He just isn’t the type. Surely, Jake, you know that as well as I.”
    â€œBecause he didn’t go to Harvard?”
    â€œHarvard? What in the deuce does Harvard have to do with it?” Tilney demanded impatiently, as if distressed to find, in the first minutes of a new relationship which was supposed to ease communication, that such things had still to be explained. “Schlide doesn’t have the personality for our kind of firm. Can you see what would happen if he pulled one of those corny jokes on old Miss Johanna Shepard? Or if he talked to the crowd at East Coast Railways about Mrs. Schlide’s little boy Barry? You know the facts of life, Jake.”
    â€œIt seems a pity. He means so well.”
    â€œWell, did you and I make the world? Now stop worrying about Barry Schlide and get yourself home and shaved and rested and take that pretty wife of yours out to dinner tonight and tell her your good news over a bottle of champagne. Okay?”
    Jake, weary as he was, walked all the way up to Stuyvesant Town, and it seemed to him that the gleam of sunlight on the sapphire blue of the East River was as cold as the twinkle in the senior partner’s eye.

Power of Bequest
    R UTHERFORD T OWER , although a partner, was not the Tower of Tower, Tilney & Webb. It sometimes seemed to him that the better part of his life went into explaining this fact or at least into anticipating the humiliation of having it explained by others. The Tower had been his late Uncle Reginald, the famous surrogate and leader of the New York bar, and the one substantial hope in Rutherford’s legal career. For Rutherford, despite an almost morbid fear of clerks and courts, and a tendency to hide away from the actual clients behind their wills and estates, had even managed to slip into a junior partnership before Uncle Reginald, in his abrupt, downtown fashion, died at his desk. But it was as far as Rutherford seemed likely to go. There was nothing in the least avuncular about Uncle Reginald’s successor, Clitus Tilney. A large, violent, self-made man, Tilney had a chip on his shoulder about families like the Towers and a disconcerting habit of checking the firm’s books to see if Rutherford’s “Social Register practice,” as he slightingly called it, paid off. The junior Tower, he would remark to the cashier after each such inspection, had evidently been made a partner for only three reasons: because of his name, because of his relatives, and because he was there.
    And, of course, Tilney was right. He was always right. Rutherford’s practice didn’t pay off. The Tower cousins, it was true, were in and out of his office all day, as were the Hallecks, the Rutherfords, the Tremaines, and all the other interconnecting links of his widespread family, but they expected, every last grabbing one of them, no more than a nominal bill. Aunt Mildred, Uncle Reginald’s widow, was the worst of all, an opinionated and litigious lady who professed to care not for the money but for the principle of things and was forever embroiled with landlords, travel agencies, and shops. However hard her nephew worked for her, he could never feel more than a substitute. It was Clitus Tilney alone whose advice she respected. Rutherford sometimes wondered, running his long nervous fingers over his pale brow and through his prematurely grey hair, if there was any quality more respected by the timid remnants of an older New York society, even by the flattest-heeled and most velvet-gowned old maid, than naked aggression. What use did they really have for anyone whom they had known, like Rutherford, from his childhood? He was “one of us,” wasn’t he—too soft for a modern world?
    The final blow came when Aunt Margaretta Halleck, the only Tower who had married what Clitus Tilney called